| This dissertation explores intersections between Russian musical theater and St. Petersburg's aristocratic culture at the turn of the twentieth century. At the center of my inquiry is the persistence of distinction in the incipient age of mechanical reproduction. Rather than probing the excesses that marked this era of social unrest, I focus on the neglected legacy of the ancien regime culture that still lingered in Russia. Seeking the roots of what was later dubbed musical "neoclassicism" in particular social practices, I offer new modes of approaching musical techniques through social context. In my study's four chapters I shift the focus from academic practice to public and private court rituals to theatrical experimentation, to demonstrate various ways aristocratic experience inscribed in music. Scrutinizing Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart and Salieri, court cantatas by Alexander Glazunov and Anton Arensky, and Piotr Chaikovsky's and Glazunov's ballets, and drawing on a variety of ephemera---journalistic reviews, and memoirs or diaries from the period---I conjure up the image of this belated Russian aristocracy, a corporate identity that hovered between dominance and extinction. Further, I show how Sergei Prokofiev's 1921 opera Love for Three Oranges re-articulated the very notions of retrospection that sustained musical and theatrical practice in late Imperial Russia. Tracing the social-cum-aesthetic background of the composers who formed the core of the Soviet musical pantheon, but also inspired the trend-setters of musical modernism, I suggest the common origins of totalitarian ritual and modernist nostalgia. |
