REPERTOIRE
On 18 December 1867, in Kherson (now in Ukraine), Samuil Moiseevich Maykapar was born into a Karaite Jewish family. The archaeologist and scholar Abraham ben Samuel Firkovich (1786-1874) had demonstrated to the Tsar’s satisfaction that the Karaite community had been exiled and settled in Crimea well before the common era and could not therefore be held responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion; Karaites were thus exempted from the oppressive legal restrictions to which Rabbinic Jews were subjected.
Maykapar’s father, Moses Samuilovitch, a successful merchant, moved his family to the Russian port town of Taganrog shortly after Samuil’s birth. There, the six-year-old Samuil began music lessons with Gaetano Molla (1845-1894), who had moved from Milan to Taganrog in 1870, taking over the town’s Italian opera company, and greatly improving many aspects of the town’s musical life.
The foment of Russian musical life at this time cannot be underestimated. For centuries the Orthodox Church had prohibited secular music making. It was not until the 1720s, during the reign of Peter the Great – who saw Western culture as a means and marker of civilisation – that European musicians were imported to compensate for the lack of a local Russian tradition, and as the St Petersburg court’s European fashions became throughout the Russian nobility, Western musical styles flourished too.
