| This dissertation examines the artistic activities and the historical significance of the Moscow Private Opera---a private enterprise that operated in Moscow, Russia, at the turn of the twentieth century. The company appeared at a pivotal moment in the country's cultural history, when the dominant realist ideology faced challenge from the new modernist aesthetics of the Silver Age. The Moscow Private Opera found itself at the heart of this aesthetic shift, becoming a point of transition from realism to modernism on the Russian operatic stage. The creator and artistic director of the enterprise, Savva Mamontov, has been previously either dismissed by researchers as a negligible figure in the history of music and the arts, or described in the literature as a man of the 1860s, a defender of realism and nationalism. However, the unpublished archival materials on which this dissertation is based reveal his views to parallel those of the Russian decadent movement, and the transitional nature of the decadent aesthetics to be reflected in the conflicting ideological agendas within his company.; Mamontov developed an entirely new approach to opera production as a synthesized art form created through collaborative process. In order to realize his artistic ideal, he instigated major reforms in acting, directing, and design, trained a whole generation of singing actors and stage directors, and attracted major talent in various branches of the arts to his team. The concept envisioned by Mamontov was not often perfectly realized in the Moscow Private Opera productions, due in part to its sheer complexity, the dominance of drama and design over music that undermined the balance between the arts, the pull of the realist tradition, and the pressures of the market in flux. Instead, the ideal, perceptible through imperfections, was absorbed by the next generation of creative artists, thereby influencing their own development and paving the way for the modernist vision of theater developed, in their respective fields, by the Mir Iskusstva group, the Russian Symbolists, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. |
