Patrick Bade
Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov, the Great Russian Opera

Patrick Bade | Mussorgsky Boris Godunov, the Great Russian Opera | 05.08.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Well, we get to Boris Godunov this afternoon, which by general consensus, this is the greatest of all Russian operas and indeed one of the greatest operas of any nationality. But the question is, which Boris Godunov we talking about, because there are several versions. Mussorgsky himself wrote two quite different versions. The first version in 1869 was considered even by his friends, too gloomy, too dark, not enough contrast. So he made changes, he made major auditions. In particular, he added the Polish Act, which introduces some festive dance music and an absolutely gorgeous love duet. But even then, many even of his supporters considered that Mussorgsky was a bit of a rough diamond. I think you can see that in this portrait on the left hand side by Repin, very famous portrait was actually painted the day before he died. As you can probably see in his face, he was a severe alcoholic and he was in hospital actually, and he was on the waggon.

But it was the day that the Tsar was assassinated and he fell off the waggon and that killed him the next day. But anyway, I’ll talk more about that portrait incidentally, in a week’s time when I talk about Russian portraits. Anyway, he was considered, as I said, to be a kind of rough diamond that needed polishing and various composers attempted to do that, initially Rimsky-Korsakov, and then later Shostakovitch. And it was in the Rimsky version of Boris Godunov that the opera really conquered the world in the early 1900s with the great Feodor Chaliapin, one of the greatest singers of the 20th century in the title role. He just wowed audiences everywhere where he played in the role. Now today, most critics will say, oh, well, Rimsky was very well-meaning, but by smoothing the rough edges, he actually, it was detrimental to the opera. I’m not really convinced by this, I’ve yet to hear a version of Boris Godunov in the original version with the original orchestration that has really convinced me.

The last time I saw Boris was at Covent Garden. It must have been, I think just before lockdown. And it was in a very strict production going back to his original 1869 version. And I must say I found it extremely boring. And it was partly ‘cause it was a very boring production and partly 'cause the singers were boring. And what you really need, of course, in Boris Godunov, what you must have is a very charismatic, exciting singer for the title role who’s really going to put it across. If you don’t have that, it’s just a complete non-starter. In fact, the role is in terms of length is not enormous. And Boris is only on stage for 42 minutes of what is about three hour opera. In that sense, it’s a bit like where the most interesting character, the important character is the Marshal. And she is also only on stage for less than half the length of the opera.

But I think probably the reason I have yet to be converted or convinced by the original score is that I’ve never really heard a good performance of it, either live or on record. The really great performances I’ve heard both live and on record, were of the Rimsky version. And now I’m going to give you a chance to judge yourselves 'cause I’m going to play you the same excerpt from the famous Coronation scene. And we are going to hear it first in a relatively recent Russian performance conducted by a conductor called Fedoseyev. And then we’ll follow that with a recording of the same music in the Rimsky version.

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Now it’s terrifically exciting music, you know, with that simulation of the tolling bells and so on, it should have you on the edge of your seat. It doesn’t, for me in that performance, but see what you think of this performance. This is conducted by the Russian conductor, Issay Dobrowen. And for me, he’s one of the heroes of my talk tonight. And this recording for me is indisputably the best recording ever made of the opera in all sorts of ways. It’s one of those rare recordings where everything, everything went right, the casting and so on. And it’s his monument.

I mean, he’s an interesting character who’s born in Novgorod, fled from the Russian Revolution, established quite a career in Europe, but of course as he was of Jewish origin, he fled from Germany in '33. He was in Norway and it was actually who saved his life by getting permission for him to leave Norway and go to Sweden where he sat out the war. And then at the end of the war, well, this early 1950s, he made this recording and then died soon after. So it’s this recording that he’s remembered for. As I said, it’s really his monument. And see what you think of this. You’ve got the slightly different instrumentation, various little exotic touches that Rimsky-Korsakov introduced. But it’s really, I think the incredibly vital and dynamic conducting that makes this so wonderful.

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I think that’s all to do with the pacing, the way it builds up that makes it so exciting. Well, opera was a rather exotic elitist import to Russia in the 18th century. And initially it was Italian and French composers and Cimarosa and so on who were imported to Russia to produce this elitist form of aristocratic entertainment. But in the 19th century, Russian composers wanted to establish a national school of opera. And the founder, the founding father of Russian Opera is Glinka, who you see here on the screen. He wrote two operatic masterpieces, a Life for the Tsar in 1836 and Russlan and Ludmila in 1842. And these two operas, they’re the kind of bedrock of Russian opera. And they established the two forms of opera that were practised by the composers I mentioned last week called the Mighty Handful.

