Boris Godunov was, and has remained, a thinking person’s opera. It opens a window on to a remote and exotic period of Russian history, where there is a heart- and mind-wrenching tug of war between might and right, an all-powerful Tsar struggling with his guilty conscience and his responsibility to his people...
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
In the first decade of the 20th century Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov began to make its impact in Western Europe, when Rimsky-Korsakov’s version was presented in Paris by Diaghilev and his company. The singing and acting of Feodor Chaliapin in the title role made a tremendous impression even on those who didn’t understand Russian. With Diaghilev’s 1908 Paris production Boris Godunov began to enter the international repertory. Great publicist that he was, Diaghilev left the impression that it was a tremendous success, but more sobre study suggests that it first appealed to cognoscenti, the literary and musical avant-garde, though the spectacle also gave thrills to theatre fans.
Diaghilev wanted over 300 people on stage for the Coronation Scene, and Rimsky-Korsakov had changed Mussorgsky’s orchestration for that scene into something brilliant to a fault; this almost concealed Mussorgsky’s point; that the populace only acclaimed Boris because they were compelled by officials. Boris’s reluctance to assume the throne could also be missed amongst so much pomp and ceremony.
Soon some knowledgeable French admirers of Mussorgsky began to question Rimsky-Korsakov’s changes. This controversy among intellectuals (also welcome to Diaghilev!) shows that Boris Godunov was, and has remained, a thinking person’s opera. It opens a window on to a remote and exotic period of Russian history, where there is a heart- and mind-wrenching tug of war between might and right, an all-powerful Tsar struggling with his guilty conscience and his responsibility to his people.
Mussorgsky’s vision and the historical and literary sources he drew on take Boris Godunov into areas opera rarely explores so truthfully – the story of a nation and its people at a turning point in its history.
Feodor Chaliapin as Boris 1913. Public Domain
This opera is not called ‘Boris Godunov’ for nothing. In 1906, when Rimsky’s version was still new, Nikolay Kompaneisky recalled a conversation he had with an elderly woman on the night in 1874 of the St. Petersburg premiere. Finding her in tears in her box, he expressed his delight that the opera had moved her so powerfully. She replied ‘What kind of opera is this? There is no music in it at all. But I have to say that I never took my eyes from the stage the whole time. How splendidly Melnikov [Boris Godunov] acts; even now his every word rings in my ears! That’s genius, not just an actor!’
In all the controversy whether Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘redaction’ of Boris Godunov traduced Mussorgsky’s original, there has been a tendency to forget the main question about any opera: does it succeed as musical theatre? In the West Boris Godunov was helped by Chaliapin’s portrayal of the title character. He and his successors (such as Boris Christoff and George London) chose to act the part as strikingly as possible, paying more or less attention to Mussorgsky’s actual notes. This at least gave audiences a good night in the theatre.
For Russians, the issue has always been more complicated, and the interpretation of Boris Godunov was debated from the very beginning, and right through the Soviet period. Tsar Boris Godunov’s story is well-known to educated Russians, telling of his ascension to supreme power at the ‘Time of Troubles’ spanning the turn from the 16th to the 17th centuries. But Mussorgsky’s operatic version of the story has tended to eclipse all others, even for Russians, so that they are almost in the same position as most audiences in the West, for whom Boris Godunov is a story that has always been sung.
Boris Godunov according to playwright Pushkin and historian Karamzin
Nevertheless, Russians know more of the context; Mussorgsky was aware of this and depended on it. His main source for the opera’s libretto was Pushkin’s verse drama Boris Godunov. By the 1890s, the cult of Pushkin as ‘Russia’s greatest poet’ was well established. Hence there would be criticism in literary circles of Tchaikovsky’s lack of faithfulness when making operas from two of the poet’s works, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. But Mussorgsky arguably did Pushkin’s Boris Godunov a favor.
