Early careers: youth, training and Franco-Italian opera

Most of the surviving information about Osip Petrov’s life can be found in five sources: a single chapter from an otherwise unpublished memoir by the singer himself, covering the first four years of his career in St Petersburg; a short biographical article from 1877 by the famous music critic Vladimir Stasov; an 1882 article by V. Yastrebov which establishes the circumstances of Petrov’s youth through a careful dissection of church records, census records and interviews with the singer’s childhood acquaintances; A. M. Pruzhansky’s 1991 encyclopaedia, Отечественные певцы 1750–1917 (Singers of the Fatherland, 1750–1917); and finally, a slim 1946 biography by Mikhail L’vov which contains many anecdotes but few dates or references. Thoroughly a product of the Stalinist era, this hagiographic work portrays the singer as simultaneously an exceptional individual and a common man, a ‘person of rare moral qualities’ and a ‘great son of the Russian people’.Footnote ⁵ Cloying as it is, the narrative is not unfounded. All the sources confirm that Petrov did indeed come from a humble, even impoverished background: his father disappeared early on,Footnote ⁶ and his mother, Avdotya Petrova, struggled to make ends meet as a marketplace seller of needlework and, later, as a domestic cook. Although his backwater hometown of Yelizavetgrad in the Ukraine offered few musical opportunities, he may have sung in the local church choir as a child.Footnote ⁷ By the age of fourteen, he had become somewhat rowdy and unmanageable and was sent, on the advice of his mother’s employer, to live with his uncle, Konstantin Savvich Petrov, who trained him to work in the family business: a погребок (pogrebok), or bodega with a taproom.

It was around this time that Petrov’s musical interests began to flower. Following the example of friends, he took up the guitar and studied with a certain Kladovshchikov, a wine merchant who did business with Konstantin Savvich and who also happened to be a fine guitarist. It was said of the boy that ‘his fingers would run over the strings like living creatures’.Footnote ⁸ He also picked up the clarinet and flute. Konstantin Savvich apparently took a dim view of his nephew’s musical inclinations and frequently beat him. This did not deter Petrov in the least. When his uncle left for a two-year business trip and placed Petrov in charge of his affairs at home, he used his newfound autonomy to fraternise with the vaudeville theatre troupes that periodically came through the town. Due to his association with the players, his unmerchant-like generosity with his uncle’s alcohol and his general lack of concern for the погребок, Petrov was kicked out of the house upon his uncle’s return.Footnote ⁹

This misfortune gave the young man the impetus to pursue his interest in music and acting more directly. Despite having had no formal training as an actor, he quickly found work with the shoestring travelling troupe of a certain Danila Zhurakhovsky, and in 1826 made his debut in Yelizavetgrad in Aleksandr Shakhovskoy’s play The Cossack Poet, in which he recited text and sang couplets.Footnote ¹⁰ He spent the next few years touring various southern provincial cities, and in 1830 caught the attention of the director of the St Petersburg Russian Opera, who invited him to audition for Catterino Cavos, the Kapellmeister of Italian and Russian opera in St Petersburg. ‘It was so unexpected that I wondered if he was joking’, recalled Petrov.Footnote ¹¹

Cavos saw the potential in Petrov’s beautiful but little-trained voice and hired him for a one-year trial period. L’vov’s biography, doubtless due to the requirements of Soviet-nationalist scholarship, gives the foreign composer Cavos little credit for developing or influencing Petrov’s vocal style; he claims that Petrov was a ‘natural Russian genius’ who learned mostly by listening to Russian popular songs.Footnote ¹² Petrov’s memoir makes it clear, however, that he required substantial coaching from Cavos and at least two other voice teachers in order to make the shift from a vaudeville singing actor to a full-fledged operatic bass capable of singing French, Italian and German roles (in Russian translation), which formed the core repertoire for Russian opera singers at the time.Footnote ¹³

In October of the same year, Petrov made a rushed and nervous debut as Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte.Footnote ¹⁴ Reviews were cautiously positive, noting, however, that he needed more technical training.Footnote ¹⁵ Cavos worked with him to extend his range upward and smooth out the transitions between registers. During this time, he starred in a number of recent bel canto operas as the first Russian-stage Oroveso (Norma), Belcore (L’elisir d’amore), Dandini (La Cenerentola), Rodolfo (La sonnambula) and Alfonso (Lucrezia Borgia).Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, Cavos groomed him to portray the title character in his own Singspiel Ivan Susanin – which he composed twenty years before Glinka would write his own blockbuster opera on the same subject, and which certainly influenced the later work.Footnote ¹⁷

In 1834, Petrov had his first great success in the first Russian-stage St Petersburg performance of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, in which he played the demonic Bertram, father of Robert. His stellar performance earned him a lengthy backstage conversation with Emperor Nicholas I.Footnote ¹⁸ Audiences were equally impressed. ‘Do you remember Petrov in Robert le diable?’ recalled Ivan Lazhechnikov, a pioneer of the Russian historical novel, in The Infidel (1838):

Petrov never toured outside his homeland, but the composer and critic Aleksandr Serov claimed, many years later, that at least within Russia Petrov surpassed more internationally famous visiting exponents of the role such as Antonio Tamburini and Nicolas Levasseur, particularly in his acting:

Drawing on Serov, L’vov stresses that Petrov, unlike most of the other opera singers of the time, transcended the stereotype of the operatic villain, finding the humanity in the character of Bertram (i.e., the devil) and endowing him with sufficient emotional complexity to make him sympathetic to the audience. He links the bass’s psychological penetration to the rise of realism in Russian drama, and in particular to the innovations of the most famous Russian actor of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863). Shchepkin was perhaps the first actor to articulate the credo that would later become the bedrock of the Stanislavsky method and twentieth-century method acting: the actor must put himself in the character’s shoes and feel what he is feeling.Footnote ²¹ L’vov suggests that Petrov, who was a friend of Shchepkin, incorporated the latter’s ideas about the craft of the actor into his own operatic performances.

The bass was thus an experienced, acclaimed performer by the time he began working with Glinka on A Life for the Tsar, the opera that would be his calling card throughout his long and illustrious career. The project was fortuitous in more ways than one; it also brought together Petrov and his future wife, Anna Vorobyova (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

(colour online) Anna Vorobyova, painted by Karl Briullov, 1841, The Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Reproduced in Galina Leontyeva, Karl Briullov: The Painter of Russian Romanticism, trans. Peter Deviatkin and Alla Zagrebina (Bournemouth, 1996), plate 51.

Vorobyova’s career was brilliant but brief, and the roles she created are marginal rather than central to the Russian canon. No biography of her was ever written, though she did compose a short memoir; discussions of her career are interstitial, couched within longer essays on Petrov or Glinka. Nor did she have the hard-luck, lower-class background of Petrov which fitted neatly with Soviet musicologists’ need to analyse Russian opera through the lens of populist nationalism and to downplay the genre’s connotation of elitism. Finally, her vocal style and repertoire were markedly more Italianate than those of her husband, and therefore less amenable to the nationalist agenda of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century music critics. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that histories of Russian opera have devoted less attention to her than to Petrov.Footnote ²² Nevertheless, a study of her career will shed light on early Russian mezzo/contralto vocality, on the typical early career trajectory of Russian opera singers in the capital cities, and on certain specific challenges faced by low-voiced women in the Imperial Theatres.

