Decentralising via Russia: Glinka’sA Life for the Tsarin Nice, 1890

Abstract

Abstract On 30 January 1890, the audience at the Théâtre Municipal in Nice witnessed something extraordinary. Midway through the first public performance of a Russian opera in France, Glinka’sA Life for the Tsar, the chorus and orchestra broke into a rendition of the Russian national anthem, followed by the ‘Marseillaise’. Both anthems were then repeated, with the audience calling out ‘Vive la Russie!’, ‘Vive la France!’ With France and Russia on the verge of a historic alliance, the evening was proclaimed a political and an artistic triumph. This unusual event, I suggest, can be explained by considering the context of operatic decentralisation in France, in conjunction with the arrival of a new director at the Théâtre, Raoul Gunsbourg. As a result of local and personal imperatives, the performance came to resonate nationally, withA Lifeserving as an unlikely emblem of modernity, while also bringing one peripheral French region strongly into Paris’s purview.

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