In particular, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, of course the three. And all three wrote operas that were, I mean, Life for the Tsar is a historical epic. And Russlan and Ludmila is a sort of whimsical, folkloric, fantastic opera. So these are two basic genres of Russian opera in the 19th century. Obviously Prince Igor and Boris Godunov belong to the category of the epic historic. But there’s another factor in this, in the '60s, and that is Verdi and his opera La forza del destino. He was invited by the Tsar to Russia and he was paid a phenomenal amount of money to go to St. Petersburg. This was a big epic journey. If you go to his house at Sant'Agata, you can actually see the carriage in which he made. This is just pre, I suppose railways all the way to Russia. So he actually went all the way from Parma to St. Petersburg in this little carriage. And as I said, he was paid an immense sum of money for this. And this was really resented by Russian composers.

First of all, you know, this foreign composer was invited and given so much money. And so in a way, Prince Igor and Boris Godunov, they were conceived as anti Italian, anti Verde. But my theory is that their relationship with this opera was really quite complex. And in some ways they were taking it as a model. 'Cause La forza del destino, is an enormously, it’s great big sprawling episodic opera with all sorts of different elements, sort of earthy comic elements as well as dramatic elements and crowd scenes and so on. So I think in its form, it actually had a crucial influence on both Prince Igor and Boris Godunov.

Incidentally, I mean, I’ll do a little plug here because it’s being performed this year at the Palmer Festival in October. And I will be taking a group to Parma in October, and we will see La forza del destino. And while I’m at it, I’ll do a plug for my other two trips for Kirker, that’s K-I-R-K-E-R, I’m doing a trip to Vienna. There are still places I know, that’s 13th to 17th of June. And I’m doing a trip for Kirker again to Munich. And that’s 22nd to 28th of August.

So like Quincy Gore, it starts with a prologue. And we have a crowd scene. And the crowd really represents the Russian people, the great Russian people. And they’re complaining and lamenting because Russia is in a terrible state and it doesn’t have a powerful leader. They’re hoping that Boris Godunov will take over and give Russia the kind of leadership it needs. Now I’m sticking largely to the recording made by Issay Dobrowen. As I said, it was made in nearly 1950s. It was actually not made in Russia. It was made in Paris with a French orchestra. But if you can’t have a Russian orchestra, I think a French orchestra is probably the, of that period was the best substitute. There are actually certain similarities, particularly in the sort of in raunchy sound of the wind instruments.

I always feel that French orchestras of that period, that the horns and the rasp they sound like they’ve been smoking . They’ve got this rather raspy quality to them, which is quite similar to the sound of Russian orchestras of the same period. And the chorus is a genuine Russian chorus. It’s a white Russian chorus. In this recording it’s a chorus made up of Russian emigres in Paris. So has a very authentic sound to it.

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The monk Chekhov comes out of the monastery to address the people and also to pray that Boris could be persuaded to take on the throne of Russia. Now Boris is in opera with no less than five major roles for the base voice. My friend Erica, who I think might be listening to this in Greece, she wrote to me recently that her father, who was Russian, had a wonderful bass voice. So she’ll be in heaven, I think, in a good performance. So she should buy this wonderful performance, the Dobrowen one, which incidentally has been reissued on the budget label of Naxos. So you should be able to find it quite easily and quite cheaply. And on that performance, the five roles are divided between two very fine singers. There’s a Finish bass, Kim Borg, who we’re going to hear now, and the great Bulgarian bass, Boris Christoff, who takes on the title role. So here again is, this is Chekhov’s address, praying to God that Boris will take over the country, sung here by Kim Borg.

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Voice of wonderful velvety smoothness. So Boris is persuaded to accept the throne against his better judgement . We go back to this very splendid, exciting coronation street scene.

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Boris enters and amidst all this very noisy celebration of jolly bells and so on, he has a moment of quiet introspection. He’s very uneasy. Now Boris is essentially a failure as a Russian dictator for the simple reason that unlike Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and Putin and all the dreadful Tsars, his weakness is, his fatal flaw is that he actually has a conscience and he knows that he’s taking over the throne illegally after the murder of the child who was the true heir to the throne. So we’re going to hear the great Boris Christoff. I suppose after Chaliapin, he was probably the most highly reputed performer of the role of Boris in the 20th century.

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I was lucky enough to hear Christoff in that role in London in the early 1970s, and it made an unforgettable impression. He’s one of those singers who completely dominate the stage, dominate the theatre, had an extraordinarily charismatic presence. And that’s what you really need for this role. So that brings us to the end of the prologue. And in act one we start off in a monastery with the monk Pimen. And he is writing a chronicle of the history of Russia. And he’s chronicling all the disastrous things that have happened in the five years since Boris took the throne. The economy is crashed, sounds familiar. The hunger and popular dissatisfaction. So this is another base role. And in the recording of Dobrowen, it’s actually again Boris Christoff who takes over the role.

