Tatiana Korneeva

The aim of this project is twofold: first, it will explore the role of Italian opera seria at the court of Empress Elisabeth (1741–62) in the complex semiotic exchange between absolutist politics and the arts that took place during this formative period of Russian society, literature, and theatre. Second, it will investigate the activities of Italian composers, librettists, and actors in Russia, asking how they contributed to the creation of an official Russian operatic repertoire.

Elisabeth championed opera and theatre as a patron, critic, actress, and spectator. Her desire for theatrical pleasures, however, was never divorced from her political agenda; her ardent commitment to theatre was interwoven with the acquisition and display of supreme power. Imported, assimilated, and adjusted to fit local tastes, Italian opera came to serve as the Russian imperial genre and became part of Elisabeth’s political narrative.

Analysis will begin with Metastasio’s Clemenza di Tito, written to celebrate the Habsburg emperor and performed in Russia during Elisabeth’s coronation festivities (1742). This project will also bring to light a multilingual series of Francesco Araja and Giuseppe Bonecchi’s librettos: Seleuco (1744), Scipione (1745), Mitridate (1747), Bellerofonte (1750), and Eudossa incoronata (1751). These librettos have never been treated as a corpus although they occupied a crucial position within the tsarina’s dynamic spectacle of absolutism due to their unique status at court.

A theoretically informed analysis of the librettos will therefore highlight the complex cultural mechanisms that informed the fundamentally bilateral interaction between opera and absolutist politics, an interaction that was both a consequence of and a driving force behind the institutionalization of court theatre. In addition, the librettos were printed and thus came to be inscribed into the gradually institutionalizing tradition of Russian opera and theatre. Since performances of Italian opera seria on the Russian stage encouraged the birth of Russian opera, I will show the extent to which they paved the way to innovative dramaturgical and theatrical practices. Taking into consideration the spaces of cross-cultural contact in which these opere serie were produced, this project demonstrates how the Russian court can be regarded as a laboratory for changing conceptions of dramatic genres, theatre design, and styles of acting.