Abstract
Rachmaninoff's student opera Aleko earned a glittering reception at its premiere in 1893, when the work was hailed for its harmonic novelties. Later commentators, however, have been struck more often by the ways in which Aleko looks backward rather than forward – borrowing, sometimes explicitly, from Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Borodin. This chapter considers Aleko in relation to that musical past, exploring the ways in which Rachmaninoff's youthful opera deals with the methods and conventions of operatic realism, which reigned in Russia from the 1860s through the 1880s. The relationship between Aleko and Russian realism is not entirely uncritical: while the opera clearly references and synthesizes realist models, it also undermines them in ways that would resonate throughout Rachmaninoff's subsequent career as a vocal composer. Then, complicating the idea of Rachmaninoff as an artist out of touch with his times, this chapter examines the ways in which Rachmaninoff's attempts to move beyond realism mapped on to the efforts of two Muscovite performers with whom he had close personal and creative ties: the singer Fyodor Chaliapin and the theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky.