Colloquium by Rosamund Bartlett, Kings College: The Futurist Opera Victory over the Sun and the Russian Avant-Garde
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Speaker(s): Rosamund Bartlett, Kings College
In 1913, the year in which the Romanovs celebrated their tercentenary, the premieres of two revolutionary artistic events brought Russian artists to the forefront of the European avant-garde. With its nonsensical 'trans-sense' libretto by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, micro-tonal music by Matiushin, and pioneering abstract sets and costumes by Malevich, Victory over the Sun was even more radical than Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and also shocked its audiences. This paper will discuss the artistic significance of this epoch-making 'anti-opera', its debt to Italian Futurism, and its position within the Russian modernist movement.
ROSAMUND BARTLETT is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Music Department at Kings College London, and will take up a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute in 2012. Her most recent book is Tolstoy: A Russian Life, published in the US in November 2011. Her other titles include Wagner and Russia, Shostakovich in Context, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life and the co-edited volume on Victory over The Sun, which includes her annotated translation of the libretto. She is now writing a cultural history of opera in Russia.