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 lecture will discuss the artistic significance of this epoch-making 'anti-opera', its debt to Italian Futurism, and its position within the Russian modernist movement.
Speaker: Rosamund Bartlett is currently Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Music Department at King’s College London. She is the author and translator of many books, the most recent being a biography, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, which is published in the US in November 2011. Her other titles include Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, Wagner and Russia, and her co-edited volume Victory over The Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera, also published in November 2011. She is now writing a cultural history of opera in Russia and translating Anna Karenina for Oxford World's Classics. She is the founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation set up to preserve the Chekhov House-Museum in Yalta.