Vorobyova was trained for a stage career from an early age. Her father occupied the respectable position of choral coach and répétiteur of the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres. She initially studied ballet at the St Petersburg Theatre Academy and soon switched to singing. Her voice teachers included the composer Antonio Sapienza and Gavriil Lomakin, an eminent choral director who was a product of the noble Sheremetev family’s serf chorus.Footnote ²³ In 1830, she debuted as the page boy Pippo in a student production of Rossini’s La gazza ladra. Shortly thereafter, she also played the minor role of Ritta in Louis Hérold’s Zampa. Upon her graduation, she was accepted as a chorister in the St Petersburg Russian Opera. In this capacity, she took part in straight plays, vaudevilles, divertissements and concerts as well as operas.

Catterino Cavos, who had a knack for spotting unusual voices, began coaching Vorobyova privately and convinced the directorate to give her the demanding assignment of Arsace in the Russian-stage premiere of Rossini’s Semiramide. Her debut on 30 January 1835, at age eighteen, marked the beginning of her professional soloist career and established her as a trouser-role specialist. Like Petrov, she was the first Russian-stage performer of a number of other bel canto roles, including Adalgisa (Norma), Romeo (I Capuleti e i Montecchi) and Riccardo (I puritani), as well as the first St Petersburg Russian-stage performer of Tancredi in Rossini’s eponymous opera.Footnote ²⁴ She likely crossed paths with Petrov, or at least observed his rise to fame up close, before they worked together in A Life for the Tsar.

A Life for the Tsar, the bass father-hero and the fledgling mezzo trouser role

Had Petrov and Vorobyova’s professional activities been limited to the French and Italian repertoire, they would still merit an honourable mention in the history of opera in Russia, since these repertoires played such an important part in Russian public life throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ Yet ultimately, the couple would be remembered most for creating the leading roles of Ivan Susanin and Vanya in the work that would come to be considered the foundational Russian opera.

Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (premiered on 27 November 1836) was by no means the first Russian opera. Foreign composers had already written operas to Russian librettos in the mid-eighteenth century and continued to do so in the early nineteenth century; already by the late eighteenth century Russian-born composers such as Vasily Pashkevich and Yevstigney Fomin had jumped on the bandwagon.Footnote ²⁶ By 1835, the Russian repertoire could boast at least one popular Singspiel: Alexei Verstovsky’s Askold’s Tomb, and, as mentioned above, A Life for the Tsar itself was heavily indebted to Cavos’s own opera Ivan Susanin, which concerned the same episode of Russian history. Nonetheless, Glinka’s first opera was perceived by many observers as a watershed work: it was the first through-composed opera by a Russian composer on a Russian subject that sounded authentically Russian insofar as it drew inspiration from Russian indigenous musical traditions. It seemed народный (narodny), a term that meant popular, folky and, increasingly in the nineteenth century, national(ist).Footnote ²⁷

Recent scholars are more sceptical, hearing the opera as thoroughly indebted to Franco-Italian convention.Footnote ²⁸ Marina Frolova-Walker argues that the народный character of Russian classical music from the 1830s on was a fantasy concocted by aristocrats and intellectuals who had been raised on Italian-inflected urban романсы (romances, or salon art songs) and had scant knowledge of the music being created in parts of Russia that were uncontaminated by Western influence.Footnote ²⁹ But in order to understand why A Life for the Tsar was so successful and influential, and more specifically why Petrov’s portrayal of the hero Ivan Susanin established him as the most revered Russian bass of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to consider why the intelligentsia of the time were so eager to detect authentic Russianness in the opera.

The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of feverish nationalist and democratic sentiment throughout Europe. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic era and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had all undermined the public’s faith in nation-states as fixed, eternal entities headed by indestructible monarchies. Rather, monarchs were not necessarily legitimate; national boundaries could be dramatically redrawn; and people outside the traditional ruling classes had the power to engage in this process. A number of revolts duly followed.

The rise of nationalism in Russia had a somewhat different trajectory from that of Western Europe, and its peculiar features were reflected in the plot and the protagonist of A Life for the Tsar. The Russian iteration of Romantic nationalism began during the war of 1812, when the invading French army was famously defeated by the brutal Russian winter, the Russian army’s scorched-earth strategy and the peasant guerrilla fighters. Thereafter, many members of Russia’s intelligentsia remained permanently distrustful of foreign cultural influence. The Slavophiles, as they came to be called, made a conscious effort to rediscover – or create – a unique, distinctive national culture rooted in the traditions of rural Russia.

This brand of nationalism lacked the democratic impulse that played such an important role elsewhere. Rather, it remained committed to the existing social order and hierarchy of power. In an attempt to find a unique essence that set Russians apart from other peoples, the Slavophiles became convinced that Russia’s destiny required a break with the West’s liberalising political trajectory and a closer embrace of venerable Russian institutions such as autocracy and the Orthodox Church.Footnote ³⁰ As a result, nationalist opera in Russia was characterised by conservative, pro-monarchy plots rather than the liberal-revolutionary ones that had become standard fare in Western Europe.Footnote ³¹

Given this political climate, it is not surprising that an opera about the expulsion of foreign invaders and the founding of the Romanov dynasty would receive a warm reception. A Life for the Tsar takes place in 1612–13, towards the end of the period of interregnum and Polish-Lithuanian military incursions that followed the death of the last tsar of the Rurik dynasty, Feodor Ivanovich, in 1598. The opera weaves together the personal and the political by having the fate of the country depend on the heroic actions of one family, and especially its patriarch, the peasant Ivan Susanin.

Susanin appears to have been a real historical figure who was indeed killed by Polish invaders for refusing to divulge the nearby hideout of the Romanovs. However, the documentation is sparse,Footnote ³² and many details of the story are fictionalised in order to strengthen its nationalist message. The plot is simple: Susanin’s daughter Antonida is engaged to fellow peasant Bogdan Sobinin, but Susanin will not allow them to marry until a new tsar has been elected. Mikhail Romanov is duly elected, but must immediately go into hiding when the Polish occupiers decide to nip his reign in the bud. A group of soldiers burst into the Susanin residence and demand to know where the tsar is. Susanin leads them off on a wild goose chase through the snowy woods while his adopted son and future son-in-law go off to warn the Romanovs and get help. When the Poles realise that they have been bamboozled, they kill Susanin. The opera ends with a triumphal celebration of Mikhail Romanov’s ascendancy and Susanin’s heroism.

Susanin’s power as a symbol resides largely in the fact that he is both the authority figure in his family and local community and a humble peasant who seeks faithfully to serve the monarchy. Thus he embodies the two mutually reinforcing myths on which the Russian political system was grounded: the image of the benevolent patriarch and the image of the happily submissive peasant. The character’s unswerving devotion to the nation accorded with the Romantic nationalism of nineteenth-century intellectuals. Reviewers were entranced: Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky gushed:

The character of Susanin impressed Odoyevsky not only through his patriotism, however, but also – importantly for our purposes – through a singing style that seemed unprecedented. This style set the heroic Susanin apart from the opera’s other, more quotidian characters and would quickly become associated with a tragic, patriotic bass grandeur. Odoyevsky writes:

Ultimately, what was most special for Odoyevsky about the vocal style of Susanin was that it ‘elevate[s] Народный singing to tragedy’,Footnote ³⁵ a claim that helped establish the popular idea that Russian music and drama are essentially tragic in sensibility. The Act III aria 'Ты придешь моя заря' (‘You will come, my dawn’) does indeed combine operatic gravity with the simple rolled i, iv and V chords of a sad, guitar-accompanied popular song (see Ex. 1).

