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Empress Catherine II issued an imperial edict that "Russian Theatre should be not merely for comedies and tragedies, but also for operas". This decree of 12th June 1783 to the Russian company performing in the specially built Bolshoi (Stone) Theatre envisaged the "production of one or two serious operas and two new comic operas per year". This date is considered the starting point in the history of the Mariinsky Opera Company.
Italian opera held sway over St Petersburg´s Bolshoi Theatre, which opened on 24th September 1783 with Paisiello´s opera Il mondo della luna. Alongside those by foreign composers, Russian works gradually began to appear on the Petersburg stage, including Orpheus and The Coachmen at the Travellers´ Inn by Yevstigney Fomin, The Miller, the Wizard, the Liar and the Matchmaker by Mikhail Sokolovsky and The Carriage Accident by Vasily Pashkevich. These first frays into the world of opera played a great historic role, as this is where elements of the Russian musical and dramatic style were first heard, later to be developed in the works of the great opera composers of the 19th century. Russian opera singers such as Yelizaveta Sandunova, Anton Krutitsky, Vasily Samoylov and Pyotr Zlov dazzled alongside foreign soloists on the Petersburg stage. The emergence of the Russian school is linked to these names.
Mikhail Glinka´s opera A Life for the Tsar was premiered at St Petersburg´s Bolshoi Theatre on 27th November 1836; precisely six years later, on 27th November 1842, Glinka´s second opera Ruslan and Lyudmila was performed here for the first time. The first in a series of great Russian operas combining true art with genuine accessibility, they marked the birth of classical Russian opera. It was not by mere chance that A Life for the Tsar opened the Mariinsky Theatre on 2nd October 1860.
Edward Napravnik, who dedicated over half a century to the Mariinsky Theatre (1863-1916), played an immense role in developing Russian operatic theatre, training singers and establishing a brilliant orchestra. Napravnik built up a great company that could perform complicated concert programmes in addition to operas and ballets.
The operas The Stone Guest by Dargomyzhsky (1872), Judith (1863), Rogneda (1865) and Satan (1871) by Serov, most of Rimsky-Korsakov´s operas, Boris Godunov (1874) and Khovanshchina (1886) by Musorgsky, Prince Igor (1890) by Borodin, The Demon by Rubenstein, all of Tchaikovsky´s operas (Charodeika being conducted by the composer himself) and other magnificent Russian operatic works were all premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre.
The theatre´s repertoire also included the best operas by western European composers. Giuseppe Verdi wrote La forza del destino especially for the Mariinsky Theatre in 1862, where it was premiered in the presence of the composer.
The history of Richard Wagner´s operas in Russia is closely linked above all with the Mariinsky Theatre, where Wagner first became known to Russians not only as a composer but also as a conductor. In the 1860´s and 1870´s, the Mariinsky Opera Company introduced the public to the composer´s early reformative works and, at the turn of the century, staged Wagner´s grandiose tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen in full.
A great opera company emerged at the Mariinsky Theatre. The talents of Osip Petrov, who first sang the roles of Susanin, Ruslan, Farlaf, the Miller and Ivan the Terrible helped Russian operatic art to blossom. He performed on stage for almost half a century alongside Anna Vorobyova-Petrova, Maria Stepanova and Lev Leonov. These singers were succeeded by a younger generation of singers including Yulia Platonova, Mikhail Sariotti, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, Ivan Melnikov, Fyodor Stravinsky, Yevgeny Mravin, Maria Slavina and Nikolai and Medea Figner. At the turn of the century, the Russian operatic stage was illuminated by the talents of the great Fyodor Chaliapin, who constantly aimed to embody artistic truth and portray strong human emotions on the stage.
Chorus
The chorus plays a hugely important role in any opera company. Outstanding opera conductor Eduard Napravnik was of fundamental significance in the birth and development of Russian choral art. It was during his almost fifty-year reign at the Mariinsky Theatre that celebrated operas by Alexander Borodin, Modest Musorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Pyotr Tchaikovsky with their vast crowd scenes were first staged at the Theatre.
The brilliance of the Russian opera chorus in St Petersburg is to a great extent connected with the outstanding talents of chorus masters Karp Kuchera, Ivan Pomazansky, Yevstasy Azeyev and Grigory Kazachenko.
