Here is my Sandbox (Meladina 14:23, 7 May 2006 (UTC))


Opera was brought to Russia in the 1730s by the Italian operatic troupes and soon it became an important part of entertainment for the Russian Imperial Court and aristocracy. Many foreign composers such as Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Sarti, Domenico Cimarosa, etc. were invited to Russia to compose new operas mostly in Italian language. Simultaneously some domestic musicians like Maksym Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky were sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in Russian was Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer Francesco Araja (1755). The development of Russian-language opera was supported by the Russian composers like Vasily Pashkevich, Yevstigney Fomin and Alexey Verstovsky.

However a real birth of Russian opera was connected with Mikhail Glinka and his two great operas A Life for the Tsar, (1836) and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842). After him in the 19th century in Russia there were written such operatic masterpieces as Rusalka and The Stone Guest by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky, Prince Igor by Alezander Borodin, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, The Snow Maiden and Sadko by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and so on. These developments mirrored the growth of Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, in part as a function of the more general Slavophilism movement.

In the 20th century genre of opera was developed by many Russian composers including Sergei Rachmaninov (The Miserly Knight, and Franchesca da Rimini), Igor Stravinsky (Le rossignol, Mavra, Oedipus rex, and The Rake's Progress), Sergei Prokofiev (The Gambler, The Love for Three Oranges, The Fiery Angel, Betrothal in a Monastery, and War and Peace), Dmitri Shostakovich (The Nose, and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), Edison Denisov L'écume des jours, Alfred Schnittke (Life With an Idiot, and Historia von D. Johann Fausten) and so on.


Notable Russian Opera Composers

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This is a list of notable opera composers.


Russian Opera

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Maksym Berezovsky Ukrainian-Russian (1745-1777):

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887):

Dmitri Bortnyansky Ukrainian-Russian (1751-1825):

César Cui (1835-1918):

César Cui, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin:

Alexander Dargomyzhsky (1813-1869):

Edison Denisov (1929-1996):

Elena Firsova (b.1950):

Evstigney Ipatovich Fomin (1761 - 1800)

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857):

Nikolai Karetnikov (1930-1994):

Alexander Knayfel (b.1943):

Nikolai Korndorf (1947-2001):

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881):

Vasily Pashkevich (1742-1797):

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953):

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943):

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908):

Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894):

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998):

Alexander Serov (1820-1871):

Judith

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975):

Dmitri Smirnov (b.1948):

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):

Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915):

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893):

Alexey Verstovsky (1799-1862):

Other republics:

Georgia

Zakharia Paliashvili (Georgia)(1871-1933):