“A Portrait & A Princess: Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina (1768-1831) Comes to Utah.”
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de la princesse Natalia Ivanovna Kourakina, née Golovina (1797) | Oil on canvas | Utah Museum of Fine Arts, UMFA1993.034.014
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All rights reserved.
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Presented by Lisa Chaufty and Darlene Castro at the Mountain Plains Music Library Association Meeting. Reno, Nevada. (May, 2018); and, with revisions at a Fridays with Faculty Lecture. University of Utah (August, 2018).
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Chaufty, Lisa and Darlene Castro. "A Portrait & A Princess: Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina (1768-1831) Comes to Utah." Conference Presentation, University of Nevada, Reno, 2018. Updated April 15, 2023.
Prélude
This presentation dates back to May and August of 2018, with minor revisions in March & April of 2023. To keep the presentation format, since this was a partnership, we will clarify which author is speaking as we move through the sections. Additionally, because of the nature of this blogging tool, both authors cannot be credited through the automated authorship features. Therefore, please see the “Source for this post” and “How to cite” sections above for clarity. This current written document is only the first part of the original presentation. The remaining part will be expanded by Lisa Chaufty for traditional journal article publication.
Introduction
[Lisa Chaufty speaking] The seeds for this presentation were sown in the summer of 2017 as I was contemplating the concert theme for the Fall 2017 semester of the University of Utah Early Music Ensemble. Part of the joy of directing any ensemble is the exciting challenge of curating a rich and diverse program for concert performance. For this particular concert, the ensemble was offered a slot on one of the regularly scheduled concert evenings that the Utah Museum of Fine Arts hosts in its museum space. For this reason, the theme of this particular concert coalesced around the paintings in the museum’s European collection. That is when the Portrait de la princesse Natalia Ivanovna Kourakina came to my attention.
The portrait features the Russian Princess, Natalia Kurakina, as painted by the artist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. [1] Le Brun was a gifted and admired painter in Paris. She was portraitist to Marie Antoinette, and her portraits of the queen kept her in high demand within the aristrocratic community. [2] However, it was that same relationship that forced Le Brun to flee Paris in 1789 with the onset of the revolution. [3] Her flight began a twelve-year exile. During this time Le Brun travelled through Europe and into Russia, supporting herself with her skills as a portraitist. It was in St. Petersburg where Le Brun first met Kurakina, prior to painting this portrait [4]. The two women formed a friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives: the first volume of Le Brun’s memiors, for example, published in 1835—several decades after this portrait was painted—begins with a set of twelve autobiographical letters to the “Princess Kourakin.” Likewise, when Kurakina published her own travel memoirs years later, she included many details about her visits to the Paris home of Le Brun once Le Brun had returned to Paris, post-exile.
Figure 1. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de la princesse Natalia Ivanovna Kourakina, née Golovina (1797) | Oil on canvas | Utah Museum of Fine Arts, UMFA1993.034.014
The Portrait
A glance at this portrait (Figure 1) will reveal to you why I noticed it in particular—first, it’s quite lovely. Le Brun was a master of representing the natural drape and sheen of fabrics as we see here. The vibrant colors complement each other—notice the blue shawl with its added ribbon with red roses echoing the red dress and the red pages of one of the books in the stack. And see how the blue and gold turban plays with the gold necklace and the bodice’s belt. Notice how the curve of the turban’s folds is mirrored by the cream neck scarf and the necklace, and, again, by the gently curving fingers of the sitter’s right hand. The turban and shawl, fashionably recalling the East and antiquity, appear in other portraits by Le Brun. In her Souvenirs, Le Brun describes working with her models and how she “was delighted when, having gained their trust, they allowed me to dress them after my fancy. No-one wore shawls then, but I liked to drape my models with large scarves. . . . Examples of this can be seen in several of the portraits I painted whilst in Russia.” [5] We may wonder if this score, tantalizingly open and readable, was also one of the painter’s props? Vigée Le Brun was a music lover—her memoirs include details of her musical activities, either as a participant, accompanying herself with a guitar, or as a worshiper in church; or, as part of an audience at the Opéra. [6] Not surprisingly, several of her portraits include a sitter holding a score or leaves of music.
Le Brun’s portrait of Paisiello, for example (Figure 2), shows the composer with the score of his opera Nina o la pazza d’amore. Le Brun had attended a performance of this opera in Naples where she also met Paisiello and painted this portrait, dated several years before her portrait of Kurakina. The opera represented in this portrait was a significant work for both Paisiello and Lebrun. [7] So, it would seem by extension that the work of music featured in Kurakina’s hands would be one of significance to Kurakina and/or Le Brun. (Of course, there are other intriguing differences between the two Le Brun portraits. Those will be discussed in the paragraphs ahead.)
