Russian opera
There are examples of Russian operas written in French, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Japanese, or the multitude of languages of the nationalities that were part of the Empire and the Soviet Union.
Russian opera includes the works of such composers as Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Italian, French, and German operas have served as examples, even when composers sought to introduce special, national elements into their work.
The first opera shown in Russia was Calandro by Giovanni Alberto Ristori (1692–1753), performed in Moscow in 1731 under the direction of the composer and his father Tommaso, with 13 actors and nine singers including Ludovica Seyfried, Margherita Ermini and Rosalia Fantasia.
In 1735 a big Italian opera troupe led by a composer Francesco Araja was invited for the first time to work in Saint Petersburg.
The first opera given by them was Araja's La forza dell'amore e dell'odio, with a text by Francesco Prata, staged on 8 February [OS 29 January], 1736 as Sila lyubvi i nenavisti (The Power of Love and Hatred).
In 1743 at "Zimnij Dvorets", the (Winter Palace) in Saint Petersburg, instead of a small hall of "Comedie et opere" was built a new Opera House (architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli) that held about a thousand persons.
The next opera seria by Araja Seleuco, text by Giuseppe Bonecchi was given on 7 May [OS 26 April], 1744 in Moscow as part of a double celebration of the anniversary of the coronation of Elizaveta Petrovna and conclusion of peace with Sweden.
The staging of Araja’s opera seria Bellerofonte, text by Giuseppe Bonecchi (9 December 1750 [OS 28 November], Saint Petersburg) was notable for the participation of a Russian singer from "pevchie" of the Court Capella, Mark Poltoratski, who played the role of Ataman, a nobleman of Kingdom of Likia.
In the 1760–80s in Russia there were working in turn Venetian Galuppi, Manfredini from Pistoia, Traetta from Bitonto near Barri, Paisiello from Taranto, Sarti, Cimarosa from Campania, and Spaniard Martin y Soler.
Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), a famous Neapolitan composer of more than 100 operas seria and buffa, he spent in Russia eight years (1776–1783), where he wrote 12 operas including Nitteti (1777 Saint Petersburg), Lucinda e Armidoro (1777 Saint Petersburg), Il barbiere di Siviglia, ovvero La precauzione inutile (1782 Hermitage Theatre), and Il mondo della luna (1782 Kamenny Island Theatre).
His most successful operas in Russia were Armida e Rinaldo and The Early Reign of Oleg (Nachal'noye upravleniye Olega),[2] for the latter of which the empress herself wrote the libretto.
Maksym Berezovsky (1745–1777) went to Italy in the spring of 1769 to train with Padre Giovanni Battista Martini at the Bologna Philharmonic Academy, where he graduated with distinction.
In Italy, Bortniansky gained considerable success composing operas: Creonte (1776) and Alcide (1778) in Venice, and Quinto Fabio (1779) at Modena.
At the same time in Russia, a successful one-act opera Anyuta (Chinese Theatre, 6 September [OS 26 August], 1772) was created to the text by Mikhail Ivanovich Popov.
The music of another successful Russian opera Melnik – koldun, obmanshchik i svat (The Miller who was a Wizard, a Cheat and a Match-maker, text by Alexander Ablesimov, Moscow, 1779), on a subject resembling Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, is attributed to a theatre violin player and conductor Mikhail Matveyevich Sokolovsky (c.
Italian-trained Yevstigney Fomin (1761–1800) composed about 30 operas including the most successful opera-melodrama Orfey i Evridika to the text by Yakov Knyazhnin.
It began with a success of a massive and slowly developing operatic project: the opera Lesta, dneprovskaya rusalka and its three sequels (1803–1807, first in Saint Petersburg) based on the German romantic-comic piece Das Donauweibchen by Ferdinand Kauer (1751–1831) with the Russian text and additional music by Russianized Venetian immigrant Catterino Cavos (1775–1840) and Stepan Davydov (1777–1825).
Savva Mamontov discovered talent of Chaliapin, commissioned designs from Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Natalia Goncharova and Ivan Bilibin, staged the late operas by Rimsky Korsakov.
The political collisions of the 20th century divided Russian opera composers into those who managed to escape to the West, successfully or not, and those who continued to live in not the particular friendly atmosphere of the Soviet and Post-Soviet regimes.
He began but did not finish the fourth Monna Vanna (1907, 1st act in a vocal score) after Maurice Maeterlinck who refused to give permission to the composer for use of his text.
A serious condemnation and persecution of the Soviet Union's foremost composers, such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich and many others, had emerged in 1948 in connection to the opera by Vano Muradeli (1908–1970), Velikaya druzhba (The Great Friendship); see Zhdanov Doctrine.
The ideological and stylistic control and limitation of creative freedom by the authorities and older colleagues-composers in the hierarchical structures of the Union of Composers made almost impossible the innovation and experiment in any field of musical art.
The list of the composers who contributed to the development of Russian opera nearer to the end of the 20th century: Also: Nikolai Sidelnikov, Andrei Petrov, Sandor Kallosh, Leonid Hrabovsky, Alexander Vustin, Gleb Sedelnikov, Merab Gagnidze, Alexander Tchaikovsky, Vasily Lobanov, Dmitri N. Smirnov, Leonid Bobylev, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, and so on (see: Russian opera articles#20th century).
It began with the noisy premieres of two comic operas, whose genre could be described as "opera-farce": The first was Tsar Demyan – a frightful opera performance (a collective project of the five participants: composers Leonid Desyatnikov and Vyacheslav Gaivoronsky from Saint Petersburg, Iraida Yusupova and Vladimir Nikolayev from Moscow, and the creative collective "Kompozitor," (a pseudonym for the well-known music critic Pyotr Pospelov) to the libretto by Elena Polenova after a folk-drama Tsar Maksimilyan, premiere 20 June 2001 Mariinski Theatre, Saint Petersburg.
Another opera The Children of Rosenthal by Leonid Desyatnikov to the libretto by Vladimir Sorokin, was commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre and premiered on 23 March 2005.
