NATASHA

considered far superior to the leading company in Moscow, whose theatre was located on the site of the Bolshoi Theatre today. The Moscow theatre's English director, Michael Meddox, complained that Kuskovo, which did not charge admission, had deprived his theatre of an audience.⁸⁵ Pyotr Sheremetev had established the serf troupe at Kuskovo in the 1760s. He was not an artistic man, but the theatre was a fashionable addition to his grand estate and it enabled him to entertain the court. In 1775 the Empress Catherine attended a performance of the French opera in the open-air theatre at Kuskovo. This encouraged Sheremetev to build a proper theatre, large enough to stage the foreign operas so beloved by the Empress, between 1777

and 1787. He left its direction to his son, Count Nikolai Petrovich, who was well acquainted with the French and Italian opera from his European travels in the early 1770s. Nikolai trained his serf performers in the disciplined techniques of the Paris Opera. Peasants were selected at an early age from his various estates and trained as musicians for the theatre orchestra or as singers for the troupe. There was also a German who taught the violin, a French singing teacher, a language instructor in Italian and French, a Russian choir master, and several foreign ballet masters, most of them from the court. The Sheremetev theatre was the first in Russia to stage ballets on their own, rather than as part of an opera, as was common in the eighteenth century. Under the direction of Nikolai Petrovich it produced over twenty French and Russian ballets, many of them receiving their first performance in Russia, long before they were put on at court.⁸⁶ The Russian ballet was born at Kuskovo.

So, too, was the Russian opera. The Sheremetev theatre began the practice of performing operas in Russian, which stimulated the composition of native works. The earliest, Anyuta (premiered at Tsarskoe Selo in 1772.), was produced at Kuskovo in 1781; and Misfortune from a Carriage by Vasily Pashkevich, with a libretto by Kniazhnin (first put on at the Hermitage Theatre in 1779) was seen at Kuskovo within a year.* Before the final quarter of the eighteenth century, opera was imported from abroad. Italians made the running early on. Giovanni Ristori's Calandro was performed by a group of Italian singers from the Dresden court in 1731. The Empress Anna, enchanted by this 'exotic and irrational entertainment', recruited Francesco Araia's Venetian company to entertain her court in Petersburg, which staged La Forza dell'amore in the Winter Palace on the Empress's birthday in 1736. Starting with Araia, Italians occupied the post of maestro di capella at the Imperial court, with just two exceptions, until the nineteenth century. Consequently, the first Russian composers were strongly influenced by the Italian style. Maxim Berezovsky, Dmitry Bortnyansky and Yevstignei Fomin were all taught by the Italians of St Petersburg, and then sent to study in Italy itself.

* Stepan Degterov, the composer of Minin and Pozharsky (1811), was a former Sheremetev serf.

Berezovsky was Mozart's fellow student in the composition school of Padre Martini.*

The love affair between Petersburg and Venice was continued by Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. It was ironically a Venetian, Catterino Cavos, who pioneered the Russian national opera. Cavos came to Petersburg in 1798 and immediately fell in love with the city, which reminded him of his native town. In 1803 the Emperor Alexander took control of the public theatres and placed Cavos in charge of the Bolshoi Kamenny, until then the only public opera house and exclusively reserved for Italian opera. Cavos built the Bolshoi Kamenny into a stronghold of Russian opera. He wrote works such as Ilya Bogatyr (1807) on heroic national themes with librettos in Russian, and his music was strongly influenced by Russian and Ukrainian folk songs. Much of Glinka's operatic music, which the nationalists would champion as the foundation of the Russian tradition, was in fact anticipated by Cavos. The 'national character' of Russian music was thus first developed by a foreigner.+

The French were also instrumental in the development of a distinctive Russian musical style. Catherine the Great had invited a French opera troupe to the Petersburg court as one of her first acts on the assumption of the throne in 1762. During her reign the court opera was among the best in Europe. It staged the premiere of several major works, including Giovanni Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782). The French comic opera, with its rustic village setting and its reliance on folk dialect and music, was a major influence on early Russian operas and Singspiels like Anyuta (similar to Favart's Annette et

* Berezovsky was elected to the Accademia Philharmonica in Bologna. He returned to Russia in 1775 and, two years later, committed suicide. Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia (1983) is a commentary on exile as told through the story of Berezovsky's life. It tells of a Russian emigre in Italy engaged in research on his doppelganger and fellow countryman, an ill-fated eighteenth-century Russian composer.

