Acting Ukrainian: The Case of Osip Petrov

• In Event: The Practice of Musical Biography in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Former Eastern Bloc

Abstract

Osip Petrov (1805-78) was original “great Russian bass”: the progenitor of a lineage that came to include Fyodor Chaliapin, Boris Christoff, and many others. In his improbable 52-year stage career, Petrov created major bass roles in nearly every Russian opera between A Life for the Tsar and Boris Godunov. Yet Petrov, the Mariinskii’s biggest nineteenth-century star, was a Ukrainian merchant’s son with little formal training in music. Born in Yelysavethrad, Osip Petrov began his career in the provincial theaters of Poltava, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv, where he performed singing and speaking roles in both Russian and Ukrainian. Petrov’s biographers have generally marshaled his Yelysavethrad origins to support the image of a simple man of the folk who hailed from a provincial backwater; from there, Ukraine tends to evanesce from Petrov’s biography, as if becoming a great Russian bass meant leaving “little Russia” behind. My paper addresses this formative but under-considered period of Osip Petrov’s biography, exploring his background and training as a repertory player in Ukrainian provincial theatres. I show that many of the features for which Petrov was known in his journeyman years on Ukrainian stages would become leitmotifs of his later reception, after his transition from Ukrainian actor to Russian singer. Some of Petrov’s specialties (for example, his precise declamation, his talent for blending comedy with pathos, and his “true-to-life” depiction of social types) would come to be identified as hallmarks of a “Russian” national style of performance, as ways of distinguishing Russian operatic performances from the Italian bel canto tradition. Yet Osip Petrov’s proto-“Russian” performing style was developed and honed in the provincial theatres of colonial Ukraine – where Russian drama, not Italian opera, was the dominant art form to be reckoned with.

Author

• Emily Frey, Brandeis U