Mavra [Kirchmeyer 39, White 50], 1924 - 1929

File — Box: 8, Folder: 8

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Set of engraved proof sheets. Piano-vocal score. Berlin: Russischer Musikverlag G.m.b.H. Édition Russe de Musique [PN R.M.V. 411], 1924.

Folio. Unbound. With wrapper with a design in colour by Ivan Bilibin dated 1909 to upper.

3-89 pp. printed on rectos only on fine quality heavy paper. With text in Russian and French with English translation by Robert Burness added in manuscript.

Note to recto of first blank leaf in blue, violet, and lead pencil, including translator's address in London, publisher/engraver's notes dated September 22, [19]24, and stamp "Manuskript R.M.V." With occasional corrections relating to text in pencil in an unknown hand.

In shipping wrapper with large rectangular J. & W. Chester printed label with typed address to Stravinsky at "167, Boulevard Carnot, Nice, France" with small circular postmark dated "London 25. Jan [19]29" to upper and annotations in Stravinsky's hand in red crayon "Epreuves Mavra piano et chant" to lower.

Dates

1924 - 1929

Language of Materials

From the Collection: The materials are written in English, Russian, French, and Italian.

Conditions Governing Access

This material is open for research.

Stored onsite at the Woodson Research Center.

Biographical / Historical

An opéra bouffe in one act to a libretto by Boris Kochno after Aleksandr Pushkin's narrative poem Domik v Kolomne (‘The Little House at Colomna’, 1830), Mavra, composed in 1921-22, "and regarded from the first by Stravinsky as one of his best works," was first performed in Paris in 1922.

"... it was in Biarritz with his family that [Stravinsky] chiefly found the peace and security he always needed for his work. The first major new project, probably dreamt up in discussion with Diaghilev and his new secretary, a 17-year-old Russian poet by the name of Boris Kokhno, was for a short opera called Mavra, based on an ironic verse story by Pushkin about a girl in 1830s St Petersburg who tricks her mother into employing a handsome young hussar in drag as the family cook. Stravinsky had been in Spain with Diaghilev at Easter 1921, and in London with him in June, where he heard Eugene Goossens conduct The Rite of Spring brilliantly and Serge Koussevitzky conduct the world première of the Symphonies d'instruments à vent atrociously (both performances in the Queen's Hall). But Mavra was consciously designed as a refutation of this old neo-nationalist Russian styleBut Mavra was consciously designed as a refutation of [the] old neo-nationalist Russian style." Stephen Walsh in Grove Music Online.