This play, written in 1825 and published in 1831, was daring in putting a Tsar on stage, and the censors banned it from the stage until 1866, just before Mussorgsky chose it as the basis of his libretto. Even then, the play failed in the theatre. Pushkin’s drama consists of 23 short scenes, many of them almost fragmentary, and following each other without obvious logical connection. Pushkin relied heavily on the audience’s prior knowledge of the story. He even recommended to his readers that before reading his play they should skim the final volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State. The first eight volumes of this history were published in 1816, in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic upheavals, when there was much propaganda about the sacred legitimacy of Russia’s rulers. Appointed official historian by the Emperor Alexander I in 1803, Karamzin made history an eminently readable story, and he used it to champion autocracy and the ruling Romanov dynasty. He idealised the old Russia, and did more than anyone to establish the received idea of the Boris Godunov of history, an idea considerably modified by later historians.
Boris, in Karamzin’s view, though legally elected Tsar (election, rather than succession, was unprecedented in Russia) was an illegitimate ruler. Though talented, he was fatally guilty of a dynastic crime, whose consequences brought down the Russian state. The Romantic cliché lurking behind Karamzin’s account is of Boris as a hero-villain, pursued unto death by the avenging ghost of his innocent victim. Karamzin is anachronistic in assuming a ruler such as Boris would have an uneasy conscience over eliminating a dynastic rival. The historian in Karamzin recognised that, with the Romanovs well established on the throne later in the 17th century, political and religious forces conspired to confirm Boris’s guilt and put it in writing. After Boris’s death, Prince Shuisky (who became Tsar after the elimination of Boris’s son), took steps to have the Church canonise the Tsarevich Dmitry, supposedly murdered on Boris’s orders. Thus the weight of religion blackened Boris’s memory. Karamzin himself considered Boris guilty of the Tsarevich’s murder, a bias in the source that is crucial for Pushkin’s play and Mussorgsky’s opera.
Although Karamzin’s History was Pushkin’s main source for his play, Pushkin leaves an impression of the subject very different from Karamzin’s. His choosing to write a historical drama shows Pushkin aligned with preferences of the 1820s, when such subjects were considered ‘worthy of the attention of a thinking man’. But Pushkin’s history is very different from Karamzin’s: it is typical of historical drama of the time, mixing poetry and prose, tragedy and comedy, presenting a wide range of character types, and giving a large role to the crowd. In these respects the play is close to similar ones by Shakespeare, the model Pushkin acknowledges. It is also anti-Romantic in making politics its main interest and omitting any romance or love-interest.
Even more radical is Pushkin’s fragmentation of his story, the sense he conveys that events are driven by confusion, rumour and slander. Unlike Karamzin, who found a guiding force in divine providence, Pushkin largely views the events through observers who only partially understand them, whether members of the crowd or high-placed people surrounding the throne. ‘We watch mostly those who watch’, an authority on Pushkin has written. Pushkin’s contemporaries complained that the play has no heroes. The author gives a sense that the further the story unravels, the less any story can be trusted, and the more solitary feel both the audience and the characters.
An act of bravado to create such an opera
It was an act of bravado on Mussorgsky’s part (as Russian music expert Richard Taruskin points out) to make an opera libretto from such a play. Taruskin sees the choice as typical of ‘realism’, an aesthetic Mussorgsky shared with his fellow-members of the nationalist ‘Five’, the ‘Mighty handful’ of composers. Mussorgsky in his treatment of the Pushkin material would test his ‘scientific’ theory that music could portray emotion and character by meticulously objective imitation of ‘natural’ conversational speech – what he called ‘simple human speech’. In 1868 Mussorgsky had workshopped this method in its most radical form with his unfinished setting of Gogol’s The Marriage, an ‘experiment in dramatic music in prose’.