Ex. 1

‘Ты придешь моя заря’ from A Life for the Tsar (Moscow: Jurgenson, n.d.).

The aria largely eschews the melismatic pyrotechnics of the other characters, which Odoyevsky and other critics would increasingly associate with Italian ‘artificiality’, in favour of syllabic text-setting and a broad, simple lyricism that doubtless seemed more suitable for an unlettered peasant character than roulades that could only be performed by a trained voice. It must be noted, however, that the Franco-Italian operatic repertoire throughout its history has also contained many slow and weighty arias, and the designation of this aria as cantabile shows Glinka’s indebtedness to this tradition.Footnote ³⁶ The most likely model for ‘Ты придешь моя заря’, for instance, is the baritone Guillaume Tell’s arioso ‘Sois immobile’ from Rossini’s opera of 1829. Tell, like Susanin, is a father and patriot who has fallen into the hands of the enemy; his aria, like Susanin’s, is a slow, anguished meditation. The effectiveness of ‘Ты придешь моя заря’, then, probably lies less in its proximity to Russian folk musical forms such as the протяжная песня (protyazhnaya pesnya)Footnote ³⁷ than in the way it harnesses a Franco-Italian musical convention so expertly in the service of a Russian story that it masks its own origins and creates the illusion of being autochthonous.

Although Odoyevsky naively discusses the characters as if they were wholly the creations of the composer and includes little discussion of the singers, there can be no doubt that his positive impression of Susanin was due in part to Petrov’s characterisation. Other contemporary observers, meanwhile, saw something phenomenal and unprecedented in the way Petrov inhabited the role. Legend has it that he was so convincing that he provoked the choristers playing the Polish soldiers into attacking him violently enough that his arm was broken.Footnote ³⁸ He was Susanin in some uncanny way: Musorgsky declared that ‘The appearance of Grandfather Petrov [onstage] as Susanin, in my opinion, is the appearance of Susanin (the idea) as Petrov’ (see Fig. 2).Footnote ³⁹

Fig. 2

Petrov as Susanin (L’vov, Petrov, 10).

In this image, the costume and beard are convincingly peasant-like; the facial expression is appropriately grave. Nevertheless, the perceived truthfulness of his performance lay only partly in his realistic acting. It also lay in his skill at co-creating and bringing to life an intangible ideal that was already slowly germinating in the collective mind of the intelligentsia. Such an endeavour required less attention to real-world detail (such as the lifestyle and worldview of actual peasants, with whom the urban Petrov was likely not very familiar), but rather imagination, stylisation, an instinct for the sentimental and the picturesque, and an ability to go beyond realism into the realm of myth. The music critic Feofil Tolstoy got to the crux of the matter: ‘In the role of Susanin Petrov … created an eternal type.’Footnote ⁴⁰

That a general type or archetype culled from many specific instances might be a truer representation of reality than any one of those instances is, of course, an idea that ultimately derives from Plato’s theory of forms. According to this theory, abstract ideas partake of an underlying reality that is more fundamental than the material world we perceive through our senses. By analysing specific, related, observable objects in the world, one can reach an ideal conception of that object; for example, one reaches the mathematical notion of a perfect circle by observing the many imperfect circles in nature, and the perfect circle is considered ‘truer’ than the imperfect ones insofar as it is their blueprint. The notion of the theatrical stock character or ‘type’ is one example of how this idea has filtered down through the ages into popular culture. The Russian intelligentsia, having imbibed a loose conception of forms by way of German Idealism, were eager to discern and create ‘types’.Footnote ⁴¹ In the case of Susanin, Petrov creates the ‘eternal type’ of the heroic, authoritative, self-sacrificing bass father – a character with tremendous propaganda value for an authoritarian and patriarchal nation. Henceforth, A Life for the Tsar would be the pillar not only of Petrov’s career – he sang the role every season for the next thirty years – but also of the national repertory. Even after Petrov gave up the role, the opera continued to be mounted every year, and increasingly as the season opener at the Mariinsky Theatre, until 1917.Footnote ⁴²

Vorobyova received just as much acclaim as Petrov for her portrayal of Susanin’s adoptive teenaged son, Vanya, and in the process brought trouser roles into Russian opera. But her contribution to vocal and dramaturgical convention proved more subsidiary, partly because the character she played was less central to the plot than Susanin, partly because the vogue of trouser roles had already begun to decline in the trend-setting operatic culture of France and Italy, and finally because her more ornate, obviously Italianate singing style did not fit so well with the nationalist agenda of the incipient music-critical establishment. Perhaps the most significant achievement of her performance, as a result, was that it raised the prestige of the low female voice. Thereafter, Russian composers would make the most of mezzos and contraltos.

The trouser role was something of a curiosity for Russian audiences, because they did not have a substantial native tradition of theatrical cross-dressing. They never fully absorbed the interest in eroticised gender ambiguity on the stage that had been present in Western European theatre since at least the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ Nevertheless, Vanya proved a highly successful character, because Glinka and Vorobyova skilfully harnessed the convention in a way that made sense to Russian audiences. Rather than demonstrating pubescent romantic inclinations as his Western counterparts tended to do, Vanya existed in order to burnish the patriarchal credentials of the all-important bass Susanin. What better way to portray this patriotic hero as an ideal father than by giving him a vulnerable child? The fact that Vanya was Susanin’s adopted son rather than his natural son further enhanced the latter’s moral stature as a man who is willing to take on more than his fair share of responsibilities. Susanin’s unselfish love for Vanya mirrored his self-sacrificial love for his country’s ruler (also a teenaged boy at the time of his ascension), bolstering the opera’s linkage of patriarchal values and patriotism. Thus Vanya signifies little in and of himself; rather, he functions to reinforce the father figure. This kind of trouser role – a likeable child who gives the stern parental protagonist a chance to show the audience his or her tender side – would reappear in later operas, such as Serov’s Rogneda and especially Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov.

Glinka’s original intention of making Vanya merely a passive appendage to his foster father, however, was complicated by the influence of Vorobyova. Having been weaned on decidedly non-passive bel canto trouser roles, she brought a more animated Italianate sensibility to the part, which initially gave Glinka cause for concern. During the first run-through of the character’s Act III aria, she recounts

Given that the song is about an orphaned baby bird and thus has obvious parallels to Vanya’s life, Vorobyova might be forgiven for assuming that the song called for great depth of feeling. However, Glinka wanted a rendition devoid of the emotional posturing that he associated with Italian opera – or perhaps simply a diegetic song whose distracted, ‘hummed’ quality would enhance the realism of the scene – and she obliged.

The result was a breakout success in this relatively small role. Odoyevsky said, ‘What of Mrs Vorobyova’s acting? It is difficult to dwell on any one thing! With the performance of A Life for the Tsar she is beyond praise in both acting and singing. One can only assure her of one thing: that the entire public unanimously adores the dear little fledgling!’Footnote ⁴⁶ The composer and critic Aleksandr Serov wrote much later, in 1860, that ‘Vorobyova sent us all out of our minds.’Footnote ⁴⁷

The contralto did not rest on her laurels. Her success gave her the leverage to reshape the role in accordance with her own preferences, and she requested that Glinka add another scene for Vanya in time for the next season. He apparently needed little persuasion. According to her perhaps fanciful account, he finished composing the scene less than twenty-four hours after the text had been provided:

That scene became a permanent addition to the opera.

