Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure by Walsh Stephen

Author:Walsh, Stephen [Walsh, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780385350488
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

By the time Musorgsky put pen to paper on his own new opera, late in October 1868, he had both Lohengrin and parts of the first act of The Maid of Pskov in his mind’s ear. Wagner was perhaps a negative influence, a trigger rather than a model, but Rimsky-Korsakov’s work must have set him thinking along musical lines, and may even have been a factor in his decision to compose Boris Godunov. The similarities were obvious enough. Here in Pushkin was a monarch obsessed with power, fearful and paranoid, with blood on his hands, a deep love of family in his heart. As in Mey, the personal factor played against a broad historical canvas, including a handful of crowd scenes, slender in content but suggestive for a composer prepared to take the hint and expand. This would mean, of course, departing from Pushkin’s text, whereas it was a mere three months since Musorgsky had been explaining to Shestakova how, by setting Marriage as it stood, he would “fix Gogol in his place and the actor in his place, that is … say it musically such that you couldn’t say it in any other way and say it as Gogol’s characters wish to speak.”14 But then Marriage had, by his own admission, been an experiment, and one which—already in August—he had confessed to Rimsky-Korsakov ran the risk of “a monotony of intonation.” The same day he had described it to Nikolsky as a “preparation.”15 One might see it as a necessary discipline, like life classes as a way of learning to draw; the student won’t always be drawing human bodies, but the technical study is at once purifying and enriching, in due course enabling work not envisaged by the discipline.

In 1868 Pushkin’s Boris Godunov had never been staged, and there were some who regarded it as unstageable. Though clearly modelled in some respects on Shakespeare’s history plays, and poetically and linguistically rich in the same kind of way, it seems studiously to avoid crucial aspects of Shakespearean drama. For one thing, the title character appears in only six of the twenty-three scenes in the play as published, and in two of these his appearance is fleeting. Moreover, the dramatic texture is loose, not unlike a comic strip, in which the narrative is laid out in a series of discrete images, and the sequence of events can be hard to discern, unless, like Pushkin’s presumably intended audience, you already know (from Karamzin’s history) the salient details.16

You would know, for instance, that Boris Godunov was the brother-in-law of Ivan the Terrible’s feeble-minded son, Tsarevich Fyodor, for whom he had acted as regent after Ivan’s death; that Fyodor’s half-brother, the nine-year-old Dmitry, had been found one day in 1591 with his throat cut, and that Boris was widely suspected of having ordered his murder.17 At the start of the play (the year 1598), Fyodor himself has died and Boris is being urged to accept the crown, against his own presumably tactical show of reluctance.

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