Reflections on: Vincenzina Ottomano, “Quando l’opera russa diventò europea: Musica e scambi culturali tra Ottocento e Novecento” (Milano: Casa Ricordi, 2024)

Научный вестник Московской консерватории. 2026. Vol. 17. No. 2. P. 352–357.

Golovlev A.

Vincenzina C. Ottomano’s Quando l’opera russa diventò europea is an ambitious and carefully argued study of the reception of Russian opera in Italy and France from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century. The book examines how Russian operatic works were reframed by critics, impresarios, patrons, and institutions and transformed into cultural objects serving different local, political, and aesthetic agendas.

Focusing on Glinka, Cui, Tchaikovsky, and Mussorgsky, Ottomano shows that Russian opera was not simply imported into Western Europe but actively reinterpreted within specific theatrical, diplomatic, and social contexts. The monograph is especially valuable for its transnational perspective, combining musicology with cultural transfer studies, reception history, and the political history of listening. Its strongest contribution lies in demonstrating that Western audiences did not merely hear Russian opera: they learned how to hear it as foreign, modern, and at times troubling.

The book makes an important contribution to the study of Russian music, operatic reception, and French and Italian cultural history, and will be of interest to scholars of music history, transnational exchange, and cultural identity.

Keywords: история музыки, история Италии, транснациональная история, история Франции, french history, cultural transfer, культурный трансфер, transnational history, Russian music, русская музыка, music history, Russian Opera, Italian history, Русская опера