摘要：This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing revision of the historiography on eighteenth-century Russian music in general, and Russian opera in particular. After an extensive survey of the state of the field, the author adopts a multi-disciplinary approach (combining musical and philological studies) to analyse recently published primary sources about the reception of Italian opera seria in early imperial Russia. The article demonstrates that far from merely providing amusement for the Court of three consecutive female monarchs, Italian composers and their works engaged in complex ways with a much more variegated Russian "public." The author suggests that the creation of this music-listening and -performing domestic public was indebted to Italian operatic traditions and, at the same time, intimately connected to local traditions of musical performance.