Figure 2. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Giovanni Paisiello (1791) | Oil on canvas | Château de Versailles, MV 5877
As we consider the music represented in the portrait of Kurakina, we notice that it is possible to transcribe what we can see of the score. What if we could identify the piece and perform it as a companion to the portrait at the University of Utah Early Music Ensemble’s UMFA concert? From that point on, Darlene Castro, a guitarist in the ensemble, and the co-author and co-presenter of this paper, joined Lisa Chaufty as a research partner. Our research path began with this painting and lead us—as any journey through new terrain would—on a road that often had some bumps, dangling branches, and occasional thorny brambles.
Before we share Darlene’s experiences of transcribing the score, let’s focus a bit more on the subject of the portrait, Princess Natalia.
Kurakina in St. Petersburg
Natalia was a royal princess in Catherine the Great’s court. Like Queens Elizabeth and Anna before her, Catherine II continued to open up the Russian court to the intellectual ideas of Western Europe. On the musical front, Empress Catherine, especially, wooed many Italian composers, including Locatelli, Galuppi, Veracini, and Sarti, to come and work in Russia. [8] The opening of Catherine’s court philosophically and artistically had positive effects for women in Kurakina’s position.
Figure 3. Petr Drozhdin, Catherine II (1796) | Oil on Canvas | Tretyakov Gallery
For example, the poet Ekaterina Urusova praised her empress, Catarina, writing, [9]
“Now, clustering about the sacred Muses’ throne
the female sex begins to lift its song:
These ladies deck the virtues in their verse,
An overflowing tenderness rehearse;
sweetly they sing of pleasurable things
and in those songs passion and feeling ring.
Russia has Sapphos now, and De La Suzes,
I would with them: O hear me, beauteous Muses!”
When Le Brun’s portrait of Kurakina was painted, Kurakina was twenty-nine years old. She had already been a married woman for fourteen years. Like many women of her social station, she was musically trained: she played the harp, and was described as having a fine contralto voice. And she was also a composer. Like many women musicians/composers (and participants in salon culture in St. Petersburg), she wrote romances. [10] Approximately one dozen of Kurakina’s romances were published in the 1790s. Her largest publication, Eight romances, composed and arranged [for voice and] harp was published by Breitkopf, St. Petersburg in 1795, just two years prior to the Le Brun portrait. Concurrently, a half-dozen of her French romances and Italian canzonetti were published in several issues of a weekly guitar journal of Italian, French, and Russian airs for voice with guitar. At the the time of the portrait creation, Kurakina’s music was in print. She was a published composer.
Identifying the music in the portrait
[Darlene Castro speaking] Transcribing music is similar to translating between languages in the sense that one is transferring data from one frame of reference to another. Common transcribing methods include transcribing from older music notation into modern notation or transcribing from one instrument to another. In such cases where the system, or frame of reference, changes, whether that be notation or instrument, the perspective and audience of what is being transcribed remains relatively unchanged: both were probably written, or framed, in such a way that they were meant to be reproduced by musicians in some way (through performance, pedagogy, etc.)
So, what does this mean? What must be taken into consideration for this musical data to be read, and thus reproduced, correctly? Well, it has to be complete in order to be reproduced in its entirety and it has to be clear if it is to be recreated as accurately as possible. Clefs, rhythms, pitches, key signatures, ornaments and time signatures all play a critical role in telling musicians how to perform and they must be present to complete a work. However, in this portrait by Le Brun we see that some of these important elements are missing. For example, the clef is not quite clear in the upper two voices, but clear in the lowest voice as an F clef. The time signature is clear, as are some of the rhythms; but, as the page turns the angle of the music changes and we lose clarity. Likewise, the subject of the painting, Princess Kurakina, is physically covering part of the music with her hand, literally displaying her prominence over the music (Figures 4 and 5). Le Brun was a skilled artist and has paid incredible attention to detail, which is evident all over this work, and the music is no exception. The text underlay is clear and the rests are painstakingly notated when they could have easily been left out. We know that Le Brun was well versed in music (as mentioned earlier in this presentation) so we can safely assume she was comfortable with reading and thus recreating music notation.
This next portrait, for example, of the Baroness of Crussol from 1785 (well before the portrait under the current study) shows Le Brun’s skill as a music copyist (Figures 6 and 7). The score is immaculately clear and there is a title. There is no mystery here as with the Kurakina portrait. The Baronne is represented with the score from Gluck’s opera Echo et Narcisse, a reference as well to Marie Antoinette, as Gluck was her music teacher as she grew up, later becoming his patron.