In her recent study Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance, Hilary Poriss analyses similar instances of aria insertion in Franco-Italian opera. She argues that this practice was the main way for opera singers to assert a degree of control over a repertoire that was increasingly dominated by the work-concept – the idea that the operatic work, as created by the librettist and composer, was a finished product that should be performed faithfully by singers and not altered in any way.Footnote ⁴⁹

Vorobyova’s proposed revision in this context was hardly drastic by the standards of the time; she did not interpolate an aria by another composer as Maria Malibran and other Western European divas often did. Rather, she consulted with Glinka, the librettist Kukol’nik, and her co-star Petrov in order to come up with a dramatically logical scene for Vanya. (While Susanin plays for time by leading the Poles off into the woods, the boy goes to warn the Romanovs.Footnote ⁵⁰) But her direct influence can be seen in the vocal writing of the second aria (see Ex. 2). Though it does not exhibit the level of bravura coloratura that can be found in the heroic Italian trouser roles in which she excelled, it requires significantly more agility than Vanya’s other music. This aria, like much of the opera’s music, would seem to represent a compromise on Glinka’s part with the Italianate vocal style which he professed to dislike but which suited his singers so well. Its addition not only intensifies the opera’s more general compromise with Italian style, but also might therefore be seen to reflect an Italian-derived conception of the singer as a compositional agent.Footnote ⁵¹

Ex. 2

Beginning of the second verse of ‘Зажигайте огни’ (‘Light the Fires’) from Act IV of A Life for the Tsar (Moscow: Jurgenson, n.d.).

This aria, in tandem with contemporary descriptions, gives us some sense of what Vorobyova’s voice might have sounded like. It stays in the middle to low range, occasionally going down to an accented B♭ and never going above f''. It conspicuously avoids a climactic high note at the end. The vocal writing is consistent with contemporary descriptions of her voice as a contralto and with her own statement that her range extended comfortably for two octaves (g to g”) with extensions to f and a”.Footnote ⁵² The combination of the quick tempo, the frequent leaps of a sixth (or even a tenth near the end of each verse), and the many semiquaver runs also demonstrate her agility.Footnote ⁵³ What cannot be deduced from the score, however, is her timbre. For this we must rely on contemporary descriptions which are flattering but vague; Serov described her as having ‘an incomparable voice which one could not hear without heartfelt emotion (whatever A. Y. Petrova[-Vorobyova] sang, the very timbre of her voice became imprinted on the soul)’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Besides giving Vanya much more stage time, this scene also fundamentally alters his character. A passive and plaintive figure during the rest of the opera, he suddenly turns into a brave messenger who alerts the forces of the tsar-elect to the arrival of the Polish troops. Though of course he remains subordinate to the father-figure Susanin, who makes the ultimate sacrifice that saves the day, he has nevertheless gained much more importance in the plot than Glinka initially intended. It was Vorobyova’s charisma and initiative that accomplished this elevation. Audiences were delighted: Vladimir Stasov, the famously polemical music critic and supporter of native Russian music, reports that she was ‘passion itself, fire itself’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Admittedly, Vanya did not resonate with later generations of viewers to the extent that Susanin did; thirty years later, Serov, who had increasingly come to despise Italian-derived coloratura singing in Russian opera, dismissed the interpolated aria as a poorly conceived attempt to turn the character into a bel canto hero ‘à la Arsace’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Vorobyova’s success in the part sparked a vogue for trouser roles and initiated a long tradition of significant mezzo characters.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ruslan and Lyudmila, the Lukewarm Bass Hero, the Bass Buffoon, and the Decadent Mezzo Trouser Role

Glinka knew he had a formidable team in Petrov and Vorobyova, who married in 1838, soon after the first run of A Life for the Tsar.Footnote ⁵⁸ He wrote his second and final opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila, with them in mind, attempting to recreate the winning combination of a patriotic bass hero and a young male supporter played by a mezzo. But no amount of vocal star-power and compositional excellence could make up for the libretto’s narrative and dramaturgical weaknesses. The opera, which premiered on 27 November 1842, proved to be a fascinating, influential succès manqué. Afterwards, both singers would pursue very different goals from those that Glinka had marked out for them.

Glinka intended Ruslan and Lyudmila to be another patriotic epic that celebrated the Russian state-building enterprise and the loyal service that made it possible. The opera is set in the myth-shrouded era of Kievan Rus’ (i.e., between the ninth and thirteenth centuries), and concerns the exploits of the heroic Russian knight Ruslan, who must rescue Lyudmila, daughter of Great Prince Svetozar of Kiev, from the evil foreign wizard Chernomor. In the process, he gains the help of a Finnish wizard and wins the support of his former rival for the princess, the Khazarian knight and trouser role Ratmir. Frolova-Walker has argued that the picaresque, multicultural story line supports the imperialist agenda of the nineteenth-century Russian state, which had annexed Finland in 1809 and had won one of several wars over territory with the Ottoman Empire in 1829. Through the activities of the hero and his allies, Ruslan and Lyudmila concocts a fantasy of the conquered territories’ happy cooperation with and submission to the Russian Empire.Footnote ⁵⁹

The most surprising thing about Ruslan is his voice-type: in defiance of Italian-derived vocal convention, which assigns higher voices to younger characters and lower voices to older characters, the young knight is a bass. Glinka wanted to capitalise on his favourite bass’s stupendous success as Susanin, and in doing so he further established a tradition of bass protagonists (see Fig. 3). He wrote the role specifically for Petrov; the vocal writing seems tailored to the singer’s high-lying bass voice (it calls for a g’), and he coached the singer extensively in preparation for the premiere.Footnote ⁶⁰ But the magic of Susanin was gone: even after Ruslan’s striking music overcame the initial tepid reviews of the opera, audiences and critics never warmed to the story. In his monumental serialised article ‘Ruslan and the Ruslanists’, Serov called the opera cold, boring and lacking in pathos: a brilliant design but not really alive.Footnote ⁶¹ The static, episodic plot and certain characters’ lack of emotional verisimilitude did not accord with nineteenth-century standards of good drama.

Fig. 3

Petrov as Ruslan (L’vov, Petrov, 10).

