In Review: Stanislavski on Opera

Abstract

Stanislavski on Opera details the experience of Pavel Rumyantsev, an actor-singer/director who participated in most of the operatic productions to emerge from Stanislavski’s Opera Studio of the Bolshoi Theatre. The studio was founded in 1918 through the influence of E.K. Malinovskaya, manager of the State Theatres in Moscow, then later converted in 1924 into the Stanislavski Opera Studio and in 1926 into the Opera Studio-Theatre, ending up in 1928 as the Stanislavski Opera Theatre (the many names perhaps accounting, at least partially, for the students’ nickname for the studio: “School on the Move”). Rumyantsev took detailed notes of the productions mounted by the variously named studios, and the result is a lengthy exposition of Stanislavski’s musical theatre methodologies, his directorial principles, his blocking instructions and his scenographic innovations. Writing in the style of a memoir, with all the attendant difficulties of speaking authoritatively in another’s voice or of transcribing another’s voice with any degree of historical accuracy, Rumyantsev devotes his attentions to chronicling Stanislavski’s attempt to transform operatic production via the notion of theatre as “an expression of collective art” (374).