Description:
In the 19th century, opera inspired passionate responses in many countries, nowhere more than in Russia. "Russian citizens lived for art," says Julie A. Buckler, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard, in this engaging study. Young men in St. Petersburg would harness themselves to a diva's carriage and pull it through the streets. In the 1840s, there was the "flower frenzy," when fans strove to outdo each other in the tributes they threw at the feet of singers. The status of opera in Russia was more complicated than in Western Europe. The country was late in finding its own operatic voice (even then, a masterpiece as great as Eugen Onegin--later acclaimed as a national treasure--was considered too prosaic). Earlier in the century, despite ambivalence toward the West, Russia depended on imports of Bellini and Donizetti. The performers, too, were at first mostly foreign. Russia did not produce many sopranos with voices suited to bel canto. Besides that, Russians saw something unwholesome about these traveling ladies of the stage. The French diva Pauline Viardot, a huge star, created an unpleasant stir when she danced in the same ballroom with marriageable society girls. There was a "peculiarly Russian view of the opera diva as public servant," Buckler writes, that demanded she be earnest, not glittering. In an analogous way, La Traviata became popular only after critics interpreted it to emphasize Violetta's redemption, downplaying the unsavory themes of prostitution, disease, and money. Buckler is most illuminating on this interaction between the art form and its public. She is less original when she examines opera themes in literature of the period, picking out the motifs in both well-known works (Anna Karenina, Oblomov) and obscurities. Buckler does skillfully analyze the treatment of diva and divalike characters in fiction. She depicts these outsize figures as victims of a collision between the romantic poetry of the early 19th century and the realistic prose of the century's second half. As she follows literature into the 20th century, opera represents an obsolete world receding into the past. --David Olivenbaum
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