With a rich history of choral performance, the Mariinsky Theatre Chorus is famed for its great professionalism today. Its repertoire ranges from Russian and Western European opera classics to works in the cantata and oratorio genres and choral works a cappella. The Mariinsky Theatre Chorus is renowned for its beautiful and powerful singing and broad scale of sound as well as its acting abilities. A regular participant at international festivals and in world premieres, today it is one of the world´s leading choral ensembles.
On the initiative of Valery Gergiev, the Academy of Young Singers was founded at the heart of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1998. Under the guidance of its astute and attentive Artistic Director Larisa Gergiev, it has become an integral part of the theatre.
Larisa Gergieva is a renowned figure in music, being a concert accompanist and tutor of world standing, General Director of the International Rimsky-Korsakov Competition, jury member of numerous prestigious international opera singers´ competitions and Artistic Director of the International Summer Academy in Mikkeli. The hopes of the experienced teachers were justified from literally the very first years of the Academy´s work.
Each year the Academy admits new young singers who come from all parts of Russia and from Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Bulgaria, Korea, Japan, Sweden, the UK, Poland and the USA. The Academy provides its students with unique training conditions – by studying with brilliant teachers they assimilate vocal technique, form a sense of style and learn foreign languages and the history of the Mariinsky Theatre and world opera. Moreover, the academicians have the wonderful opportunity to take part in master classes of such famous singers as Plácido Domingo, Renata Scotto, Elena Obraztsova, Ileana Cotrubas, Vladimir Atlantov, Tom Krause and Dennis O´Neal as well as working with renowned coaches including Maria Cleva (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) and Gustav Dzhupshobakka.
Academy soloists are actively involved in Mariinsky Theatre productions, performing not just minor roles on the hallowed stage, but major ones too. In recent years some of the Mariinsky Theatre´s most successful productions have been those engaging exclusively singers from the Academy and created under the direction of Larisa Gergieva – Rossini´s Il viaggio a Reims (winner of the Golden Mask for best musical production, best directing and best female role), Prokofiev´s The Love for Three Oranges and Mozart´s Die Zauberflöte.
It is impossible to imagine musical life in St Petersburg without concerts of vocal music by soloists of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers. Their performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, the Large and Small Halls of the Philharmonic, the Yusupov Palace, the Chaliapin Apartment Museum, the Hermitage Theatre and other venues have long since become a noble tradition. Concert playbills listing the names of the Academy´s soloists can be seen throughout Russia, the CIS and abroad. Their supreme professionalism, artistry and individual performing style have been met with delight from music-lovers in Moscow and Smolensk, Yaroslavl and Arkhangelsk, Ulyanovsk and Vladikavkaz, Tallinn and Elista: Many of the academicians´ concerts take place abroad. In recent years the map of the Academy´s soloists´ concerts has taken in dozens of towns and cities in countries including the UK, the USA, Italy, France, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Belgium, Canada and Japan. Soloists of the Academy – several-times recipients of Grand-Prix, awards and diplomas at the most prestigious international competitions – are actively involved in many festivals.
Ballet
The Mariinsky Ballet Company is closely linked with the entire history of the development of Russian choreographic art which has begun some 250 years ago. Since 1783 the company performed at the stage of the St Petersburg Bolshoy (Stone) Theatre and from 1885 onwards the ballet productions have been staged at the Mariinsky Theatre.
