Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage by Inna Naroditskaya (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 887 but Absurdopediia russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina is the most exhaustive and compelling exploration of Sorokin’s work in any language, and looks set to be so for some time yet. Department of Politics, Languages and David Gillespie International Studies, University of Bath Naroditskaya, Inna. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2012. xvi + 401 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £45.00. At the centre of Inna Naroditskaya’s ingenious and engaging new book is the idea that ‘[a]s real tsarinas disappeared from Russia’s political stage, a number of magical tsarinas materialized in Russian fairy-tale operas’ (p. xii). In order to explore this insight in greater detail, Naroditskaya first examines the role of Russia’s four eighteenth-century tsarinas as patrons of opera, drawing on Richard Wortman’s work on imperial ceremony and spectacle to argue that opera was an ideal vehicle through which they could promote — and almost literally stage — the potency of their own rule. In particular, Naroditskaya argues for the decisive role played by Catherine the Great in establishing Russia’s tradition of historical and fairytale operas. She then turns her attention to the nineteenth century, noting that with the establishment of a nationalist musical historiography, this feminine lineage was violently repressed. Where Russian tsarinas used opera to represent themselves in artistic form, they now became the object of a masculine historiography that tended to dismiss them as artistically inferior and derivative of foreign models. As Glinka was crowned the father of Russian music, his eighteenth-century female antecedents were effaced in a process that Naroditskaya terms ‘the transformation of historical empressesintosupernaturaloperatic(anti)heroines’(p.5).Devotingchaptersto individual studies of operas by Glinka (Ruslan and Liudmila), Dargomyzhskii (Rusalka), Rimskii-Korsakov (Mlada and Sadko) and Chaikovskii (Queen of Spades), she reveals how ‘Russian male protagonists and their creators were prone to mid-to-late-nineteenth-century psychosis, which, in part, reflected on the past, fictional and historical. […] The idea that their Russia had been shaped not only by Peter but more recently and more obviously by foreign female(s), haunted these men’ (p. 238). This obsession is perhaps clearest in Naroditskaya’s final example, Chaikovskii’s version of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Where scholars like Simon Morrison have examined the opera’s syncretism as a premonition of symbolist aesthetics, Naroditskaya prefers to see its temporal ambiguities as indicative of an almost oedipal struggle between a strong eighteenth-century precursor (Catherine the Great) and a nineteenth-century tradition desperate to overcome such an overwhelming SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 888 authority. Yet this struggle was fated to be metonymic, not just because artistic influence is almost always tangential, but also because the nineteenth-century ban on the representation of imperial subjects on the Russian stage meant that the presence of eighteenth-century tsarinas was often indicated by means of absence, illusion or apparition. Written with great verve and assurance, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage is nonetheless a work whose seemingly simple guiding thesis accommodates a range of subtle and sensitive readings. Some might cavil at Naroditskaya’s apparent willingness to blur the boundaries between creative artists, fictional characters and broad characterizations of Russian culture, and her account of how a nineteenth-century tradition of masculine nationalism sought to eradicate its feminine roots in the eighteenth century rests on the fact that there were simply no female claimants to the throne in Russia after Catherine the Great. It would be an interesting counterfactual exercise to wonder how the book’s thesis might have looked had there been a nineteenth-century Russian tsarina to rival her, and Naroditskaya chooses not to make any comparisons with the representation of the male ruler in Russian opera (consider, for example, Musorgskii’s handling of the figure of the tsar in both Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina). At times, her account reads like a careful but persistent psychoanalytic analysis of its subject matter (Naroditskaya’s use of the word ‘psychosis’ in the passage cited above is telling). If Freudian theories will potentially strike some as being out of place in a piece of historical musicology (however...