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Olga Haldey
Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème has long been accepted as a masterpiece of late nineteenth-century Italian opera. For more than a hundred years now, it has remained a staple of the repertoire, a vehicle for international stars, and an ever-faithful presence on a playbill guaranteed to attract audiences to any theater that stages it. Yet research into the performance history of La Bohème reveals that, while the public has almost always been kind, the early critics were hardly enthusiastic. 1 It appears that the radically innovative musical language of the opera proved to be the main obstacle to its critical success in Italy, as well as in Western Europe as a whole. 2 This article investigates the early history of La Bohème in Russia, a country that until now has been entirely overlooked by Puccini scholars. There, while some aspects of the opera's reception were related to its musical style, others and perhaps more significant
1 Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 118.
2 Both Western-European and American reception of La Bohème has been investigated in some detail, with particular emphasis on Italy; see Linda B. Fairtile, Giacomo Puccini: A Guide to Research (New York and London: Garland, 1999).
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ones were conditioned by the idiosyncrasies of the local theater market rattled by a radical shift in aesthetic and cultural politics of the country at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Puccini was a little-known commodity in Russia when La Bohème was premiered there on 12 January 1897, less than a year after it was first introduced in Turin. At the time, Manon Lescaut , typically used by Italian critics and audiences as a measuring stick in their reception of La Bohème , still awaited its premiere by a local theater. 3 The 1886 staging of Le Villi went unnoticed, inspiring precious little enthusiasm for its young composer. At first glance, La Bohème was headed in the same direction: an unremarkable appearance followed by quick oblivion. To begin with, the opera was premiered in Moscow. Away from sophisticated St. Petersburg, the city had a reputation for nationalism and conservatism, and was habitually snubbed by the cosmopolitan dwellers of Russia's northern capital. Even some of its...