It Was Russia’s Most Popular Opera. Then It Disappeared.

Anton Rubinstein’s 1871 opera, “Demon,” is a tried-and-true 19th-century plot with a religious twist: A fallen angel seeks redemption through a woman’s love. In Russia, it was the most popular opera of its day. Then it disappeared.

“Rubinstein became a footnote in Russian history in a way that is ill-deserved,” said Leon Botstein, who will conduct a rare production of “Demon” that runs from Friday to Aug. 5 in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, as part of the SummerScape festival at Bard College.

Rubinstein (1829-94) was a pivotal figure in Russian music. The founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher, he was an early advocate of academic training in the country. His symphonies — the Second and Fifth are exceptional — were among the first by a Russian composer. An internationally famous pianist, he toured the world giving concerts, including a U.S. tour in the 1870s that stretched from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Mobile, Alabama.

His music reflects his cosmopolitan, Europe-facing outlook, though “Demon” (also known as “The Demon”) makes gestures to its unusual setting in the Caucasus. At the start of the opera, the heroine, Tamara, is having her wedding; the heady, exotic flavor of the sound world will be familiar from works of the period still popular today, like Borodin’s “On the Steppes of Central Asia” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” (Rimsky-Korsakov is the focus of this year’s Bard Music Festival on successive weekends beginning Aug. 10.)

But after the wedding, these folksy touches end. The Demon arrives and kills off Tamara’s fiancé — and the exotic music, too. His sound is drawn not from the Caucasus or Russia but from a rich well of Western European Romantic melody and his ariosos are the opera’s best-known excerpts. Finally, in a long, richly lyrical duet, he seduces the grief-stricken Tamara.

It is no surprise that when asked to describe Rubinstein’s style, musicologists often reach outside Russian borders. “You can compare him with Schumann, for example: sometimes very unusual harmony,” said Marina Frolova-Walker, a professor of music history at Cambridge University and the scholar in residence at Bard this summer.

The Demon’s music “doesn’t have a real sense of place,” said Richard Taruskin, an emeritus professor and expert on Russian music at the University of California, Berkeley. “And why should it, in a certain sense, because the Demon doesn’t come from any country. He doesn’t even come from Earth.” Taruskin described some of the score as similar to a contemporary work, Bizet’s “Carmen.”

And therein lies the seed of Rubinstein’s, and his opera’s, excision from music history: He did not think “Demon” was obliged to sound Russian.

“His melodic and harmonic practices were from a Western point of view,” Botstein said. “He didn’t particularly believe in folk melody or folk rhythm as an inspiration. Rubinstein would have been more attracted to an international language of culture and audience that wasn’t simply an instrument of national assertion.”

But the generation of Russian composers that followed him, particularly the group known as the Five, or Mighty Handful (including Rimsky-Korsakov as well as Mussorgsky and Borodin), favored aggressively nationalistic music, grounded in folk inspiration. What to Rubinstein had been the professionalization of composition was for this group unwelcome Westernization.

They and their propagandist, the critic Vladimir Stasov, condemned Rubinstein in print. César Cui, another member of the Five (along with Mily Balakirev), would credit Rimsky-Korsakov with the first Russian symphony, even though Rubinstein had completed his first more than a decade earlier. Unlike his younger competitors, Rubinstein “didn’t sport an eastward-looking definition of the Russian sensibility,” Botstein said. “He was a patriot, but he was not an ethnic nationalist.”

That national flavor is what the Five, who were all self-taught, wanted, and to some extent we still approach Russian music on their terms. Germans and other Western Europeans are often said to write music that’s generic — in the best way — and universally accessible, while we evaluate Russian music based on its Russianness; it is inextricably marked by its creators’ nationality. (In the 20th century, Stravinsky spent decades trying to shed the label of “Russian composer.”) Rubinstein therefore doesn’t fit into the way we often discuss his country’s repertory.

“Rubinstein is a composer we usually forget about,” Frolova-Walker said. “He actually preceded the Five, but because of bad publicity, he was kind of demoted in historiography. But musically ‘Demon’ is one of the most popular Russian operas.”

Compared with the Five’s preference for declamation over melody, Rubinstein’s conservative taste for tunes, ensembles, dances and identifiable arias makes “Demon” highly accessible. Particularly interesting is the final act, which largely consists of a long duet for the Demon and Tamara, in which her prized virtue is pitted against his salvation. They speak in long alternating speeches, an unusual form that inspired the final scene of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” (Rubinstein’s melodic style was also an inspiration for that masterpiece by his student.) The duet is a striking back-and-forth between the leading characters, even if the focus on feminine virtue is not the opera’s most novel element. “In some sense it is part of a very long-standing tradition of a kind of moral panic about women being visited by someone where they might have an erotic experience,” Frolova-Walker said.

The ending is confusing: Tamara gives in and yet she is somehow saved, ascending to the heavens, while the Demon is left, well, demonic. It recalls the finales of operas like Gounod’s “Faust” and Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”

Thaddeus Strassberger, the director of the Bard production, sees Tamara’s plight as psychological. He has set the entire opera as a flashback from her perspective.

“We see it as a psychological accessing of the feelings as opposed to a straightforward narrative,” he said. He described the exotic beginning of the opera as a “fairy tale,” which is then taken over by something more internal as we travel inside Tamara’s mind.

Demons, in Strassberger’s vision, are our own creations. “They exist as stand-ins for an internal monologue you have with yourself,” he said. Tamara, he suggested, is not happy about her coming (and likely arranged) marriage and the Demon is her psyche’s way of dealing with the situation.

Taruskin somewhat disagreed. “In real supernatural drama, the supernatural characters really exist,” he said. Russian audiences in the 19th century, at least, would have thought the Demon was absolutely real.

Strassberger has it both ways: The characters believe in the Demon, while we in the audience can maintain our distance through the psychological frame. This approach also centers the story not on the title character but on Tamara; the Demon is less important than her crisis. The final scene is not the usual operatic struggle for a woman’s chastity against a seducer so much as a depiction of an internal struggle, an intriguing move for opera, which tends to place strict limits on women’s subjectivity.

The production’s challenge is to evoke, through a psychological lens that’s closer to listeners today, the titillation of the theological content, which was part of what made Rubinstein’s opera so popular in its day. (The source material, a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, was banned for a time as blasphemous.)

“Demon” moved swiftly from celebrated blasphemy to forgotten curiosity. But in Rubinstein’s melodic, accessible music, we can hear some of the threads left out of music history because they haven’t fit prevailing narratives.

“There’s so much great underperformed opera,” Botstein said. “We are a rare art form; if we’re in a museum we have a whole basement of works which we never show. Our whole point is that the audience and support and interest in it is doomed if we permit its real history to be erased.”