Critical response to Tchaikovsky's Casse-Noisette ( The Nutcracker ), the ballet-féerie premiered in December 1892 in St. Petersburg, has historically been mixed. An aesthetic mongrel, the original production joined the highbrow expectations of Romantic ballet with the popular conventions of the féerie and challenged its first audience just as much as its immediate predecessor, The Sleeping Beauty . To this day, writers object to the original libretto's uneven distribution of pantomime and dance and its lack of a coherent story, of continuous development, and of a satisfying conclusion. This article offers an alternative reading that reconstructs the dramatic disruptions and turnabouts and relates them to the first production's aesthetics and politics. The ballet's composer and choreographers, using music, action, and dance, repeatedly placed the audience in a position of wonder and awe similar to that of the young heroine Clara. This aesthetic captured Alexander III's particular “scenario of power” (Richard Wortman) in late-nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia, projecting imperial court culture and sovereign power onto a fantastic canvas.

This article is based on the key-note lecture given at the conference “Non-Nationalist” Russian Operas, Leeds, U.K., on 17 November 2010. It engages with the conference's distinction between the “nationalist” and “non-nationalist” and proposes six potential situations for when an opera might be described as “Russian”: by composer's intention, by reception, by interpretation, by association, by blood or culture, and by emanating from the nationalist school. Given that these six categories of Russianness (some of them mystificatory) form a network of conflicting claims upon any opera, there is no straightforward method for assigning operas to Russian or non-Russian categories. Therefore an alternative approach is proposed: to revive the older concept of “local color,” which figured prominently in nineteenth-century Russian discourse on opera, and to use this as a lens through which almost any nineteenth-century Russian opera can instructively be viewed. After examining how the concept was understood by leading Russian critics, Serov and Cui, the author offers a selection of her own examples to elucidate the use of “Russian” local color. It is emphasized that there are certain limits beyond which this color cannot be applied: characters of noble birth, even when Russian, are rarely portrayed in Russian colors; scenes that take place outside Russia usually have their own, appropriate color, e.g., “Polish” or “Oriental”; most importantly, themes that are considered universal, such as love or death, are usually exempt from Russian coloring. Examples from the late operas of Rimsky-Korsakov demonstrate his conscious and sometimes obsessive efforts in creating appropriate colors, Russian and otherwise. This approach allows us to set aside preconceived notions of which composers were truly national, especially when we generalize that local color denotes any distinguishing device designed to evoke a specific time and place, as well as the social identity of a character. Thus Tchaikovsky's operas, often criticized for their lack of “Russianness,” display a subtle understanding of appropriate coloring: Eugene Onegin , for example, uses an idiom based on the parlor song of the Russian gentry, while The Queen of Spades takes up eighteenth-century idioms—in both cases lending the drama an appropriate color. The article concludes that local color, a much-used device in nineteenth-century opera across Europe, was an almost obligatory requirement for Russian opera composers who adopted an aesthetic of the characteristic, along the lines proposed by Victor Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell . The concept proves to be a valuable critical tool that allows us to deal with nineteenth-century Russian opera without becoming ensnared in essentializing distinctions between “nationalist” and “non-nationalist.” At the same time, it allows us to put Russian color in perspective, as one color among many cultivated by opera composers.

This article considers a number of Tchaikovsky's songs——specifically those with texts by Apukhtin, Romanov, Heine, Goethe, and Tchaikovsky himself——to explore how silence constitutes a powerful yet elusive form of expression. It argues that Tchaikovsky's songs, an underappreciated and underexplored aspect of his output (at least in the West), are characterized by a degree of literary and musical sophistication seldom attributed to the composer. Their self-consciousness is held to be the product of a combination of three main social and aesthetic forces characteristic of Russian culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing first on the work of Bakhtin, the article argues that the nature of Tchaikovsky's songs as lyric forms in an age dominated by the realist novel invests them with a creative tension between the need to conceal (an imperative inherited from the lyric poetry of the 1820s and 1830s) and the need to reveal (a feature of the novel's tendency to intimacy and confession). Then, turning to the work of Foucault, it traces how a coherent discourse of homosexual identity (as opposed to an otherwise unrelated series of individual homosexual acts) arose in the later nineteenth century, forcing queer artists to address (whether consciously or otherwise) the question of how best to relate this identity to their creativity. Finally, it looks at the evolving status of the artist in late Imperial Russia and suggests that an uneasy relationship between revealing and concealing was imposed upon personalities in the public eye by an audience that wished to feel close to the artist, yet also required discretion and the avoidance of scandal. At the heart of the article lies a study of silence as a particularly expressive form of apparent non-expression, dealing with frequent instances in Tchaikovsky's songs of silence as a poetic trope, as well as with equivocation on matters of gender and identity in lyric forms as indicative of a potentially queer sensibility. Also, the article refuses to reimpose a categorically and reductively homosexual reading, posited on some presumed opposed heterosexual norm. Rather, it argues that Tchaikovsky was able to discern the peculiar appeal of lyric forms as referentially incomplete yet aesthetically self-sufficient fragments, and that he approached such lyrics in a way that emphasized qualities of ambiguity, allusion, and the uncanny. Although drawing extensively on literary models, the article also considers how music is paradoxically well placed to enact poetic silence. The relationship between words and music, and between composition, performance, and reception, is a further instance of how song became an apt medium in which the thoughtful composer could explore issues of personal and creative identity in an age of profound artistic and social transformation.