Catterino Albertovich Cavos (; ; October 30, 1775 – ) was an Italian composer, organist and conductor who settled in Russia. He played an important role in the history of Russian opera and was the father of Alberto Cavos.
Cavos is celebrated in Russian musical history as the man who composed the opera Ivan Susanin in 1815, 20 years before Mikhail Glinka's opera of the same name. The plot, based on an episode from Russian history, tells the story of the Russian peasant and patriotic hero Ivan Susanin who sacrifices his life for the Tsar by leading astray a group of marauding Poles who were hunting him.
Early years and family
Cavos was born in Venice, Italy, on October 30, 1775. His father, Alberto Giovanni Cavos, was the Primo Ballerino Assoluto (lead male ballet dancer) and director of the La Fenice theatre in Venice.
Cavos studied under Francesco Bianchi. At the age of twelve, Cavos composed a cantata to celebrate Leopold II's arrival in Venice. At fourteen he was offered the post of organist to St Mark's Basilica, but refused the position, allowing the post to be given to an older, impoverished musician.
Russian years
In his early twenties, Cavos accepted a position as conductor of the Italian operatic company Astariti, and traveled with the company to St. Petersburg in 1797. The company was soon disbanded, but Cavos had fallen in love with St. Petersburg, and entered the service of the Imperial Theatres, at first as composer for a French opera troupe with the responsibility to write music for the opera-vaudevilles. In 1803, Emperor Alexander I appointed Cavos as Kapellmeister of Italian and Russian opera, placing him in charge of the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre. He also served as a professor at the Saint Catherine School, and later occupied the same place in the Smolny Convent.
He began composing his own operas in 1805. These included: Knyaz-nevidimka (The Invisible Prince) (1805), Ilya Bogatyr (Ilya the Hero) (1807), Zephyre et Flore (1808), Ivan Susanin (1815), and The Firebird (1822). He also contributed to the second part of the opera tetralogy Rusalka (1803-1807). The Cossack as Poet, a one-act vaudeville (1812), remained in the repertory until 1852.
John Warrack wrote of Cavos' work: Cavos's operas draw on Russian subjects. Ilya Bogatyr, for which the fabulist Ivan Krylov wrote the libretto, is a Romantic magic opera continuing the line of Catherine's Fevey text and anticipating Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila. A few, such as The Firebird (1822), treat the Oriental themes that had become fashionable with Russia's expansion, and thus also anticipate Ruslan and Lyudmila and Borodin's Prince Igor. Cavos's main librettist, however, was Alexander Shakhovskoy, Director of the Imperial Theatres. Shakhovskoy's text for The Cossack Poet (1812) invokes the patriotic sentiments of the times, and so, even more, does his text for Ivan Susanin (1815), a "rescue opera" owing much to French example. When Glinka's own opera about Ivan Susanin...was produced in 1836, it was Cavos who conducted; but though Cavos generously declared that his work was now superseded, it [Ivan Susanin] continued in the repertoire until 1854.
Cavos' opera Ivan Susanin is regarded as the first Russian opera: the plot is based on real Russian historical fact, he included in the music the Russian folk melodies, for the first time a Russian peasant became the main character on the Opera stage - not a mythical character, not a tsar or a commander. For the first time an attempt was made to enter the theatre of the opera stage of the specific features of Russian life.
However, in Russian musical literature, the analysis of this opera are devoted to only two articles (up to the present time) - of Abram Gozenpud and of Viktor Korshikov.
Russian music critic Abram Gozenpud (1908 - 2004) considered that this opera was unsuccessful because it is not shown in the main: the feat of the hero. Real Ivan Susanin died from enemies, and the opera was a happy end (author of libretto is Alexander Shakhovskoy, ru: Александр Александрович Шаховской).