Emily Frey

Visiting Scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

September - December 2024

 

 

HURI Research Project

Acting Ukrainian: The Case of Osip Petrov

“[The bass] Osip Petrov is one of the founders of the Russian operatic tradition,” proclaimed Vladimir Stasov at the singer’s fifty-year jubilee in 1876. Hyperbole is to be expected on such occasions, especially coming from so practiced a propagandist as Stasov. Yet there is reason to take this statement seriously. Osip Petrov’s stage career spanned an improbable 52 years, and he created major bass roles in nearly every Russian opera between A Life for the Tsar and Boris Godunov. For nineteenth-century audiences, Russian opera must have sounded like Osip Petrov, regardless of who wrote the notes. The nineteenth century’s “great Russian bass” – the progenitor of a lineage that came to include Fyodor Chaliapin, Boris Christoff, and many others – was not ethnically Russian. Born Iosyp Opanasovych in Yelysavethrad, Petrov was a Ukrainian merchant’s son who began his career in the provincial theaters of Poltava, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv. The repertoire on which he cut his theatrical teeth crossed genres and languages; he performed both singing and speaking roles, in both Russian and Ukrainian. In his journeyman years on Ukrainian stages, performing such fare as Ivan Kotliarevsky’s musical play Natalka - Poltavka, Petrov distinguished himself as what we might call a character actor. He was known, above all, for his versatility, his talent for blending comedy with pathos, his “true-to-life” depiction of Ukrainian social types, and his precise declamation. Mutatis mutandis, these features would become leitmotifs of Osip Petrov’s later reception, after his transition from Ukrainian actor to Russian singer. They are also key ingredients in our understanding of Russian musical realism writ large. What exactly was the relationship between Ukrainian provincial theatre and Russian musical realism, as embodied in the operatic performances of Osip Petrov? This question may seem obtuse, hanging as it does on two entities that scarcely figure in traditional narratives about opera in the Russian Empire: Ukraine on the one hand and performers on the other. This project explores the connection between these two forgotten elements, which the author suspects do matter, perhaps profoundly.

Biography

Dr. Emily Frey is Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. Originally from rural New Jersey (which does, in fact, exist), Emily received her B.A. in Russian literature and music from Amherst College. She completed her M.Phil. in musicology at Cambridge University and her Ph.D. in music history and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research on opera and psychological prose in 1870s Russia was awarded an Alvin H. Johnson/AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship. Emily's publications include articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, Rimsky-Korsakov and His World, Rachmaninoff and His World, and The Cambridge History of Music Criticism. She is currently finishing her first book, Opera and Realism in the Russian Empire. An advocate of interdisciplinary teaching and research, Emily has held faculty positions in three different departments (music, Russian, and comparative literature) and taught courses on Russian culture, literature and music, European Romanticism, and all eras of music history. While a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) at Berkeley, her teaching was honored with the music department's Outstanding GSI Award. In 2011, she was one of 10 graduate students at UC Berkeley to win the university-wide Teaching Effectiveness Award, which honors creative solutions to pedagogical problems. In October/November 2018, Emily was a multi-day champion on the television game show Jeopardy!.