Alexander Nikolayevich Serov

  • Born: St. Petersburg, Russia, 23 January [O.S. 11 January] 1820
  • Died: St. Petersburg, Russia, 1 February [O.S. 20 January] 1871
Valentin Serov, portrait, between 1888 and 1889.

For a time, Alexander Serov (1820–71) was the most popular opera composer in Russia. A civil servant and self-taught musician, he was a noted critic – he wrote some of the earliest appreciations in Russia of Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Spontini – and an admirer (a self-styled ‘apostle’) of Wagner. He composed three operas: Judith, Rogneda (1865), both an enormous successes, and The Power of the Fiend (1871). Tchaikovsky admired the first, but deemed the two others “mediocre, if not downright feeble”1.

Richard Taruskin2 considers Judith the first Russian music drama that consciously sought to do what Glinka did instinctively, while Martin Cooper3 suggests that Serov’s “importance in Russian musical history was perhaps that of a lesser Russian Meyerbeer”: his grand operas bridged the bel canto era of Glinka and more innovative composers like Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. “Serov’s thorough professionalism was a new and wholesome element in Russian music, although it was not wedded to great creative powers”. On the other hand, Rosa Newmarch4 contends that Serov left no lasting traces on Russian opera.

Operas

  1. Judith [Юдифь] (1863) **
  2. Rogneda [Рогнеда] (1865)
  3. The Power of the Fiend [Вражья сила] (1871)