On 30 January 1890, the audience at the Théâtre Municipal in Nice witnessed something extraordinary. Midway through the first public performance of a Russian opera in France, Glinka's A Life for the Tsar, the chorus and orchestra broke into a rendition of the Russian national anthem, followed by the 'Marseillaise'. Both anthems were then repeated, with the audience calling out 'Vive la Russie!', 'Vive la France!' With France and Russia on the verge of an historic alliance, the evening was proclaimed a political and an artistic triumph. The success of this unusual event, I suggest, can be explained further by considering the context of operatic decentralisation in France, in conjunction with the arrival of the new director at the Théâtre, Raoul Gunsbourg. As a result of local and personal imperatives, the performance came to resonate nationally, with A Life serving as an unlikely emblem of modernity, while also bringing one peripheral French region strongly into Paris's purview. ***In 1891, Charme dangereux, the latest release from the prolific novelist André Theuriet, hit the shelves. It told the story of a staid Parisian, Jacques, who succumbs to the charms of a mysterious Russian princess, the unforgettably named Mania Liebling, while vacationing in Nice. She first catches his eye at the Théâtre Municipal during a performance of Don Giovanni:

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In the build-up to the French premiere of Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin in Nice in 1895, critics, speakers and writers on music were declaring the opera a masterpiece of psychological realism. Such a reading seems to resonate more with recent assessments of the opera; but in 1890s France, a combination of interest in the Russian realist novel and new trends in realist opera had led critics to make the literary link already. With the Franco-Russian Alliance recently finalized and hostility towards the Triplice mounting, many even suggested that the opera might form the lyric equivalent of the Russian realist novel and, in so doing, offer a morally and politically superior alternative to the so-called verismo operas of the new Italian school. The optimism surrounding Onegin, I'd like to show, was part of a broader move in late nineteenth-century France to celebrate cosmopolitanism, if not in the sense one might expect. Tchaikovsky and Onegin were very much deemed representatively Russian. What was cosmopolitan, and in turn modern, was the act of cultural transfer – exploiting international personal networks – and the opera's realism: its evocations of ordinary life and of the contemporary psychological condition. As such, a Russian opera like this could be applauded not for its revelations of an exotic or disconnected country, but for the potential it posed to integrate with and revitalize French culture.

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Musorgsky has a habit of upstaging Rimsky-Korsakov. His image just fits that bit better with Romantic notions of the genius composer: anarchic musical experimentation, populist sympathies, an untimely death. Rimsky-Korsakov, meanwhile, defected from the rebellious Kuchka to become one of the St Petersburg Conservatory's most respectable professors, is best known for music dealing in fantasy, and lived a long, comfortable life. Sure enough, Musorgsky infiltrates every chapter of Rimsky-Korsakov and his World. But this time, the goal is to redress the balance. We find Rimsky-Korsakov portrayed as a composer of deep feeling; as an arch political commentator; and even as a suitable source of instruction for Soviet musicians. Indeed, it is quite rare for a collected volume to achieve such unity of intent as that found here. While Musorgsky, naturally, is not the focus, the authors throughout seek to enrich and enliven the current image of Rimsky-Korsakov -dare I say, to make him a little more Musorgskian.