Figure 6. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de la Baronne de Crussol (1785) | Oil on canvas | Musée des Augustins de Toulouse, Salon Blanc.
Figure 7. Detail image. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de la Baronne de Crussol (1785) | Oil on canvas | Musée des Augustins de Toulouse, Salon Blanc.
So, we know from this example that Le Brun was skilled and knowledgeable in recreating music notation. From all of this we can gather that it is not the music itself that is meant to be the focus in the Kurakina portrait, but the act of reading it. Princess Kurakina’s physical interaction with the music literally overshadows the music itself. This is not an isolated event in Le Brun’s works. Most notably, this self-portrait from 1790 (Figure 8) features many of the same principles. Here the artist is at work in front of her canvas, again, with a working pose. There is a faint outline on the canvas, suggesting her work as a portraitist, but it is off to the side and not as vivid or clear as Le Brun’s physical presence.
Figure 8. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Self-portrait | Oil on canvas |Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence
Again, her action of painting and interacting with the canvas literally casts a shadow on it, obscuring part of the artwork in the portrait much like Princess Kurakina’s hand and reading of the score obscures the actual music notation (Figure 9).
And, as we consider that notation, we have many questions: How do we handle the transcription of music not exclusively meant to be performed? How do we extract and then transfer data between two slightly incompatible systems? Is this possible and how successful can it be? We can present a partial answer, through a partial transcription of this piece in the Kurakina portrait.
As previously mentioned, the clef in the lowest voice (Figure 4) is quite clear and gives us a good marker for pitches. The first six measures are decipherable before trailing off into the fold of the binding. The next system begins somewhat legibly, allowing for two and a half clear measures, before Kurakina’s hand blocks the next few measures, which also get lost to the binding.
Over on the recto side (Figure 5), we see the physical interaction again obscuring the clarity of the work and the music again distorts into the binding. However, here we have a trade off! The action of turning the page gives us a glimpse of the following page, a great clue if we were looking to find the original manuscript that Vigée Le Brun’s subject is holding.
So, how do we extract all of this data from a non-performable system and transfer, or transcribe it, into a performable system? Well, we take the performable elements only and try to minimize the guesswork of what should be written. Pitches that contain unclear rhythms are kept only as note heads, ornaments are not included, and anything that is not legible or clear is crossed out. And we finish with this (Figure 10.)
Figure 10. Transcription of the music represented in Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait de la princesse Natalia Ivanovna Kourakina, née Golovina (1797) | Oil on canvas | Utah Museum of Fine Arts, UMFA1993.034.014
In terms of the transcription, we are still missing one facet that makes this piece performable: we need to make a decision about the clef of the top voice. We know that most pieces begin on a consonance, and thus, we could guess that it is a treble clef or some sort of moveable C clef. After testing out the possibilities, a standard treble clef made the most sense. Luckily for us, that does not change the appearance of the top line, so whether or not we are correct, we are still accurate in how we represent the top voice. The text is left exactly as it appears in the portrait; no interpretation is applied. Unfortunately, it is not a complete transcription, but it is enough of a representation that we could possible try to use the melodic and other features to identify a source if one exists.
We can now hear a general idea of the piece Kurakina is studying. Of course, this is only one dimension of transcription. We could easily try to transcribe further and interpret the ornaments and unclear rhythms. This would make it more compatible with our performable system, but we run the risk of corrupting our original data. So, the solution here is to be as true to the original as possible and take only the common elements between the non-performable and performable systems. See Figure 11 to play a midi representation of the transcription (Figure 10).
Figure 11. Audio file of midi version of Figure 10.
[Lisa Presenting] So, where does this transcription leave us? We could try to judge it as a piece of music, as we notice some unusual moments of dissonance or voice-leading issues; however, that does not seem like a positive approach since we don’t have a definitive transcription. A good approach is to see what clues we have available to assist with our quest for identification. Let us begin with the text. It is legible enough in the portrait and has been identified as belonging to the aria “Se non ti moro allato” from Metastasio’s libretto for the opera Adriano in Siria. See Figure 12 for the text of the aria. The bolded text in the image below is the text from the score in the Vigée Le Brun painting.
