Description
Public lecture given while in residence as a Fung Global Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional StudiesAbstract:
In her talk, Olga Panteleeva analyzes the politics of classical music in contemporary Russia through the lens of deteriorating relations between Russia and the “West.” As a case study she examines public response to the controversial production of Chaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Theater (2006). Replacing a classic production from 1944, the new version was an example of Regieoper – a revisionist approach to operatic staging universally associated in Russia with Western European music culture. Discussing the production at the major Russian online forum for classical music, Forumklassika.ru, some operagoers welcomed it as a progressive approach to a canonic work, while others resented it for defiling national heritage, viewing it as a symptom of the political situation in Russia in general. The talk identifies a cluster of ideas that coalesce into a post-Soviet brand of anti-Western resentment: the loss of identity after the fall of the Soviet Union; painful memories of the financial crisis of the 1990s, a post-1991 influx of Western mass culture that is viewed as a threat to national traditions of high art; the erosion of “kul’turnost’” (culturedness), a quality cultivated in Soviet citizens since the mid-1930s; and the tyranny of incompetent cultural elites. Analyzing the opera’s reception as an iteration of the centuries-old debate about Russia’s role vis-à-vis European culture, Dr. Panteleeva argues that the grassroots distrust of Western culture, grounded in the trauma of the 1990s and cast in moral and political terms, was evident already in 2006 – years before the new wave of centralized anti-Western rhetoric and rapidly deteriorating political relations.
| Period | 12 Apr 2018 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Princeton University, United States |
| Degree of Recognition | International |