From the mid-fifteenth to the late-eighteenth century, Italian theatre practitioners traversed the whole of Europe, promulgating musico-dramatic repertoires, artistic excellence, and socio-political ideas. From London to Vienna, from Dresden to Stockholm, from Madrid to Copenhagen and St Petersburg, there was hardly a court or city that did not employ Italian-born musicians, playwrights, singers, actors, dancers, theatre engineers, painters, and tailors. As crucial agents of cultural transfer and exchange, Italian artists actively contributed to the formation of many European values, institutions, and cultural identities. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, Italian theatre and its artists became vital to the Russian tsars, who wanted to emulate and surpass the examples of other European courts. They championed Italian opera and theatre as patrons, critics, and spectators, using them to amplify and mythologise their victories and to glorify their close ties to European modernity and Slavic identity.1 Russian rulers employed Italian musico-dramatic works to advance social and political goals, legitimise Russia’s position as a ‘European nation’, assert the Empire’s cultural competitiveness on the international stage, and emphasise Russia’s cultural uniqueness and cosmopolitan character. They designed their courts as theatres, in which theatregoing played a central role.
This book, as the first part of its title suggests, is about Italian musico-theatrical repertoires performed by Italiancomici andoperisti at the Russian imperial court. Geographically located between, and even straddling, Europe and Asia, the faraway Russian Empire boasted, rather unexpectedly, a more cosmopolitan repertoire than any other European court. While elsewhere in Europe Italian drama was performed in the original language or in a national vernacular, performance practice and repertoire in Russia was governed by the principle of multilingualism. The British, Habsburg, and Saxon-Polish courts reflected a decided preference for Italian theatre and opera; Sweden and Dresden were more aligned with French tastes. In Imperial Russia, on the other hand, a wide variety of dramatic works by Metastasio, Voltaire, Goldoni, Beaumarchais, Kotzebue, and Iffland (to name but a few) were performed in Italian, French, German, and Russian. Usually considered at best peripheral to Europe, eighteenth-century Russia provides us with a particularly compelling example of the mobility of theatre practitioners and the circulation of their artistic practices. Indeed, the influence of Italian theatre was more widespread and longer lasting in Eastern and Northern Europe in general, and in Russia in particular, than in other countries.2
The period covered in this volume begins in the early years of the reign of Anna Ioannovna, Empress of Russia (1693–1740, r. 1730–1740) and niece of Peter the Great (1672–1725, r. 1696–1725), the first of the Tsars to ‘modernise’ (i.e. ‘Europeanise’) the Russian Empire, who imported Italian theatre, opera, and chamber music to St Petersburg. My study extends to the end of the reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1709–1762, r. 1741–1762), Anna’s successor on the throne, who was also aware of the socio-political importance of the performing arts. Under her reign,opere serie andbuffe were commissioned specifically for the Russian stage, as well as the first opera in Russian. Italian theatre and opera were imported, assimilated, and adapted to local tastes so that they