A big part of the problem lay in the hero himself. According to Serov, who admittedly had his own aesthetic agenda for Russian opera and was eager to find fault with every aspect of Ruslan and Lyudmila, ‘Petrov was not quite satisfied with Ruslan’s aria – he talked about it with Glinka in my presence – and because of that sang it limply and reluctantly.’Footnote ⁶² The remark refers to the Act II double aria scene, ‘О поле, поле … Дай, Перун, булатный мечь’ (‘O field, field … Give [me], Perun, a sword of damask steel’). The first of this pair of arias, like ‘Ты придешь моя заря’, provides a moment of reflection on loss and death before the hero’s conscious plunge into danger, but lacks the affective power of Susanin’s beloved aria. Instead of treating simple, heartfelt emotions such as familial love, it ventures into more abstract territory: Ruslan looks at the old battlefield he must cross, meditating on the large number of warriors who have died there and wondering if he will die there too. He does not mention Lyudmila’s plight; rather, the main cause of his melancholy is the possibility that his heroic exploits will not be remembered. In the following aria he rallies himself and expresses heroic resolve, but the impression remains of a character who is improbably self-conscious, concerned with his legacy and lacking in emotion. Furthermore, since Ruslan’s exploits take place offstage, the audience never has the opportunity to see him as the hero he purports to be. The character simply did not have the emotional depth or visible agency that audiences had so admired in Susanin; and, furthermore, the role arbitrarily flouted opera’s conventions of voice-type. The drastic reassignment of the bass lead from the father-figure to the youthful lover-hero, normally a tenor, may ultimately have seemed too strange for Petrov (and audiences) to endorse – though he must have been flattered that Glinka made that decision on his account. One might go so far as to say that bass protagonists in Russian opera were successful only if they conformed to the stock character of the father-figure.

Ruslan’s inadequacy as a model for future bass heroes thus stemmed from the disregard on the part of Glinka and his librettists, Valerian Shirkov, Nestor Kukol’nik and N. A. Markevich, for the psychological detail that was becoming de rigueur on the stage as the nineteenth century progressed, from Petrov’s indifference to the role, and from the intrinsic mismatch between the character and his assigned voice-type.Footnote ⁶³ It was a failure that foreshadowed the inability or unwillingness of any later Russian composer to write a properly heroic bass role,Footnote ⁶⁴ and, just as important, the preference of many bass singers themselves for non-heroic roles. The ideal of the heroic patriarch which had so galvanised the audiences of Ivan Susanin proved impossible to replicate.

However, Ruslan was a failure that opened up other avenues for the bass voice that were more artistically significant and rewarding for Petrov and the singers who followed in his footsteps. Anxious to help his friend Glinka in the wake of Ruslan’s disappointing premiere, Petrov used his star-power to force the management to keep mounting the opera over the years – but increasingly with him playing not Ruslan but Ruslan’s inept rival, the Varangian knight Farlaf.Footnote ⁶⁵ Why did he prefer to play this relatively minor character? L’vov suggests that Farlaf is the most realistic, human character in the story.Footnote ⁶⁶ Certainly he is the most humorous: afraid of everything but nevertheless prone to boasting prematurely about his victory over Ruslan, Farlaf brings an appealing antiheroic dimension to this otherwise coldly epic opera. One can imagine that a proficient actor such as Petrov would find Farlaf’s insecurity, mood swings and outbreaks of bluster a more interesting challenge than Ruslan’s stolid heroism. Observers were delighted with the singer’s comedic rendition. Stasov wrote that:

César Cui was even more effusive:

Although L’vov’s suggestion about Farlaf has merit, his nationalist bias may have blinded him to another equally significant reason for Petrov’s embrace of the role: an appreciation for the Italian buffo tradition. Having sung such roles as Dandini (La Cenerentola) and Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia), he surely found Farlaf’s patter song familiar and congenial (see Ex. 3).

Ex. 3

‘Близок уж час торжества моего’ (‘Close is the hour of my triumph’) from Ruslan and Lyudmila, ed. Mily Balakirev and Sergei Lyapunov (Moscow, 1938; reprint of Jurgenson edition, n.d.).

The vivace tempo, simple accompaniment, repetitive and highly accented rhythmic patterns, syllabic text-setting and tongue-twisting succession of consonants are typical of the Rossinian bass patter aria, a musical form familiar to Russian audiences who were flocking to the Italian Opera in the 1830s and 1840s. Farlaf and the ensuing tradition of comical Russian basses – several of whom would be created by Petrov, including Leporello (Dargomïzhsky’s The Stone Guest) and Varlaam (Boris Godunov) – reflect the Italian buffo tradition and provide a significant counterweight to the heroic or solemn bass protagonists for which Russian opera is known.

The role that Glinka created for Vorobyova proved even more problematic than Ruslan. The effete Khazarian prince Ratmir was the first of several Eastern mezzo characters (in the future female) who embody or encourage нега (nega), a blissful lassitude that is the negation of conventionally heroic and virtuous behaviour.Footnote ⁶⁹ In these operas, the decadent Easterner attempts to seduce the Russian protagonist into abandoning his mission for a life of passive pleasure. In this case, Ratmir, a jaded contender for the hand of Lyudmila, tries to convince the heroic Ruslan to set aside his quest for the kidnapped princess and join him in a bacchanal that evokes his lifestyle as the owner of a harem.

His casting as a woman reflected the orientalist discourse through which Russia attempted to justify its imperialist enterprises.Footnote ⁷⁰ This discourse characterised Easterners – especially those of the declining Ottoman Empire – as sensual, decadent and (most significantly for vocal typecasting) effeminate, and therefore in need of civilisation through imperialism.Footnote ⁷¹ Ratmir is an improper foreigner who has to be taught the virtues of monogamy and assimilated into Russian culture. Glinka and his librettists accomplished this by giving him an improbable change of heart midway through the opera: he reunites with a former lover, abandons the rivalry over Lyudmila and unselfishly assists Ruslan in finding her.

It is unclear if the nationalist message Glinka hoped to convey through Ratmir registered with audiences. Indeed, critics were bemused by the character’s very presence in the opera. Serov disapproved of the decision to write a lascivious adult male character for a contralto:

On this final point, Serov was indubitably correct. In fact, just two years before the opera premiered, Glinka would have had the opportunity to see Vorobyova in a high-profile trouser role: Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (a setting of Romeo and Juliet) alongside the Giulietta of the touring star soprano Giuditta Pasta.Footnote ⁷³ Stasov praised her ‘passionate, poignant’ performance,Footnote ⁷⁴ which likely made Glinka more confident about his decision to write Ratmir as a trouser role. Serov does concede that Vorobyova ‘sparked the public’s excitement’ as Ratmir,Footnote ⁷⁵ but concludes that the role is ‘colourless’, ‘out of place’, dramatically unperformable and unrewarding.Footnote ⁷⁶

The pallid role was clearly anticlimactic for Vorobyova, and her career declined from that point on. The story of how her career ended is instructive, because it illustrates the unique challenges that faced Russian mezzos at mid-century and helps account for the fact that so much of their influence later in the century came about in private, amateur settings rather than in the official realm of the Imperial Theatres. Her stardom evaporated suddenly – overnight, if the anecdote can be believed. Forced by the directorate of the Imperial Theatres to sing the baritone role of Riccardo in Bellini’s I puritani, she performed successfully on opening night but woke up the next day with no voice. Her voice never fully returned, and that was the last operatic performance of her life.Footnote ⁷⁷

Some details of this story are no doubt embroidered: it is unlikely that a singer could ruin her voice for good by taking on one unwise role, or that the disintegration could take place over one night of performance instead of more gradually in rehearsals. Inasmuch as Vorobyova continued to sing for devoted admirers in amateur settings, it seems possible that she simply lost patience with the dictatorial management and took the opportunity to quit, exaggerating the damage to her voice. In a retrospective article on her career, Stasov mentions unspecified ‘family concerns’ as another reason for her early retirement, and Yastrebov briefly alludes to a child born in 1838.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although the details of her retirement are murky, Vorobyova’s story reveals singers’ lack of control over their repertoire, the tone-deaf omnipotence of the theatrical directorates and the dangers that faced female singers who specialised in trouser roles. No male Russian singer was ever forced to sing a role composed for a woman or a different male voice-type, and no soprano was ever forced to sing a role composed for a man or, so far as I know, one composed for a mezzo. Only mezzos and contraltos were routinely compelled to sing roles written for other voice-types (usually sopranos). Vorobyova’s case vividly demonstrates the insensitivity faced by women who occupied an interstitial space of vocal sound.

