why did the famous Italian singer emigrate to Russia

He was an important opera celebrity, performed in the main theaters of Europe, after finishing his career, settled in Russia, was a favorite of the nobility here, was mentioned in a poem by Pushkin – and was completely forgotten. Sergey Khodnev collected bit by bit the biography of the Italian emigrant Pietro Muschietti who lived in Moscow.

In the humorous joint work by Pushkin and Vyazemsky “We must remember, we must certainly remember…” there is one intriguing character: “We must remember (especially you) Arndt, // Yes, the Englishman Warnta // The famous mechanic Mocduano, // Moschetti, the Moscow soprano / / And all those who get drunk early.” God knows who Warnt and Mocduano are, the commentators don’t seem to have gotten to them, the line about Moschetti is another matter, the eye catches it. Soprano, but a male person: a castrato, or what? But why Moscow? The mention is cursory, naturally, not serious (and therefore “soprano” rhymes with “get drunk early”), and still there is a feeling that the reference is to a very specific and well-known figure, and not conventional, like those appearing just below “Mrs. Chulkov, Noskov , Bashmakov, Sapozhkov.” And indeed.

In the alphabetical index of the corresponding volume of Pushkin’s “Stalinist” PSS it is reported that “Moschetti, Moscow soprano” (soprano, comrades! soprano!) of the corresponding poem is “Muschetti, tenor”. Dot.

Around the same time, Alexander Glumov’s book “The Musical World of Pushkin” was published (“the entire fullness of the melodiousness of the Russian song was captured and developed by Pushkin in his most musical verse”, etc. – that’s roughly what the musical world is like there), and here in it on a different occasion it is fleetingly reported: yes, there was such a Muschietti. Famous vocal teacher, castrato. Further: in his famous “Essays on the history of music in Russia from ancient times to the end of the 18th century,” Nikolai Findeisen, it seems, once mentions, speaking about the 1790s, that in Moscow, along with many other artists, a singer named Muschietti. And in another place he remembers “the Moscow composer Pietro Muschetti, who in 1797 released some “6 arias with accompaniment for piano, price 5 rubles.” In essence, that’s all.

You can be satisfied with this fragmentary information – well, one of the colonies of foreigners who lived in Pavlovsk and Alexandrovskaya Moscow, you never know there were many of them. Loser, probably: no, to settle into retirement, at least in St. Petersburg. Of course, an Italian vocal teacher, and also a castrato, is a little out of our usual ideas about the circle of Moscow foreigners (hairdressers, tutors, cooks, milliners, restaurateurs…), but not too much: there were also French dance masters. And here is an Italian – a singing teacher, who, apparently, composed a little for additional income – there is nothing to be surprised at, but there seems to be nothing to be interested in either.

At the same time, we still have at our disposal a source where the biography of the “Moscow soprano” is not mentioned in passing – and it is said much more solemnly: “He was once a singer, famous in Italy and France, one of the first celebrities of his time in terms of vocal music, comrade Babini, Luigi Marchesi and Paciarotti.” As the Countess sings in “The Queen of Spades,” “what names!”: truly the flower of Italian opera in the last quarter of the 18th century. This source is an article from 1850, which the theater critic Fyodor Koni wrote on the death of the singer Ivan Rupini (Rupin): he was a student of Muschietti. Koni writes confidently, but obviously from the words of Rupini – and who knows if something is embellished here.

But here, with the emergence of details, we finally find ourselves on more or less solid ground. You can check whether anyone named Muschetti (and, presumably, Pietro) sang along with tenor Matteo Babini, handsome soprano Luigi Marchesi and another famous castrato Gaspare Pacchiarotti.

And you know, he actually sang. Fortunately, in the mature 18th century, for any significant opera premieres, “libretti” were printed, where, in addition to the libretto as such, the names of the performers were published – this array is well preserved, much better, alas, than the scores themselves. And “Signor Pietro Muschietti” (il Signor Pietro Muschietti) in the same composition as other glorious gentlemen can easily be found on the pages of these “programs”.

1778, Naples, Josef Mysliveček’s opera “Olympiad”: Lycidas (the main male part!) – Muschietti, Megacles – Marchesi. 1784, Naples again, Carlo Monza’s opera “Aeneas in Carthage”: Aeneas (again the main role) – Muschietti, Sergest – Babini. 1785, Jesi, Gaetano Andreozzi’s oratorio “Isaac, prototype of the Redeemer”: Isaac – Pacchiarotti, Sarah – Muschietti.

In a word, yes, “one of the first celebrities of his time.” He sang in operas by wonderful and revered composers at that time: Johann Christian Bach, Vicente Martin y Soler, the same Mysliveček. He worked in theaters throughout almost all of Italy, received a prestigious paid position in Turin (financial statements have also been preserved), at the court of the Sardinian king, not the least in Europe. He gave concerts in a variety of countries, and ended his career in the 1790s in Berlin (from where he was apparently expelled due to suspicions of insufficient trustworthiness – everyone was very afraid of the French Revolution). There are only two points that are most interesting: firstly, in 1776 Muschietti sang in Venice, on the stage of the San Benedetto Theater, in the opera “Creon”, written by Dmitry Bortnyansky – here the Russian theme enters the biography of our hero for the first time.

