Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2002 - 17

RUSSIAN THEATRE DESIGN
St. Petersburg
theatres
glittered
throughout
the late
eighteenth and
nineteenth
centuries with the
artistic offerings
of great
composers,
singers,
dancers and
authors.

S P R I N G

2 0 0 2

TD & T

Perhaps no Russian city better encapsulates
the scope of a century of historical and cultural
changes than St. Petersburg, renamed three times
in less than one hundred years. Founded in
1703, Peter I made this Baltic port Russia's
window to the West and the seat of Empire. He
gave it the Dutch name of his patron saint, but
in 1914, Russia's opposition to Germany in
World War I forced Peter's descendent, Nikolai
II, to Russify St. Petersburg to Petrograd. It was
a move calculated to appease critics of the Tsar
and his German-born wife, Aleksandra. Ironically the exchange also had the effect of shifting emphasis from a city named for a saint to
one which bore the name of its founder, thus
underlining secular, imperial associations
which would precipitate yet another change
ten years later. Vladimir Ilich Lenin died on 26
January 1924. Five days later, Grigory Zinoviev,
one of the architects of the Bolshevik victory
and Communist Party Chief in Petrograd renamed the city Leningrad. This time the change
was made to revive the city's place, and of
course that of its Party Chief, in the Soviet national consciousness. The former seat of imperial power had not recovered from the
economic shock of the "temporary" relocation
of the Soviet capital to Moscow by Lenin in
1918 and the travails of the civil war that followed. The name change was an attempt to directly integrate the former imperial capital into
Soviet culture and thereby re-invigorate the
industry and commerce needed to supply activities for its starving workforce. The name remained in place for sixty-seven years including
the nine-hundred-day resistance to the Nazis
(1941-1944) when over a million perished.
In October 1991, responding yet again to social
upheaval, the city's name was officially changed
back to St. Petersburg. This time the city's name
resounded internationally as a renewal of the
city's European affiliations and resulted in a revival of interest in St. Petersburg and its links to
Russian history and culture.
Throughout the various changes in the
social and political climate, an unbroken line
of St. Petersburg artists managed to define,
catalogue and create what writer Solomon
Volkov called the "Petersburg mythos." The
spectacles performed in St. Petersburg over
the last one hundred years embody this
mythos, as well as the ongoing process that engendered it. Any attempt to divide or separate
artistic works based on an external organizing
principle is difficult and frequently imprecise.
But strict adherence to chronological patterns
sometimes ignores the thematic similarities

shared by works separated by years. Therefore
the plan for this article attempts to retain chronological links whenever possible, but breaks
the century into five "acts" which emphasize
the connections among designers and their
theatre colleagues and the works produced by
them. The act titles, The Imperial Theatre, The
World of Art, Symbolism and Other Experiments in Form, Socialist Realism and the
"Flower" of the Soviet Empire, and Denouement-Unravelling and Redefinition, reflect a
continuum tracing roughly one hundred years
of cultural development in St. Petersburg from
both historical and aesthetic contexts.

Act I:

The Imperial Theatre
St. Petersburg theatres glittered throughout the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with
the artistic offerings of great composers, singers, dancers and authors. European influences
and trends found their way onto stages but the
tastes of the Tsars and Tsarinas prevailed; without their support a work could not survive.
Aleksandr II was a relatively tolerant aesthetic
arbiter. However, both he and his successor,
Aleksandr III, particularly appreciated works
that celebrated native themes. The costumes
from an 1886 production of the opera, Ruslan
and Liudmila (fig. 5), illustrate the talent of
Evgeny Ponomarev (1852-1906) and the skill
of those who executed his costume designs.
A shift away from indigenous subject matter was made in the initial production of Piotr
Tchaikovsky's (1840-1893) Sleeping Beauty,
performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1890
with choreography by Marius Petipa (1822-
1910). For fifty years, Petipa made an indelible
mark at the Imperial theatres by composing
the choreography for fifty-four new works, seventeen reconstructions of older works, as well
as the dances for thirty-five operas. Petipa's influence on Russian ballet was monumental,
but the production of Sleeping Beauty represented a significant step forward. Staging a
production to this point consisted of hiring a
composer, designer and choreographer who
frequently worked independently of one another. The results of such non-integrated efforts were often less than memorable.
However, the performance of this ballet profoundly affected St. Petersburg artists and aesthetes because in it they sensed a unification of
story, music and presentation.
Matvei Shishkov's set rendering (fig. 6)
for the esplanade of Florestan's palace serves

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2002