Conference Agenda

Late in his career in 1936, the basso Feodor Chaliapin embarked on an extended tour of the Japanese Empire and the Republic of China. Though he did not originally plan to visit Japanese-occupied Manchukuo, the Russian émigré community in the region urged the artist to make a stop in the city of Harbin, a regional hub for Russian culture in emigration. Upon his arrival, Chaliapin fell ill and was forced to perform his sold-out concerts while fighting an intense fever. Though his vocal delivery came across as lackluster, many concertgoers in Harbin enjoyed his performances. As the cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky put it, “Naturally, it wasn’t that Chaliapin, known by those who had heard him in Russia. But it was Chaliapin!” What was it about his performances, if not his usual vocal ferocity, that satisfied Harbin’s audiences? This paper reexamines Chaliapin’s voice as a dynamic site of diasporic imagination, inflected by its indexicality to prerevolutionary Russia, politicized interpretation in emigration, and hyper-distributed media reproduction.

Scholars have long debated the ontology of vocal excess – be it “grain” (Barthes 1972), “sexuality” (McClary 1991; Koestenbaum 1993), “presence” (Duncan 2004), or “racialized enculturated listening” (Eidsheim 2019). These discussions have not fully addressed how celebrity voices engender feelings of communal belonging, heritage, and patriotism in politically volatile regions. The sheer ubiquity of Chaliapin’s musical recordings alongside that of his hectic international touring schedule resists a bounded conception of his voice as linked to a single performance, or even to his body in a single place. Drawing on previously unresearched first-hand accounts, concert programs, and recordings, I show how the reception of Chaliapin’s performances in Harbin was inextricably colored by the politics of Far Eastern Russian emigration. I argue that Harbin’s audiences listened to the hoarse groans produced by his infected vocal cords in counterpoint with a diasporic imaginary of the artist’s past performances, ideological convictions, and 78 rpm shellac oeuvre. To take seriously the diasporic imagination of the operatic voice illuminates its capacious potentiality as untethered from its vulnerable fleshy apparatus.

Information about French cellist Lisa Cristiani (1825-1853) and her travels through Imperial Russia has mainly reached us thanks to two French periodicals published around the first decade since her death. However, at the time, sources prioritized the journey itself, centering the narrative on her travels rather than her musical activities.

Recently, interest in Cristiani has resurfaced and research about her has expanded our previously limited knowledge about her life. Scholars like Hoffmann (2011) and Deserno (2018) have focused on biographical and feminist analysis, and Kamer and De Vries (2025) have unveiled have recently unveiled new information regarding her family origins, European travels, and repertoire, still, her musical performances have not been the central focus of research.

This presentation focuses on three of Cristiani’s most emblematic concerts in the East Siberian towns and settlements of Petropavlovsk, Ayan, and Yakutsk during the Summer and Fall of 1849. These performances took place while she participated in the expedition to Kamchatka, organized by the Governor-General of East Siberia, Nikolai N. Muravyov. By compiling, contextualizing, and analyzing information from German, Dutch, French and Russian sources, particularly the memoirs of Russian diplomat Bernhard V. Struve (1889), this piece of research places Cristiani’s musical performances center-stage.

Analysis of these musical events shows how Cristiani was able to take advantage of the uncommon situation she was in, providing her traveling companions with musical entertainment and morale boosting. She also served as a cultural ambassador of western Europe in a time and place where the Russian Empire was consolidating as a colonial power, all from her unique position as the first professional woman cellist, and without access to traditional concert infrastructure. These accomplishments justified the efforts Muravyov and his subordinates made to accommodate the inclusion of a musician and her invaluable Stradivarius cello into a military reconnaissance expedition.

Outside of Russia, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov remains under-appreciated by audiences, and has been (relatively) neglected by scholars. While he was primarily a composer of operas, his best-known works are the three orchestral showstoppers, composed back-to-back in 1887-88: the Spanish Capriccio, Sheherezade, and the Easter Festival overture. The composer has been acknowledged as a master of orchestration, and he had a significant influence internationally on composers such as Debussy and Ravel, as well as Ottorino Respighi, in whose case the influence was partly direct, after several (in his words) ‘very important’ lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov when working in Saint Petersburg in 1900-01 and 1902-3. This paper offers a detailed examination of features of orchestration in Respighi’s own trio of splashy orchestral works – Fontane di Roma (1915–16), Pini di Roma (1923–24), and Feste romane (1928) – with the aim of demonstrating how these draw from Rimsky-Korsakov’s practices. While also taking account of other influences (including Wagner, Ravel, and Strauss), I compare Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Respighi’s particular strategies of orchestration, including the use of individual instruments, textures, sonorities, and special effects. Beyond this, I make observations on shared general stylistic principles, and present an argument about the similar role that texture and sonority play in the structural organization of their orchestral works.
In musicology, the history of orchestration has emerged as an area with significant potential. My investigation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral style is inspired by the work of Emily Dolan (2013) and Inge van Rij (2015) on Haydn and Berlioz respectively. Timbre had been considered an ‘extraneous’ parameter, as mere surface decoration – a prejudice inherited from German Romantic aesthetics. The emphasis in Russian music on colour and sonority rather than counterpoint and ‘organic’ development would suggest that Russian music studies has much to offer to a broader history of orchestration, and Rimsky-Korsakov is the prime candidate for examination in this regard. While there are scattered references to Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral techniques throughout the scholarly literature, no systematic study has yet been conducted. Using well-known examples, this paper will contribute to a better understanding of both the main features of his style and his international influence.