The question of how to retire gracefully has always dogged performers. It is a particularly sensitive issue for opera singers, whose livelihood depends on an instrument that is temperamental even at the best of times. Vorobyova’s story is not unique; in fact, it strongly echoes that of the grand opéra star Cornélie Falcon, who had retired four years earlier at a young age after an apparently sudden loss of voice. The French soprano then devoted herself to her family and students, creating a model of kindness, self-effacement and bourgeois domesticity that likely seemed attractive to other female singers whose careers were waning.Footnote ⁷⁹ As we shall see, Vorobyova’s later life followed a similar trajectory. And, like Falcon, she cast a long shadow over her country’s operatic culture even after she ceased to perform in public.

Rusalka and the complex bass antihero

After Vorobyova retired, Petrov continued his career to ever-greater acclaim. His next project was the Miller in Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka (1856), which may have been his greatest achievement as an actor (see Fig. 4). Until the 1850s, Petrov’s repertoire centred on heroes such as Susanin and Ruslan, satanic villains such as Bertram and Kaspar (Der Freischütz) and basso buffo characters such as Farlaf. All of these characters as written are relatively one-dimensional: either avatars of a principle or an ideology, or comic relief. With Rusalka, the star bass finally had the opportunity to premiere a role that showed off the full range of his acting talents: the Miller, who combines comical selfishness with tragic grandeur in a way that had not been seen before in Russian opera.

Fig. 4

Petrov as the Miller (L’vov, Petrov, 26).

Rusalka tells the story of Natasha, a peasant girl who is seduced by a prince with the encouragement of her father, the Miller, who hopes to gain a financial reward from the relationship. The opening scenes paint him as a good-humoured, sly, mildly clownish character. But however pragmatic his intentions, he has gravely miscalculated the depth of his daughter’s feelings for the Prince: when the latter abandons her, she commits suicide by throwing herself into a lake at the end of Act I. This tragedy precipitates a transformation both in Natasha (to a русалка [rusalka], a water nymph) and in the Miller (to a guilt-ridden madman).

The Miller reappears in Act III, declaring to the Prince that he is a raven. In order to capture the brokenness of the character, Dargomïzhsky breaks out of the conventional number-opera format that characterises the Miller’s earlier music and sets his text largely in the ‘melodic recitative’ for which the composer would become known in the annals of Russian music history: a less lyrical, more declamatory singing style with full orchestral accompaniment that did not hew to a predetermined form (see Ex. 4).Footnote ⁸⁰

Ex. 4

Excerpt from the Mad Scene from Rusalka (Moscow, 1975; reissue of Muzgiz edition, n.d.).

Since the aria format allows the depiction of only one overarching mood per aria and thus forces characters to maintain the same mood for several minutes, the decision to abandon that format gave the composer the freedom to depict more realistically the erratic mood shifts that nineteenth-century audiences associated with insanity. Indeed, as Example 4 shows, the Miller careens from laughter to despair in the space of a few seconds.

This more angular and heavily accented vocal style, which required excellent diction and dramatic timing and never settled into the expansive lyricism of the traditional aria, called for a singer who was above all an actor, who could convey affective meaning instead of just beautiful sound. Contemporary reviews indicate that Petrov succeeded on that front: shortly after the premiere, Feofil Tolstoy wrote an extensive analysis of this unusual scene, stressing that:

A few months later, Serov added that:

After his highly successful debut, Petrov grew into the role still more as the years went by: reviews increasingly commented on his superlative acting and declamation even as they noted the decline of his voice.Footnote ⁸³ In 1868, one reviewer stated that ‘The role of the Miller numbers among the three incomparable types created by Petrov in three Russian operas, and with the Miller his artistic ability has all but reached its highest limits.’Footnote ⁸⁴

The mention of ‘types’ is significant, and gives a clue as to why Petrov had more direct influence on Russian opera than his wife: not only were his performances of individual roles superb (as were Vorobyova’s), but his roles, to a greater extent than hers, tapped into something beyond themselves – something to which Russian audiences could relate at a primal level. Vorobyova’s trouser roles, particularly Ratmir, were odd, quirky and dependent on a foreign convention of cross-dressing that Russian audiences never fully accepted as natural, while those of Petrov were seemingly the opposite – recognisable from everyday Russian life, rooted in the archetypes of the father and the ne’er-do-well, and manifested in a more physically plausible body. If Susanin is the type of the heroic, self-sacrificing father, and Farlaf is the type of the comical villain – both of which would exert a strong hold on the Russian operatic imagination – the Miller represents an amalgam of the two.Footnote ⁸⁵ Though he begins as the opera’s comic relief, he becomes one of its most tragic and powerful figures when he pushes the Prince into the lake, where the latter is dragged to his death by Natasha and her fellow русалки. In L’vov’s words, ‘Here, the Miller is a terrible, majestic figure of a father and avenger.’Footnote ⁸⁶ This antiheroic, guilt-torn, yet majestic personality would become the most famous character type in Russian opera via Boris Godunov.

Many years after his initial success as the Miller, Petrov created one more role for Dargomïzhsky: Leporello in the commercially unsuccessful but artistically influential The Stone Guest (premiered 1872), a retelling of the Don Juan story. The role is minor, but it kept alive the paradigm of the cowardly comedic bass established by Glinka, and thus it (along with Glinka’s Farlaf) likely influenced the similar minor comedic role of Varlaam in Boris Godunov, as we shall see below.

Boris Godunov, bass antiheroes and buffoons, and the return of the trouser role

Musorgsky’s close friendship with and adulation of the Petrovs is documented by numerous contemporaries, including Stasov, Glinka’s sister Lyudmila Shestakova, the conductor Eduard Napravnik and Petrov’s student Nikolai Kompaneiskii. Their friendship dates from the months leading up to the premiere of Boris Godunov, when Musorgsky began regularly attending musical soirées at the Petrovs’ house.Footnote ⁸⁷

Petrov never sang the most famous Russian bass role, the supposed regicide and short-lived Tsar Boris Godunov (r. 1598–1605). By the time Boris Godunov reached the stage in 1874, he was approximately sixty-six years old and well past his prime. Had the timing been more auspicious, Musorgsky might well have tried to convince the directorate of the Imperial Theatres to give him the part. Indeed, Petrov had just sung the similar but vocally less demanding role of another ruthless tsar, Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) in the first version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov (1873). (‘It is impossible to forget the irony along with the strength and imperiousness with which his [Ivan the] Terrible was filled’, wrote the critic Ivanov.Footnote ⁸⁸)

Although Petrov did not sing the role of Boris, it appears to have been written with someone like him in mind. The vocal range of Boris in the 1872 version is that of a high-lying bass or bass-baritone that would have been a comfortable fit for him at a younger age; this suggestion can be substantiated by examining the career of the singer who first sang the role, Ivan Mel’nikov, who, though he is usually identified as a baritone rather than a bass, sang some of Petrov’s roles, including Ruslan and the Miller.Footnote ⁸⁹ Furthermore, the character requires the same personality traits that Petrov had so expertly developed in his portrayals of Susanin and the Miller: dignity, paternal tenderness, violent mood swings, tormented guilt and moments of madness.

