Between a Fairy Play and an Opera: Razryv-trava (Rip-grass) by Evgeny Goslavsky and Alexander Schaefer at the Maly Theater (1901)

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The production of Evgeny Goslavsky’s magic fairy tale carried out by Aleksandr Lensky with his students and colleagues in his repertory company of the Maly Theater presented a producer’s experiment, a combination of varieties of several theatrical genres within the limits of one performance. The narrative of the play was based on the fantastic motives of folkloristic epos, which required the use of the typical means of a 19th century stage fairy play. On the other hand, the storyline and the language appealed to a poetic style of symbolist and pre-expressionist dramaturgy in the context of which the customary visual effects and machinery appeared as naïve archaic effects. Great expectations in the sphere of synthesis were exerted on Alexander Nikolayevich Schaefer, a composer who was specially invited to St. Petersburg, a graduate of the Conservatory, a chapel master of the Panayev Theater, who had already composed two of his own operas. The complexity of the musical task was in the subservience of the work to the producer’s artistic vision, simultaneously with the application of a maximal amount of professional equipment. What was especially helpful, in the first place, was a knowledge of the fairytale musical scores of Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov and, moreover, the ability to adapt to the modest means of the theater’s orchestra. The musical score preserved at the Russian National Museum of Music is variegated in terms of the instrumentation in each of the numbers and is not devoid of imitative qualities. While marking the musical potentials of the play and the production, the reviewers expressed their disappointment regarding the insufficient amount of freedom granted to the composer. Nonetheless, it could hardly have been otherwise. The failure of Razryv-trava [Rip-grass] symbolically marked the instance of a farewell to the old theatrical style and its harsh constraints of genre; the measure of the admissible freedom for the composer, the boundary beyond which the “performance with music” becomes closely interlocked with opera and ballet have yet to be ascertained.