Department Member, Music
Visiting Lecturer
Thesis Title: A Critical Re-Evaluation of Sergey Taneyev's 'Oresteia' (1894)
Dr. Stephen Muir
Prof. Clive Brown
About
My research interests cover a wide range of Russian and Soviet music, but are more specifically targeted at the lives and works of lesser-known composers. I am interested in such composers as Vasily Kalinnikov (1866-1900), Sergey Taneyev (1856-1915), César Cui (1835-1918), Vsevolod Zaderatsky (1891-1953), Vissarion Shebalin (1902-1963), and many others, whose names appear rarely or not at all in both Western and Russian musicology. In addition to the above, I plan to research the operas of Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894), Anton Arensky (1861-1906), and Sergey Rachmaninov (1873-1943), and to contribute to further research on the critical reception of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in Russia. I also research the topic of Greek tragedies as sources for modern operas.
My PhD dissertation is dedicated to an opera written by one of the most prominent and important Russian composers of the nineteenth century that has received very little scholarly attention from Russian or Western academics. It is an attempt to present the full history of Oresteia’s genesis, its musical language, a comparison of its libretto to the original text of the tragedy, its performances, and its critical reception. Through my examination of Taneyev’s interest in Wagner, I provide a wider view of Wagner reception in Russia. The case study of Oresteia points to larger aspects of the Russian musical scene at the end of the nineteenth century, such as music criticism, the workings of the Imperial Theatres, and their treatment of Russian composers. My thesis is the first substantial work on Taneyev’s opera, following a 1915 study by a Russian musicologist Boris Asafyev (1884-1949), and I present a large number of previously unpublished archival sources.
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