The leading role in the establishment and evolution of the Russian ballet belonged to foreign masters. At the end of the 18th century active in st Petersburg were Franz Gilferding, Gasparo Angiolini, Giuseppe Canziani and Charles le Picqué. But already in the 1790s the first Russian ballet teacher, Ivan Valberkh, became prominent. The main sphere of his activities was a small mime ballet company. He sought to make his productions rich in subject matter and to create recognizable lifelike images. A special place in his work was occupied by ballet divertissements which reflected his responses to the events of the War against Napoleon. The history of the St Petersburg ballet in the 19th century was associated with the activities of Charles Didelot, Jules Perrot, and Arthur Saint-Léon. In 1869 the position of the principal ballet master was entrusted to Marius Petipa who markedly raised the professional standards of the company. The peak accomplishment of this famous master became ballets staged in the period of his collaboration with the composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Glazunov – The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Raymonda. The talents of many generations of ballerinas have been revealed in them – from Yekaterina Vyazem, Marina Semenova and Galina Ulanova to younger dancers who are just fledging on the Mariinsky stage.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th century the Mariinsky Ballet Company yielded to the world of ballet such great dancers as Anna Pavlova, Mathilde Kschessinska, Tamara Karsavina, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Olga Spesivtseva, Vaslav Nijinsky, Nikolai and Sergei Legat. Many of them glorified the Russian ballet during the legendary Saisons Russes in Paris which familiarized Europe with pioneering works by Michele Fokine. The years after the revolution were a difficult period for the Mariinsky Theatre. Almost all its leading artists abandoned the company. Nevertheless during these years the classical repertory was retained. And in 1922 when at the head of the company was put Fyodor Lopukhov, a daring innovator and a brilliant connoisseur of the past, its repertory was enriched with new productions, in particular ballets dealing with contemporary life. It was during those years that Galina Ulanova, Alexei Yermolayev, Marina Semenova, Vakhtang Chibukiani, Alla Shelest and many other future celebrities of the St Petersburg ballet came to the company
The 1960s saw the staging of Spartacus and Choreographic Miniatures by Leonid Lavrovsky, the productions of The Stone Flower and The Legend of Love by Yury Grigorovich as well as The Coast of Hope and The Leningrad Symphony by Igor Belsky – the ballets which revived the traditions of symphonic dances. The success of these productions would obviously be impossible without superb performers. During the period of the 1950s – 1970s among the dancers of the company were Irina Kolpakova, Natalia Makarova, Alla Osipenko, Irina Gensler, Alla Sizova, Rydolph Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Valery Panov, Yury Solovyev and Anatoly Sapogov.
Towards the end of the 1970s in the repertory of the company appeared Le Sylfide and Naples by Auguste Bournonville, fragments of ancient choreography by Perrot, Saint-Léon and Coralli. Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart came to work for some time with the company. The Tudor Foundation gave rights for the ballets Lilac Garden and Leaves Are Fading. Jerome Robbins staged in the Mariinsky the ballet In the Night.
Orchestra
(also known as the Kirov Orchestra)
The orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre enjoys a long and distinguished history as one of the oldest musical institutions in Russia. Founded in the 18th century during the reign of Peter the Great, it was known before the revolution as the Russian Imperial Opera Orchestra. Housed in St. Petersburg´s famed Mariinsky Theatre (named after Maria, the wife of Czar Alexander II) since 1860, the Orchestra entered its true "golden age" during the second half of the 19th century under the music direction of Eduard Napravnik (1839-1916). Napravnik single-handedly ruled the Imperial Theatre for more than half a century (from 1863-1916) and under his leadership, the Mariinsky Orchestra was recognized as one of the finest in Europe. He also trained a generation of outstanding conductors, developing what came to be known as "the Russian school of conducting."
The Mariinsky Theatre was also the birthplace of numerous operas and ballets which are meanwhile regarded as masterpieces of the 19th and 20th century. World premiere performances include Glinka´s Life of a Tsar and Ruslan and Liudmila, Borodin´s Prince Igor, Musorgsky´s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, Rimsky-Korsakov´s Maid of Pskov, The Snow Maiden and Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Tchaikovsky´s The Queen of Spades, Iolanta, Swan Lake, Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty, Prokofiev´s The Duenna, as well as operas by Shostakovich and ballets by Khachaturian.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was closely associated with the Mariinsky Theatre, not only conducting the orchestra but also premiering his Fifth Symphony there, as well as the fantasy overture Hamlet and the Sixth Symphony. Sergey Rakhmaninov conducted the Orchestra on numerous occasions, including premieres of his Spring Cantata and the symphonic poem The Bells. The Orchestra also premiered the music of the young Igor Stravinsky, such as his Scherzo Fantastique and the suite from The Firebird ballet.
