Giuseppe Sarti and the topos of the tragic in Russian music

Abstract

Praising Glinka’s A Life for the Tzar as an inauguration of Russian music, Vladimir Odoevskii emphasized that its composer succeeded in elevating the figure of a simple peasant to the realm of tragedy. Odoevskii’s claim thus embodied the plea for the manifestation of tragedy based on a nationally-driven socially and culturally significant idea, conveyed through a sublime mood. Adopting this domain was indeed a long journey for music in Russia. The present essay traces forerunners and emerging elements of tragedy and its musical implementation back to the last decade of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on Giuseppe Sarti’s (1729-1802) impact on the adoption of the tragic and the sublime in Russian music. A survey of Sarti’s stage works for the 1780-90s reveals his preferred pattern of conveying a sublime atmosphere of classicistic tragedy through unmeasured text and declamation - whether notated or not - located in the cathartic points of the drama, in conjunction with unison chorus and illustrative elements in the orchestra. Sarti’s contribution to the marriage of European neo-classicism with local trends and the domestication of tragedy in Russian music is demonstrated through a survey of declamation in recitatives and melodrama styles in works by Evstignei Fomin, Stepan Davydov, Stepan Degtiarev, and Osip Kozlovskii.