The Ecstasy of Sister Beatrice: Music Heard and Unheard with Meyerhold, Komissarzhevskaia, Liadov, and the Censors

• In Event: Staging Religion Across the Twentieth Century: Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish Scenes

Abstract

Critics claimed that Vsevelod Meyerhold and Vera Komissarzhevskaia’s 1906 production, Sister Beatrice, transformed the theater into a church. They praised the “unheard” music and “implicitness” of expression. This presentation recovers the play’s heard music by Anatoly Liadov, as well as the censorship documents that banned explicit religious expression on stage, analyzing the production as an intersection between Symbolist aesthetics and Orthodox thought.

Author

• David Thomas Salkowski, U of North Florida