Throughout its history, the Mariinsky Theatre has presented works by Europe´s leading opera composers. In 1862, Verdi´s La Forza del Destino was given its world premiere at the theatre in the presence of the composer. Wagner was a favorite at the Mariinsky Theatre, where his operas were frequently performed from the 19th through the beginning of the 20th century, including the first Russian performances of the complete Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger and Parsifal. The Ring cycle was conducted by Hans Richter, who was the first to conduct the complete Ring in Bayreuth and at Covent Garden.
The Mariinsky Orchestra also gave the first Russian performances of Richard Strauss´ Elektra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier, and Berg´s Wozzeck in a production that took place two years after its world premiere in Berlin and twenty years before its premiere in Vienna.
By 1917 the orchestra´s name had changed to the Royal Imperial Theatre Orchestra, and was regarded as St. Petersburg´s leading symphony orchestra. Its repertoire - operatic and orchestral - has traditionally included not only music of Russian composers, but also of European composers. Numerous internationally famous musicians conducted the Orchestra, among them Hans von Bulow, Felix Mottl, Felix Weingartner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Otto Nikisch, Willem Mengelberg, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Erich Kleiber
The opening of the Concert Hall saw appearances by the Mariinsky Theatre´s leading soloists as well as renowned instrumentalists – violinists Vadim Repin and Maxim Vengerov and pianist Lang Lang.
In April 2007 the Concert Hall opened its doors to the general public, with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra performing the Mahler Symphonies series. The cycle ran in full as part of the XV International Stars of the White Nights Festival of Arts and marked one century since the great composer and conductor's memorial concerts in St Petersburg.
Summer 2007 saw the Concert Hall take its place as yet another of the Stars of the White Nights festival´s principal venues. In addition to Mahler´s symphonies, the Hall hosted performances of works by Stravinsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky. Towards the close of the Stars of the White Nights the Hall also hosted the Russian premiere of Rodion Shchedrin´s concert venue opera The Enchanted Wanderer. The festival presented audiences with a unique opportunity to listen to the world´s finest symphony ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra and the Bamberger Symphoniker, soloists from the Wiener Philharmoniker and outstanding instrumentalists, conductors and opera singers, among them violinists Vadim Repin and Nikolaj Znaider, pianist Alexander Toradze, conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductors Paavo Järvi and Jonathan Nott, soprano Anna Netrebko, mezzo-sopranos Larisa Diadkova and Waltraud Meier, baritones Vasily Gerello and Thomas Hampson and bass René Pape.
The building on Pisareva Street, home to the Concert Hall, has historic ties to the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1900 Viktor Schröter´s design for the Set Shop and Hall of the Imperial Theatres was constructed on the site, becoming the property of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1917. For over one hundred years the Hall produced unique sets for numerous productions, many of them still in the Theatre´s repertoire today. There was a fire in the building of the Set Workshops in September 2003, destroying almost all the costumes and sets stored there and damaging the site so badly that it seemed the building was lost. However, maestro Gergiev took the decision to build the new Concert Hall on the site of the workshops, fully retaining the historic façade which had miraculously escaped the fire. The opposite side of the building, which faces onto Decembrists´ Street, has a new façade that is a unique embodiment of 21st century architecture. Xavier Fabre who designed the new Concert Hall believes that the innovative architecture will prove an organic blend of "this century and the past one".
The opening of the Concert Hall proved yet another memorable date in the history of Russian theatre. It is the only top-class theatre and concert venue in Russia, built in accordance with the latest achievements in construction and intended from the start for concert programmes. In terms of technology and acoustics, the work of Yasuhisa Toyota, the new hall ranks alongside the world´s finest concert venues, such as the concert halls in Lucerne, Sapporo and Birmingham, Leipzig´s Gewandhaus and the Disney Hall in Los Angeles. In the new hall, the stage can be transformed for the desired effect depending on the programme for the evening. By being able to control separate sections of the stage, it is possible to vary the positions of orchestral groups or to form an orchestra pit. The hall can also be used for semi-staged productions of operas and for ballets.
The new Concert Hall would not have been possible today without the immense support from the many private individuals and companies who believed in this project and have committed themselves to bringing it to life.
Information
1, Teatralnaya Square
St Petersburg, 190000
Phone: tel. +7 812 326 4141
Fax: tel. +7 812 314 1744
e-mail: post@mariinsky.ru
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