Russian Women Composers from the Court of Catherine the Great: The Romances of Princess Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina (1768-1831)

RUSSIAN WOMEN CLASSICAL COMPOSERS IN THE 18TH CENTURYIN RUSSIA, THE TEREM TRADITION of secluding royal women limited their educational and cultural activities until Peter I's modernizing and Westernizing rule (1682-1725). Brandishing their newly won literacy, Russian women writers and poets, followed closely by Russian women composers, set pen to paper, starting in the mid-1700s. The first compositions by Russian women composers to join the classical tradition appear to have been circulated privately, in aristocratic salon albums. The modern canon accustoms us to accord significance to musical works relative to their prominence in public performances and, sometimes, to the number of published copies in circulation. Neither of these gauges are meaningful in this case: the influence of women's salon albums in Europe during the last quarter of the 18 th century should not be underestimated because they were not widely distributed or performed only in selective company. This is true for Russia as well. In fact, contemporary intellectual P. L. Iakovlev credited women's albums with improving the general tenor of Russian writing and expression in general.1These female aristocrats followed a new model of empowered and extremely cultured womanhood, modeled by four women who ruled the Russian empire for more than two-thirds of the 18th century: Catherine I, Anna, Elisabeth, and Catherine II. The reworking of absolute power in the image of the feminine sublime propelled Russian women's literary and artistic activity into the public sphere in the final quarter of the century.2 The stage was set for composers such as Princess Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina to forge the beginning of a women's tradition of publicly published songs in collections and cultural journals.PRINCESS NATALIA IVANOVNA KURAKINA (1768-1831)Princess Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina3 (nee Golovina) was probably the most highly respected woman composer of her day in St. Petersburg. She was extremely prolific: forty-five songs attributed to her are found in her manuscript album.4 Of all the Russian composers who produced work before 1800, male or female, only Osip Antonovich Kozlovskij (1757-1831) is known to have composed more songs. Kurakina's songs were so popular that Breitkopf (Petersburg) published a collection of eight of her French romances in 1795.5 As further testament to her popularity in the highest circles, several of her songs are also found in the archives that preserve the musical library of the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Alekseyevna (the future Empress of Russia, as wife to Paul I). Her songs also were taken up in popular serial publications: Gerstenberg and Dittmar published three of her pieces in issues of Hanglaise's journal,6 and another appears in Dalmar's multivolume Journal de romances choisies.7Sources of information about Kurakina include contemporary accounts of her person, her memoirs, her musical and salon albums (the liber amicorum where guests would inscribe their own poems and bons mots), and a handful of modern Russian scholarly articles.8 Kurakina was born into a well established noble family in St. Petersburg during the reign of Catherine the Great. Her natural gifts in music led her parents to provide an excellent musical education during her childhood that enhanced her talents, as well as her marriage prospects.9 Consequently, Kurakina became a well known harpist, singer, and composer of songs among the St. Petersburg aristocratic salons during the years before her marriage in 1783, at the tender age of fourteen. She gave regular salon performances of her own songs, accompanying herself on the harp. Poet Ivan Dmitriev, of the Russian sentimentalist school, was so enthralled by her expressive contralto, that he wrote a poem in her liber amicorum, entitled "To the album of Princess N. I. Kurakina":10What is our song, before Erato's peer?She finds the path to our hearts with voice!I lay my lyre at Kurakina's feet,And will attend on her in speechless awe. …