ABSTRACT
The partes-singing concerto that St. Peter loved and knew had by that time become an indispensable and basic part of Russian music, both sacred and secular. The minuet linked the Russian musical environment directly with contemporary European music. The appearance of the minuet constituted a turning point in eighteenth-century Russian music, very much like the introduction of the kant in the seventeenth century. This precedent opened the way for the powerful impact of the new idiom in the Russian court, estate and urban soundscape. Peter's immediate successors continued his policy in musical entertainment, but his niece Anna Ioannovna, in addition to the established German tradition of instrumental music also solidly initiated the Italianating of Russian court music, which was continued by all the following eighteenth-century Russian rulers. German music, along with other German cultural realities, thus established itself in Russia as one of the main elements of court entertainment in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.