The Pushkinian origins of Mussorgsky’s libretto for Boris Godunov are an important aspect of what The Record Guide in 1950 called ‘the vicissitudes of this great opera…one of the most curious and complicated stories in musical history’. An even more important puzzle concerns the relationship between Mussorgsky’s first and second versions of his opera. The first version, completed in 1869, but turned down by St. Petersburg’s theatres and never performed, can be fairly confidently reconstructed as Mussorgsky wrote it. This original version was taken entirely from Pushkin, except for the hallucination scene where Boris imagines he sees the image of the bloodstained child coming towards him. Mussorgsky made the libretto by throwing out every scene in Pushkin in which Boris himself doesn’t appear. Mussorgsky’s focus, in this first version, is on Boris, a psychological study of his lonely isolation
The seven scenes of this original version begin with the lead up to Boris’s coronation and end with his death. This death is preceded by the scene in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, which begins with the crowd uncomprehendingly discussing the anathema pronounced on the Pretender, the ‘false Dmitry’, and pleading for food. In the meantime they torment a ‘holy fool’, who when Boris emerges from the Cathedral, confronts him with his crime. Instead of ordering his punishment, Boris asks the ‘yurodivy’ to pray for him, as such holy fools were expected to do. But the fool refuses to pray for one he calls a ‘herod Tsar’, a child murderer. Left alone, the holy fool laments the fate of Russia.
The death scene comes next. Boris bursts in, interrupting the boyars’ discussion. The Tsar is in the grip of another hallucination just like the one Shuisky witnessed and is in the midst of describing. Boris is confronted by the hermit Pimen, who narrates the final scene of the chronicle he is writing, about the miraculous wonders occurring at the tomb of the murdered Tsarevich. This precipitates Boris’s collapse. He entrusts the kingdom to his son and dies.
The ‘St. Basil’s Scene’, up to the holy fool’s lament, belongs only in the first version – Mussorgsky’s revision removed it, keeping only an episode with the holy fool, moving it to the new concluding scene in Kromy Forest. This revision made the opera diverge much further from Pushkin.
'...finding the potential for realism..."
To achieve his ‘realist’ aims, even in the first version, Mussorgky had to find the potential for realism in Pushkin’s prose-poetry, by ‘roughing it up’ into declamatory prose amplified by music. Mussorgsky’s dissatisfaction with the results was part of the reason for the revision. A committee rejected the first version of Boris Godunov for performance – not, it is now thought, because of fears of the censors’ attitude. Mussorgsky would not have attempted the subject in the first place if he had not known of the lifting of the ban Tsar Nicholas I had imposed on portraying the Tsar in an opera. Nor would he have undertaken the extensive revisions without being confident they would lead to acceptance. The committee’s main reservations were that there were no significant female roles and no love interest. Mussorgsky started his revision by composing the Polish scenes containing the intrigues between the Pretender and Marina Mniszek, the daughter of a Polish magnate (these scenes were in Pushkin, but of course they do not involve Boris in person). But Mussorgsky soon extended his changes to many other parts of the opera as well, and in the process changed its structure and emphasis, deleting one scene, St. Basil’s, transferring some of it to a new concluding scene in Kromy Forest, and adding the two Polish scenes.
Mussorgsky’s changes seem to have been influenced by the reaction of friends and fellow-musicians to his first version. That was essentially a sung play in recitative dialogue, with ‘set’ numbers, such as Varlaam’s song in the inn, only when such songs occurred in Pushkin. When Mussorgsky played and sang his opera at a party in 1870, some of the guests found the peasants in Boris to be ‘bouffe’ [comic] while others saw tragedy. Mussorgsky feared that his naturalistic methods would suggest comedy, which is the medium in which they would be expected. To make clear what the genre of the opera was, he decided to elevate its tone, making it unambiguously a tragedy.
Already in the first version Mussorgsky had gone far beyond confining himself strictly to the patterns of speech, as in The Marriage. He realised the musical effect was incoherent, and – perhaps unconsciously – that the deliberate fragmentariness of Pushkin’s play gave him the opportunity to put music in the gaps and thus knit the drama together. Boris makes fairly systematic use of motifs, to suggest what is unstated in words. Perhaps the most important of these motifs is associated with the Tsarevich Dmitry; Mussorgsky uses it, with irony and ambiguity, to refer to the ‘real’ Dmitry, the false Dmitry, and to Boris’s appalled visions and conscience-stricken memories of the Tsarevich. Mussorgsky’s use of music to bind together and provide interpretations of a suggestive but open-ended text has a parallel in Alban Berg’s treatment of Büchner’s Wozzeck fragments.