+ This was not the end of the Cavos connection with the Russian opera. Catterino's son, the architect Alberto Cavos, redesigned the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow after it was burned down in 1853. He also built the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. His daughter, Camille Cavos, married the court architect and portrait painter Nikolai Benois, whose family had fled to St Petersburg from the French Revolution in the 1790s, and their son, Alexander Benois, established the Ballets Russes with Sergei Diaghilev.

Lubin), St Petersburg Bazaar and The Miller Magician (based on Rousseau's Le devin du village). These operas were the staple of the Sheremetev repertoire: huge numbers of them were performed at Kuskovo and Ostankino. With their comic peasant characters and their stylized motifs from folk song, they gave voice to an emerging Russian national consciousness.

One of the earliest Russian operas was specially commissioned by the Sheremetevs for the open-air theatre at Kuskovo in 1781. Green with Jealousy, or The Boatman from Kuskovo was a panegyric to the Sheremetev palace and its park, which served as a backdrop to the opera on the stage.⁸⁷ The production was a perfect illustration of the way in which the palace had itself become a kind of theatre for the acting out of Russian noble life, a huge stage set for the display of wealth and European ways.

The design and the decor of the palace and its park contained much theatricality. The high stone archway into the estate marked the entrance into another world. The landscaped gardens and the manor house were laid out, like the props upon a stage, to create a certain emotion or theatrical effect. Features such as sculptured 'peasants' or 'cattle' in the woods, or temples, lakes and grottoes in the English park, intensified this sense of being in a place of make-believe.⁸⁸ Kuskovo was full of dramatic artifice. The main house was made of wood that was carved to look like stone. In the park Fedor Argunov's extraordinary grotto pavilion was full of playfulness: its internal walls were lined with artificial shells and sea creatures; and (in a reference to the house in Petersburg) its baroque cupola was constructed in the form of a fountain.

In its everyday routines and public entertainments the palace was a kind of theatre, too. The daily ceremonies of the nobleman - the rituals connected with his morning prayer, his breakfast, lunch and dinner, his dressing and undressing, his office work and hunting, his washing and his bed - were performed from a detailed script that needed to be learned by the master and a huge supporting cast of domestic serfs. Then there were certain social functions which served as an arena for the ritualized performance of cultivated ways, the salon or the ball where the nobles demonstrated their European manners and good taste. Women put on wigs and beauty spots. They were conscious of

the need to take a leading role - dancing, singing at the piano, playing the coquette. Dandies turned their social lives into performance art: every mannered pose was carefully rehearsed. They prepared themselves, like Eugene Onegin, as actors going out before an audience.

At least three hours he peruses His figure in the looking-glass.⁸⁹

Etiquette demanded that they hold themselves and act in the directed form: the way they walked and stood, the way they entered or left a room, the way they sat and held their hands, the way they smiled or nodded their heads - every pose and gesture was carefully scripted. Hence in the ballroom and reception hall the walls were lined with mirrors for the beau monde to observe their performance.

The aristocracy of eighteenth-century Russia was aware of acting out its life as if upon a stage. The Russian nobleman was not born a 'European' and European manners were not natural to him. He had to learn such manners, as he learned a foreign language, in a ritualized form by conscious imitation of the West. Peter the Great began it all -reinventing himself and his aristocracy in the European mould. The first thing he did on his return from Europe, in 1698, was to order all the boyars to give up their kaftans for Western codes of dress. In a symbolic rupture with the past, he forbade them to wear beards, traditionally seen as a sign of holiness, and himself took the shears to reluctant courtiers.* Peter commanded his nobles to entertain after the European fashion: with his head of police he personally supervised the lists of guests