The libretto, first set by Antonio Caldara in 1732 (65 years prior to the portrait), is referenced in many sources, including WorldCat, RISM, and Stanford’s Opening Night database. I found mention of fifty-nine settings of this opera alone which were in existence when Le Brun painted Kurakina’s portrait in the late 1790s. Two settings of the opera were by Italians who had worked in St. Petersburg: Galuppi’s (dated 1748/revival 1758, before Kurakina’s birth), and Sarti’s (1778, when Kurakina was twelve years old). We don’t know if Princess Kurakina was familiar with these operas as she was growing up in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, however, they are not the source for the particular melodic material identified in the transcription (Figure 10). For other settings of this aria text that I could locate and access, I could not find one which matched any elements of our transcription. Of course, the opera scores that I perused looking for an inkling of the painting’s melody were operatic—meaning that the settings included parts for strings, for example.
Therefore, it seems plausible at least that the score that Kurakina is holding could be a set of songs, or possibly a compilation of arias in vocal plus accompaniment settings which could have been performed in the salon. Princess Kurakina was a well-known salonnière in St. Petersburg, and, eventually, Paris. [11]
Now, in tandem with the search I just described, and knowing that Kurakina was a composer herself, I began to wonder if Kurakina was the composer of the music represented in the painting. Research into the contents of Kurakina’s published works (mentioned earlier in this paper) has not yielded results: there is no work titled “Se non ti moro allato.”
The scholarly work of the soprano, Anne Harley, mentions an unpublished album of songs that is not openly available at this time. [12] If the score Kurakina is holding in the portrait is actually her own—her unpublished album of songs—then the setting of the Metastasian text would also be her own. There is conflicting support for such an assertion. Here, we can return to the Vigée Le Brun portrait of Paisiello (Figure 2): we note that Paisiello is captured in the moment of creation, hands on the keyboard, with his eyes directed to the heavens as light pours in from the same direction. One piece of music in the portrait is marked clearly as being his own. [13] If we turn to Le Brun’s painting of Kurakina, we don’t see an equivalent indication on the score she is holding. On the other hand, she is clearly interacting with a piece in manuscript—rather than printed—form. Ultimately, we are left with our unanswered questions related to authorship, though we note the interaction of Kurakina’s hands with the score, the cast shadow, the sitter’s prominence. We could read these details as her taking ownership of the score, and the works within it.
© Lisa Chaufty and Darlene Castro. All rights reserved. Please cite as appropriate.
Works Cited
Argent, Gesine. "Noble Sociability in French: Romances in Princess Natalia Kurakina's Album." 2013, https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Kurakina%20introduction.pdf
Ewington, Amanda, editor and translator. Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Toronto: Iter, Inc., 2014.
Harley, Anne. "Russian Women Composers from the Court of Catherine the Great: the Romances of Princess Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina (1786-1831)."Journal of Singing 72, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 2015): 11-21. Gale Academic OneFile.
Le Brun, Elisabeth Vigée. The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun. Translated by Siân Evans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
--------------------- . Souvenirs de Madame Vigée Le Brun Paris: Charpentier, 1869.
Ogarkova, Natalia. "The Music Salon in Russia in the First Half of the 19th Century." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts 10, no. 1 (2020): 17-40. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu15.2020.102.
Rice, John. "Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's Portrait of Giovanni Paisiello." In Artists and Musicians: Portrait Studies from the Rococo to the Revolution, edited by Daniel Heartz and Beverly Wilcox, 312-37. Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein Publishing, 2014.
Ritzarev, Marina. Eighteenth Century Russian Music.Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
Stanford Libraries. "Opening Night! Opera & Oratorio Premieres." Accessed August 20, 2018. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/operadata.
Argent, Gesine. "Noble Sociability in French: Romances in Princess Natalia Kurakina's Album." 2013, https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Kurakina%20introduction.pdf
Ewington, Amanda, editor and translator. Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Toronto: Iter, Inc., 2014.
Harley, Anne. "Russian Women Composers from the Court of Catherine the Great: the Romances of Princess Natalia Ivanovna Kurakina (1786-1831)."Journal of Singing 72, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 2015): 11-21. Gale Academic OneFile.
Le Brun, Elisabeth Vigée. The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun. Translated by Siân Evans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
--------------------- . Souvenirs de Madame Vigée Le Brun Paris: Charpentier, 1869.
Ogarkova, Natalia. "The Music Salon in Russia in the First Half of the 19th Century." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts 10, no. 1 (2020): 17-40. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu15.2020.102.
Rice, John. "Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's Portrait of Giovanni Paisiello." In Artists and Musicians: Portrait Studies from the Rococo to the Revolution, edited by Daniel Heartz and Beverly Wilcox, 312-37. Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein Publishing, 2014.
Ritzarev, Marina. Eighteenth Century Russian Music.Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
Stanford Libraries. "Opening Night! Opera & Oratorio Premieres." Accessed August 20, 2018. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/operadata.