The travelling musician as cosmopolitan Western performers and composers in mid-nineteenth-century St Petersburg and Moscow

This chapter offers an approach complementary to that of Applegate, and attempts some further qualification to her characterization of nineteenth-century musicians as cosmopolitans. Whereas Applegate concentrates primarily on the transfers of styles and genres and on the question of how this exchange may have profited the nations involved. The chapter focuses on the musicians themselves and the social contexts and practical consequences of their time abroad, whether in long peregrinations, seasonal concert tours or opera seasons, or after taking permanent residence in a new country. It draws from the research on musical travels to Russia, and focus on St Petersburg and Moscow – two destinations that were commonly combined in a single visit – in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism rely on the imagination, and they imagine the world in ways that shape socio-cultural conditions and practices, that derive from them, but also persist in spite of them.