For the next workshop, we welcome Miriam Tripaldi, a candidate in Music History/Theory here at the University of Chicago. Below is a note from Miriam about her project, and the pre-circulated reading is available here (email Marcy or Dan if you need the password).

See you on Wednesday,

marcy and dan

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This is a rough draft of one of the chapters of my dissertation, Style, Politics, Opera:
Musical Mobility and the Emergence of the Russian Nation, 1801–1861. My dissertation
examines the intercultural milieu in which mobile Russian, Italian, and French composers
(especially those working on opera) influenced each other’s creative practices and
the role of what one might label urban musical cosmopolitanism in the formation of a
Russian national identity in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Although scholars concerned with music in Russia have worked on the eighteenth
century and the second half of the nineteenth (from Mussorgsky’s work forward), they
have missed the opportunity to understand the entwined development of musical style
and notions of the nation-state by neglecting the first half of the latter century. Likewise,
although scholarship on the history of theatre in Russia has dealt with Imperial theatre
and art performances, scholars have yet to look at opera and questions of class and
musical mobility in the same light. What is missing, in fact, is a systematic study of the
period between the death of Catherine II (1796) and the established Russian musical
tradition (1860s).
In particular, my project focuses on composers who worked in Saint Petersburg during
the neglected period between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the
nineteenth century, such as François-Adrien Boildieu (1775–1834) and Alessandro Nini
(1805-1880). The Venetian composer Catterino Cavos (1775–1840) will receive special
attention because of the manner in which he combined Russian subjects with French and
Italian styles in his operas. He wrote the opera Ivan Susanin (1815) which later provided
the subject for Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, the first Russian National opera. Cavos, in
fact, is a key figure for any understanding of the processes of mediation, reception, and
mutual influence between Western European and Russian artists. In addition to showing
how Cavos was indispensible in the formation of a later Russian musical identity, my
aim is to show how he established a powerful network of artistic labor between Western
Europe and Russian as well as within Russia.

This chapter, tentatively titled “Russia’s Missing Middle Class and the Role of Artists
in Class Formation among the Others,” examines a series of reforms instituted by tsar
Alexander I in the first half of the nineteenth century in Russia. Moreover, it considers
how those reforms contributed to audiences’ changing access to cultural institutions, such
as the Imperial theatres.
In nineteenth-century Russia, beginning around 1806, in fact, what one might call
a middle class began to form wherein artists had greater economic status and their
cultural capital was related to assessments of their abilities and output as artists. Because
serfs coexisted with free people within a system of freedom and tsarist autocracy,
however, they produced their work in a system of inequality whose “creations” were the
opportunity for many people to change their social status.
Arguing that in Russia the notion of “a” middle class – at least in the first half of the
nineteenth century – is questionable, I will show how one can define that “paying” part
of society which grew larger in number and more ethnically hybrid in the first half of
the nineteenth century in Russia. I will argue that in Imperial Russia there was never
a “public sphere” as there was, on the other hand, in Western Europe. Defining what
constituted a middle class in the first half of nineteenth-century Russia will answer other
questions about music and musical agents (composers, musicians, artists). How were
their works written for Saint Petersburg in response to the new audience(s) in Russia
different from the ones they composed for other European theatres?

I just started to work on this chapter and as a result what you will read is a work in
progress. I started to review the secondary literature on the subject and primary sources
such as memoirs and accounts from the period, both in Russian and other languages
such as French, Italian, and English, result of travelers and/or artists who traveled/
moved to Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. On Wednesday I would
be particularly interested in discussing issues of class and mobility both in Russia and I
would like to get feedback on how it might be compared to other European places and
times.

I look forward to your feedback.
Warm wishes,
Miriam Tripaldi