However appealing it is to speculate about Petrov’s influence on the role of Boris, we must, of course, devote more attention to the minor but colourful role that he actually created in the opera: Varlaam, an old vagrant monk who is briefly one of the travelling companions of Boris’s nemesis, the Pretender Dmitri. Varlaam, like Farlaf in Ruslan and Lyudmila and Leporello in The Stone Guest and (to some extent) the Miller in Rusalka, injects some much-needed comic relief into this serious opera. Unlike the Varangian knight Farlaf, the Spanish servant Leporello, or the culturally indeterminate Miller, however, Varlaam is a recognisable social type from early modern Russia. The drunken, illiterate cleric was a common figure for much of Russian history, when many monasteries functioned less as spiritual institutions than as lunatic asylums, almshouses and prisons for escaped serfs.Footnote ⁹⁰ If Petrov went in the direction of operatic realism with Farlaf and the Miller, he may be said to have continued down that road with Varlaam, crafting a character who was not only psychologically plausible but also historically and culturally specific.

Varlaam’s big moment comes in Act I, scene 2, when the Pretender’s group arrives at an inn. He sings one of the most memorable tunes in the opera, the drinking song ‘Как во городе было во Казани’ (‘So it was in the city of Kazan’), which recounts the siege of Kazan, a famous military victory of Tsar Ivan IV (whom Petrov had recently portrayed in The Maid of Pskov) over the Tatars in 1552. The song is lively but not technically demanding, and does not require the legato that is so difficult for an aged voice to sustain (see Ex. 5). Rather, it is composed as a quasi-patter song that demands the rapid and clear enunciation of text – a skill that Petrov had perfected as Farlaf, and which did not decline with age.

Ex. 5

‘Как во городе выло во Казани’ from Boris Godunov, ed. Pavel Lamm (Moscow, 1927). Reprinted New York, n.d. (after 1960).

Since the text of this song does not appear in the play by Pushkin on which the opera is based, it seems likely that Musorgsky interpolated it partly in order to create a bass showpiece. Indeed, it would have been insulting to offer the role to a singer of Petrov’s stature without including an aria.

While the rousing agility of this number distantly recalls Farlaf’s ‘Близок уж час торжества моего’, the music in the rest of the scene moves in the direction of the ‘melodic recitative’ employed by Dargomïzhsky in Rusalka and The Stone Guest: declamatory and not particularly melodic. A couple of police officers burst into the inn, looking for the Pretender. However, since they are illiterate, they cannot read the physical description included in the warrant for his arrest. Seeing an opportunity, the Pretender offers to read the document to them and fabricates a description that matches Varlaam. As the police are about to arrest the monk, Varlaam smells a rat and insists on reading the document himself. In a darkly comical, declamatory sequence reminiscent of the lower-class wit of Leporello, the barely literate monk slowly deciphers the text (Ex. 6).

Ex. 6

From Act I, scene 2 of Boris Godunov, ed. Pavel Lamm (Moscow, 1927). Reprinted New York, n.d. (after 1960).

The written description matches the Pretender, and the act ends with his narrow escape from the police.

After this scene, Varlaam disappears until the end of the opera. Yet he utterly dominates this earlier lengthy scene as the character who does the most singing and the only character who has a full-fledged aria. Thus, Varlaam should not be considered a generic minor part but a highly eccentric and colourful role, requiring not a lyrical singer but rather a seasoned character actor-singer.

The sources do not suggest that Musorgsky consulted Petrov in writing the role; the young composer did not meet Petrov or Vorobyova personally until 1873, well after he had composed most of Varlaam’s music for the 1868 original version of Boris. However, he did expand the role slightly for the 1874 version which premiered with Petrov, and in any case Petrov probably deserves some credit for the genesis of the role insofar as Musorgsky must have been affected by the singer’s striking turns as Farlaf and Leporello. Given the dearth of comedy in the famously lugubrious Russian repertoire, Farlaf likely provided the main model for future comedic bass character roles.

Despite being in his mid-sixties, it appears that Petrov brought his usual energy to the part of Varlaam. Stasov wrote that:

For some audience members who did not care for the music, the performance of Petrov and his co-stars actually saved the opera. Kompaneiskii, Petrov’s student, reported that:

Even after achieving stardom, Petrov apparently lived by the adage that there are no small parts, but only small actors.

Vorobyova also influenced the opera from afar, though her career had officially ended long before. Boris contains a trouser role that is remarkably similar to Vanya: the Tsarevich Feodor, Boris’s adolescent and soon-to-be orphaned son. Vanya and Feodor each make their entrance midway through their respective operas with a simple, unpretentious song about a baby bird. Furthermore, they share the same primary dramatic function: neither is an especially important character in his own right, but their presence makes their protagonist fathers seem more sympathetic. The Act II scene of Boris playing with his son and the later scene of him on his deathbed giving advice to his son humanise the regicidal tsar, showing his loving, nurturing side in order to counterbalance his ruthless side. Though Boris is more morally flawed than Susanin, the relationship between him and his son echoes that of Susanin and Vanya: he is a committed father who gives sound advice to his unquestioningly obedient son.

These dramaturgical similarities seem too striking to be coincidental. It seems likely that the composer was consciously or unconsciously influenced by Vanya. Since he was too young to have seen Vorobyova herself in the role, it would not be convincing to argue for her direct influence. I would merely like to suggest two things: first, that she proved the viability of the trouser role and thereby ensured the continuation of the convention in Russian opera; second, that her success as Vanya (and Ratmir) ensured the development of a tradition of mezzo singers who were adept at trouser roles. It is no accident that the first Feodor, Aleksandra Krutikova, had sung Vanya and Ratmir first.Footnote ⁹³

The Petrovs’ friendship with Musorgsky deepened in the wake of the Boris premiere. As the matron of the Petrov household, Vorobyova presumably took on the traditional wifely duty of arranging many of the social gatherings where she and her husband cultivated the impressionable young composer. Petrov frequently performed Musorgsky’s art songs at private soirées, including ‘Darling Savishna’, ‘The Orphan’, ‘The Seminarist’ and finally ‘Trepak’ from the song cycle Songs and Dances of Death, which Musorgsky dedicated to him.Footnote ⁹⁴ Perhaps more surprisingly, Vorobyova also sang his art songs at these soirées, despite her supposed loss of voice. Glinka’s sister Lyudmila Shestakova reported on the contralto’s domestic performance of The Orphan (composed 1868), a vignette about a vulnerable child not unlike Vanya and Feodor:

In a letter to the famous French mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, the novelist Ivan Turgenev described a similar experience but had a higher opinion of Vorobyova’s voice:

Final days: Khovanshchina and Sorochinsky Fair

Musorgsky’s friendship with the Petrovs extended even to workshopping his later operatic projects in their home over a number of years. They were not only among the first to hear Musorgsky’s sketches for Khovanshchina (1872–80), but Vorobyova also helped bring the lead female role, Marfa, into the world: she sang the character’s Act III aria ‘Исходила младешенька’ (‘A maiden went walking’) ‘with truly incomparable tragedy and feeling’ for private gatherings, long before the opera was completed.Footnote ⁹⁷ So highly did Musorgsky prize her assistance that he dedicated the aria to her.Footnote ⁹⁸

