The “Greek Project” of Catherine the Great and Giuseppe Sarti

Abstract

The musical spectacle The Early Reign of Oleg—written by Empress Catherine II, with music by Giuseppe Sarti, Vassily Pashkevitch, and Carlo Canobbio—was performed in 1790 in St. Petersburg. Glorifying Russia's past and extolling its military power, the production foretold Catherine's unrealized plan of restoring the Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire through the inclusion of an excerpt from Euripides's Alcestis as a closing Greek Scene (Act V, scene 4). A multifaceted analysis of Sarti's music for the scene addresses such devices as melodrama, monodic texture, and the use of particular tonal structures, poetic meters, and melodic patterns appropriate for Attic paeans. Oleg's Greek Scene comprises Sarti's ingenious response to the pivotal antica e moderna debate, as well as to the political, intellectual, and cultural climate of late-eighteenth-century Russia.

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