But Mussorgsky evidently reached the conclusion that he had not given Boris enough of the fully-embodied stage presence Pushkin had failed to give him. The re-workings this imposed on Mussorgsky were most extensive for the scenes set in the Tsar’s Kremlin quarters. Mussorgsky told the critic Stasov he had ‘perpetrated an arioso’ for Boris, the monologue ‘I have attained the highest power’. He made the music more lyrical, the melodies different, more developed and self-sufficient, and he also altered Pushkin’s text much more radically than before, adding references to Boris’s crime and the popular discontent feeding on it.
More revisions
But the revisions did not stop there. It may be exaggerating to say that the people, in the first version of the opera, are little more than a colourful backdrop to the inner conflict of the Tsar, but the revised version makes the crowd much more prominent. Mussorgsky decided to end the opera, not with the death of Boris, but with the chaotic scene around the Pretender’s army in Kromy Forest, showing the people in active revolt against a criminal tsar. This change of emphasis derives, according to Richard Taruskin, from the writings of Ivan Kostomarov, a populist historian. The 1860s saw the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II (reversing the servitude begun under Boris Godunov). The people moved into the foreground as part of a growing Russian sense of national identity.
It has been argued that, in the revised version of Mussorgsky’s opera, conflict between the Tsar and the People, shown as the driving force of history, replaces Boris’s nemesis in his own guilty conscience (as symbolised in the St. Basil’s scene). This interpretation of Taruskin’s runs dangerously close to that of Soviet music critics who enlisted Mussorgsky as a populist and progressive materialist. Admittedly in his second version of the opera Mussorgsky went further towards the view that a people’s history belongs to and is determined in the people, but in general his historical outlook (not unlike Pushkin’s in the play) remains pessimistic and mystical: Kromy Forest is chaos, and the revised version of the opera ends with the holy fool, in the snow, bewailing the fate of Russia.
Mussorgsky’s revision certainly made Boris Godunov more conventionally operatic. The crowd is more prominent, but the music is less radical, and in place of recitative for multiple characters it puts big choral set-pieces. Musical contrasts are much greater in that the main characters’ monologues, now more arioso-like, are surrounded by a profusion of genre pieces, like the Innkeeper’s Song of the Duck, and the children’s clapping game in the royal apartments, even an orchestral polonaise for a ballet in the Polish scenes.
Different versions
Soon after Rimsky-Korsakov made his very interventionist changes to Mussorgsky’s opera, controversy began over how faithful his version was to Mussorgsky’s intentions. But what were those intentions? In 1928 musicologist Pavel Lamm made available in Russia for the first time an edition enabling study of the differences between the 1869 original and the revised version premiered in 1874. The critic Glebov (Boris Asafiev) developed the view that Mussorgsky’s initial version was a much stronger opera. The revisions were forced on him by dull-witted producers, musicians, and bureaucrats. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting.
Unfortunately performance tradition, even in Russia, has confused the issue, especially by reintroducing the St. Basil’s scene into the ‘revised’ version, from which Mussorgsky had excluded it for very substantial reasons (this scene had also been added to the Rimsky version, in a ‘Rimsky’ scoring by Ippolitov-Ivanov). Even the recent recording by Kirov forces under Valery Gergiev, presenting in the same CD box ‘complete’ versions of each of the 1869 and 1874 versions (a fascinating and instructive comparison), is not rigorous enough, judged by the consensus of modern scholarship, in keeping out of each version material that doesn’t belong there. But Gergiev does avoid the solecism of including the St. Basil’s scene in the revised version.
Ironically, it had also been excluded by Rimsky-Korsakov. Everyone should be grateful to him for having established this opera as theatrically and musically acceptable, and available to the world’s audiences. That, surely, is what Mussorgsky would have wanted. Rimsky’s version became the vehicle for unforgettable singing actors in the title role, Chaliapin and others. Many who saw it were amazed and fascinated, like the old lady in 1874. But Boris Godunov is more than just a great role. Its multifarious dimensions expanded the idea of what opera can be.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2003