The Cavos Line

The Cavos line begins with a dancer. Alberto Giovanni Cavos (c. 1750-1810, the dates unconfirmed in primary documentation) was a Venetian ballet artist - dancer and choreographer at the Teatro San Moise and other theaters of Venice, Treviso, and Padua - who rose to the rank of primo ballerino assoluto, the most prestigious in Italian ballet, and served as director and impresario of the Teatro La Fenice during the 1790s, the theater's first decade.

Some published accounts make him La Fenice's founder, or a composer; the record supports neither. The theater was founded by its association of box-holders to Giannantonio Selva's design, and the composer of the family was his son. Alberto Giovanni himself never went to Russia.

He is the earliest traceable ancestor of the line: the leading academic experts on the Cavos family identify no ancestors before him, and no Cavos documents from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries have been located in the Venetian archives. The dynasty begins, as far as history can presently say, with a dancer on the stage of La Fenice.

Catterino Cavos was born in Venice on October 30, 1775. In 1797, as Napoleon's armies extinguished the thousand-year-old Venetian Republic, the twenty-two-year-old composer traveled to St. Petersburg; in 1803 Emperor Alexander I appointed him Kapellmeister of Italian and Russian opera. He was the second of the dynasty's three founders carried east by the same revolutionary storm - three years after the confectioner Louis Jules Benois fled Paris, fifteen years before the wounded major Paul Lanceray was captured in the 1812 campaign.

His compositions show a deliberate turn toward Russian material: the magic opera The Invisible Prince (1805); Ilya the Bogatyr (1806), on a libretto by the fabulist Ivan Krylov; the enormously popular patriotic singspiel The Cossack Poet (1812), whose run coincided with Napoleon's invasion; and, in 1822, a Firebird - the fairy-tale subject that the Ballets Russes, with sets shaped by this same family's descendants, would make world-famous a century later.

His most consequential achievement came in 1815 with Ivan Susanin - the first Russian opera on a Russian historical subject, with a peasant hero and folk-derived melodies, composed a full twenty years before Glinka treated the same story. And when Glinka's A Life for the Tsar arrived in 1836, Cavos - with every institutional means of protecting his own work - championed the younger man's opera instead, conducted its premiere, and let his own Susanin yield the stage. He died in St. Petersburg on May 10, 1840, having transformed Russian opera from an Italian import into a national art form.

Catterino's eldest son, Alberto Catterinovich Cavos (1800-1863), studied mathematics at the University of Padua and trained in the workshop of Carlo Rossi, the master of St. Petersburg neoclassicism. He became Russia's foremost theater architect and codified his expertise in a treatise, the Traite de la construction des theatres, published in Paris; he was a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

When fire destroyed Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in 1853, Alberto rebuilt it (1853-1856), creating the iconic 2,150-seat hall that he approached as an acoustician as much as an architect - conceiving the auditorium as a musical instrument, its panels of resonant wood tuned like the body of a violin. And when fire likewise destroyed St. Petersburg's Equestrian Circus Theatre, he designed and built on its site the Mariinsky Theatre (1859-1860), named for Empress Maria Alexandrovna and still today the home of Russian ballet and opera.

Alberto's children connected the Cavos name to architecture, diplomacy - and, decisively, to the Benois family. Stanislav (1823-1875) became an opera composer and conductor; Caesar (1824-1883) an architect and academician who built in St. Petersburg; Constantin (1826-1890) a diplomat in the Imperial Russian service. And Camilla Albertovna (1828-1891) married the architect Nicholas Benois on September 15, 1848 - the union of the Italian and French lines from which the dynasty's golden age would spring.

Catterino's other children carried the family deeper into Russian musical life. Ivan "Giovanni" Cavos (1805-1861) served thirty years in the Imperial Theatres of St. Petersburg, holding posts that included Director of Orchestras, Director of the Italian Opera, voice teacher, and Inspector of the Smolny Institute. Their sister Stefanida taught music at the Smolny Institute from 1822 to 1837 before marrying and settling in Venice - the one member of the Russian generation who returned to her mother's homeland.