Vorobyova’s involvement in this role seems like a departure for her, since she sang almost exclusively trouser roles in her prime, while the main mezzo character in Khovanshchina is a woman, who at first glance seems to have little in common musically or dramatically with them. One could argue that Musorgsky dedicated the aria to her simply on account of her performative assistance and their long friendship, and that the specifics of the song and the character were not so significant in that context. However, there are at least two significant points of convergence between this scene and Vanya’s Act III scene. Both scenes open at the midpoint of the opera with the mezzo character singing in the third person about someone who has lost a loved one (in Vanya’s case, a bird that has lost its mother; in Marfa’s case, a girl who has lost her lover), and in both songs it quickly becomes apparent that they are alluding to their own situations.Footnote ⁹⁹

Second, both scenes involve the arrival of a bass father figure who is not the biological father (in Marfa’s case, the head priest of her sect, Dosifei, whom she calls ‘Father’ and who calls her ‘my child’). The mezzo and the bass sing a duet in which the father figure expresses love and advises the child to pledge him- or herself to a higher authority: Susanin tells Vanya always to be ready to serve the new tsar; Dosifei tells Marfa to accept the will of God. Both mezzo characters act as loyal second-in-commands to their father figures and perform what are presented as heroic deeds later in the opera: Vanya warns the Romanovs of the imminent arrival of the Polish invaders; Marfa joins Dosifei in burning herself alive along with the other willing members of her apocalyptic sect.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Although Vorobyova left the stage some thirty years before the opera was composed, it may be that her roles played a part in inspiring it. Vanya and Marfa are very different characters with very different musical styles, yet they communicate information to the audience in similarly indirect ways and perform similar functions within their respective plots. Most important, they serve to enhance the bass protagonists’ aura of authority, wisdom and benevolence.

Musorgsky began one more opera with the Petrovs in mind, and likely even at their instigation: Sorochinsky Fair (composed 1874–80). Stasov, who disapproved of the project because its slightness, comical tone and Ukrainian setting did not suit his epic-nationalist aspirations for Russian opera, provides evidence for the Petrovs’ influence: in a letter to a friend, he described Sorochinsky Fair as an ‘unfortunate Little-Russian (i.e., Ukrainian) undertaking, incited by the foolishness of Anna [Vorobyova] and Osip [Petrov]’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The main characters are, not coincidentally, a middle-aged married couple with bass and mezzo voices. The Ukrainian merchant setting recalls Petrov’s own childhood and teenage years. Cherevik, the husband, is a clownish bass whose penchant for bursting into drunken ditties recalls Varlaam. The role would have provided a stimulating but not overly demanding vehicle for Petrov. The role of Khivrya, Cherevik’s wife, would have suited Vorobyova’s voice well enough that she could likely have performed the famous Gopak in a private setting (though it is unlikely that she intended, at that late date, to return to public operatic performance). The jocular, declamatory vocal style and the drollery of all the characters give the whole opera the feel of the Inn Scene in Boris Godunov.

The project never came to fruition. Petrov’s sudden death on 12 March 1878 sent Musorgsky into a downward spiral of depression and alcoholism. ‘With grandfather’s [Petrov’s] death, I’ve lost everything … I’ve lost an irreplaceable mentor’, he reportedly said at the funeral.Footnote ¹⁰² The composer never fully recovered, and the opera remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1881. Vorobyova outlived her husband by twenty-three years. Little is known of her activities during that time. An obituary simply states that she ‘modestly lived out her days with her family’ after leaving the stage and, beginning in the 1880s, gradually went blind.Footnote ¹⁰³

Conclusion: the glorious bass (anti)hero and the self-effacing mezzo subordinate

By the time of his death, Petrov was the most celebrated Russian opera singer of the nineteenth century. On 21 April 1876, two years before his death, the Mariinsky celebrated his fiftieth anniversary on the stage. The singer was presented with a gold medal by Tsar Alexander II, as well as a diamond-studded gold wreath; on each leaf was engraved the name of one of the one hundred operas in which he had sung.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The celebration culminated with a cantata composed for the occasion by Tchaikovsky with text by Nikolai Nekrasov, the poet famous for his sympathetic depictions of Russian peasant life:

Petrov had indeed risen far from his humble beginnings as a Ukrainian market seller’s son. This jubilee, a remarkable theatrical performance in and of itself, recalls the end of A Life for the Tsar, in which the (deceased) Ivan Susanin is praised for his loyal service to tsar and fatherland. It vividly illustrates Petrov’s influence on Russian opera, the selective preference for the heroic and moving affect of his early roles rather than the antiheroic, buffoonish characters that he cultivated later in life, and finally the degree to which his legacy became intertwined with the larger nationalist agenda of the contemporary manufacturers of public opinion.

Petrov and Vorobyova’s partnership with each other and with several prominent Russian opera composers of their time established certain patterns that reverberated down through the history of Russian opera even after they retired. First of all, being Italianate singers by training, they helped import a number of Italian conventions into Russian opera, including the trouser role, coloratura and the bass patter aria.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This pattern of drawing inspiration from Western European opera remained a potent (though rarely admitted) force for innovation in Russian opera.

Second, they significantly outperformed their tenor and soprano colleagues in Glinka’s two seminal operas. Their star-power pulled Russian vocality’s centre of gravity downward, resulting in a repertoire more favourable to basses, mezzos and contraltos than any other repertoire in Europe.

Third, they established the stock characters of Russian nationalist operas: the authoritative Russian bass protagonist (usually a father figure), his loyal mezzo subordinate, and/or the seductive mezzo foreigner who must be conquered and assimilated. The first two of these stock characters, appearing together over and over again in many operas, create a striking array of cooperative filial or fraternal relationships between bass and mezzo characters, often trouser roles. This dramaturgical pattern is different from that of Western European opera, in which the main functions of the trouser role were (at first) to carry on the tradition of heroic castrato lover-warriors and increasingly to titillate audiences with the spectacle of a woman’s body in male clothing. Russian operas – at least the ones in whose performance or composition Petrov and Vorobyova were involved – would more typically feature a mezzo young man or occasionally young woman who learns to be heroic and virtuous from a bass authority figure. This loving, cooperative relationship between fathers and children, between authority figures and subordinates, mirrored the aspirations of an authoritarian society and provided a key component in the construction of Russian operatic nationalism. It also mirrored the Petrovs’ own relationship: the younger Vorobyova played the supporting role to Petrov both onstage and in real life.

Finally, the two singers later in their careers moved away from the nationalist paradigm that they themselves had originally helped to put in place. Petrov lost interest in nationalist heroes and increasingly turned to comedic, vulgar, tormented and antiheroic roles that called for a more declamatory vocal style; Vorobyova, who had spent her early years as a loyal foot soldier of the Imperial Theatres, left the company when it took advantage of her docility and focused her attention on private projects within an environment where she had more control. In making these career shifts, Petrov influenced the development of the ‘realist’ aesthetic in Russian opera, and Vorobyova established a domestic musical milieu that incubated significant younger musicians.