Secondly, if not the very first, then the second composer in his operatic career was even Mozart. In 1770, Muschietti got the role in “Mithridates, King of Pontus,” which was first performed at La Scala in Milan—Arbat, ruler of the city of Nymphaeum, in what is now Crimea.

The dates of Muschietti’s life are, unfortunately, a mystery. I was able to find only in the “ABC index of names of Russian figures for the Russian Biographical Dictionary” (and this is already the 1880s) a lapidary mention of a “professor of music” named “Pietro Moschiti”, who died in 1818 – vague, but maybe . In the end, even in Italy the singer’s surname was sometimes written differently, sometimes as Muschietti, sometimes as Moschietti. In 1770, by the way, the great musical writer Charles Burney listened with delight to a young sopranist named Moschetti in Brescia, who promised the singer a glorious future – and wrote down that he was “no more than 14 or 15 years old.” Theoretically, this could be a clue: castrati usually made their debut quite early, 15 years for the first stage work by the standards of that time was not at all unusual. In the middle of the last century, Robert-Alois Moser, compiling his monumental “Annals of Music and Musicians in Russia in the 18th Century,” armed himself with precisely these considerations and, sketching the biography of the future “Moscow soprano,” drew information from Burney’s Italian notes. The problem, however, is that Burney’s young singer is called Carlo, not Pietro.

No portraits have survived either – and this is quite surprising for a celebrity of this caliber. Only a couple of verbal descriptions of the Moscow era: the mentioned Koni brings out a man “with an expressive southern physiognomy and quick, impatient movements, testifying to the volcanic quality of his nature” – somewhat cliched, but he is not an eyewitness. Stepan Zhikharev, in his diaries of 1805, describing a dinner in Muschietti’s company, expresses himself more casually: “a tall and corpulent bon vivant and gourme.”

Why, “having fallen asleep”, he went specifically to Russia – one can speculate here: maybe he remembered Venice in 1776 and his communication with young Bortnyansky, a boarder of the generous Russian Tsarina. Maybe he followed the example of Martin y Soler, a composer whom the same queen, at the peak of his career, in 1788, invited to St. Petersburg, and he lived there until his death in 1806. Here is Moscow – the choice is indeed not entirely obvious, but clearly calculated. The nobility and artistic circles of the Mother See loved and pampered him, and Muschietti’s teaching method was greatly appreciated. In general, old age is not very noticeable, but pleasant.

And although he charged a lot for lessons (25 rubles – in banknotes, however), there was no shortage of students – and especially female students. He trained many professionals on the opera stage, but it is now difficult to impress anyone with their names. Another thing is amateur singers. Muschietti’s most illustrious student was Zinaida Volkonskaya, nee Princess Beloselskaya-Belozerskaya – yes, yes, that Princess Volkonskaya, Pushkin’s “queen of muses and beauty.”

Versatile education, a respectable position, a bright character, a courageous (to put it mildly) personal life, social talents – this is not all about her. Volkonskaya, obviously, was indeed a capable opera artist, although it was difficult for a wide range of music lovers to judge this. Volkonskaya’s performances as a singer were either at home or, as they would say now, “exclusive”, for a special circle of invitees. For example, she fearlessly adorned the cultural program of both the Vienna Congress and the “summit” of the Holy Alliance in Verona, and found quite grateful listeners among the monarchs and their dignitaries.

But she, a friend of Alexander I, had absolutely no relationship with his successor. Therefore, in 1829, after she hosted with demonstrative pomp the wives of the Decembrists – Ekaterina Trubetskaya and Maria Volkonskaya, her daughter-in-law – who were leaving to join their husbands in Siberia, Zinaida Volkonskaya considered it best to leave Russia. Before, she didn’t live here very long, but then she left for good—to Rome. She converted to Catholicism, lived in the Palazzo Poli, the same one whose façade serves as the backdrop to the Trevi Fountain, bought and transformed a villa on the Esquiline, where she received diplomatic, literary and artistic light and where Gogol pondered “Dead Souls.”

Her teacher Muschietti moved from Italy to Russia – and she moved from Russia to Italy. Thus, in an involuntary but eloquent way, two eras came together in the biographies of the teacher and his students. One is a time of global catastrophes and changes, when the most amazing migrations generally occur – and somehow it turns out that Russia turns out to be a safe haven, at least for a while. When King Louis XVIII lives in Russian Courland (1798–1801, 1804–1807), when the entire army corps of Prince Condé is stationed in the Volyn province (1798–1799), when the bloodsucker Marat’s brother turns out to be one of the first teachers of the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum under the name de Boudry . And the second is the Nikolaev time, when not arrivals, but permanent departures for ideological, political or religious reasons become more and more frequent.

And at the junction between these two eras came the blissful decline of Pietro Muschietti, the heir to the carefree 18th century, a man who sang with Mozart in his youth and taught Moscow young ladies in his old age. How not to remember? It’s definitely worth mentioning.

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