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Sleeping beside him is a young novice called Gregory. And he wakes up and Pimen tells him the story of how the Tsesarevich, the young heir to this throne was brutally murdered at the age of seven, exactly 10 years ago. And Gregory, who’s ambitious and dissatisfied with his life in the monastery, something clicks, he thinks, oh yes, Tsesarevich was 17, I’m 17. I am going to claim to be the Tsesarevich. And in the next scene in act one, he has left the monastery and the scene takes place in on the border with Lithuania. And he’s hoping to nip across the border and then announce that he is the lost Tsesarevich. This scene enables Mussorgsky to bring in comic elements. I think it’s actually inspired by similar scenes, in La forza del destino. And we meet the very earthy character or Vallam. He’s really a equivalent of Prince Golitsky, who I was talking to you about last time. He’s a monk, but he’s a drunken no good monk. And he gets drunk and he sings this song in praise of the brutality of Ivan the Terrible and how Ivan the Terrible completely destroyed the town of Kazan. We’re going hear it here in a historic recording sung by Feodor Chaliapin.

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Next scene is in the royal palace. And it’s the great scene for Boris. As I said, the six years of his reign have not gone well. There’s hunger and rebellion, and he himself is constantly haunted by the thought of the crime, the murder of the Tsesarevich that brought into the throne. A character called Shuski arrives with news that a pretender, he’s proclaiming himself to be the Tsesarevich. It’s of course Gregory in Lithuania. And he’s reigning, he’s gathering troops and is advancing on Moscow. And so Boris says to him, are you really sure that this guy is not the Tsesarevich? And are you absolutely sure that the Tsesarevich was murdered?

So Shuski describes the murder of the child in very graphic terms. And Boris has a complete meltdown. He has a total breakdown with horror and guilt at the description of the bloody corpse of the child. And in his great monologue, the clocks in, as the clock strikes, he has a vision. He thinks he can see the ghost of the bloody with the child covered in blood coming towards him. As I said, he has an absolute meltdown. This is one of the most extraordinary scenes in all of opera. And I’m going to play you an absolutely incomparable version with Chaliapin.

I’ve heard this so many times and I’ve played it in so many lectures, and every time I hear it, it completely amazes me. I just think, how could he do this? How could he go over the top like this in a studio in front of a microphone. And in the theatre, it always produced an incredible impact. He first performed it in Paris, at the Paris Opera in 1908, it was an opera that had never been performed in Paris before. So it was unfamiliar to French audiences. They weren’t really sure of what was going on, what was the plot, what was really happening. And of course, in those days they didn’t have surtitles and nobody in the audience would’ve understood Russian. And at the moment where Chaliapin reacts where he sees the ghost of the child, his acting was so vivid that it actually caused a panic in the audience.

People were climbing onto chairs 'cause they wanted to see what he was reacting to. And they thought that really just some horrible disaster had actually happened backstage in the theatre. Well, in this recording, you won’t have any trouble in recognising the moment where the clock starts working and where he sees the ghost of the child. And it’s so modern. When you think this was written in the 1860s and it has to be half sung, half spoken, very, very, very difficult to bring off. It really needs a singing actor of genius to bring it off.

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Next we have the so-called Polish Act that Mussorgsky was persuaded to add to the opera to give it a greater popular appeal. And I’m very glad he did. And I certainly resent it when that opera is, that act is excluded as it was in the current production at Covent Garden. Now the order of these scenes can change in different productions. Chaliapin insisted that the opera should end with his death scene. And the very fact, I suppose, that you can actually shuffle the scenes is a symptom of the fact that the opera has a very kind of, it lacks really as Prince Igor does. I mean, both operas are really like a series of scenes. It doesn’t have the unity that you would expect from great opera. It’s kind of episodic. Anyway, here is the absolutely gorgeous love duet that finishes the Polish scene. One of those extended Russian melodies, gorgeously sensuous melodies. Of course we heard lots of them in Prince Igor last week and superbly sung here by the appropriately Polish Mezzo, Eugenia Zareska.

You can see she was a beautiful woman with a gorgeous, gorgeous voice. And she had a career, a substantial career in France. I’m not quite sure why she didn’t become more famous internationally. But her partner was somebody who was certainly going to become very famous. This is Nicolai Gedda, the very, very young Nicolai Gedda in his first major recorded role, voice sounding gloriously fresh and so ardent. He was somebody who’s, I dunno, he’s particularly good in caddish roles. 'Cause obviously the false Dimitri, Gregory is a bit of a cad. My very dear friend Fiona worked with him at the Edinburgh Festival and she said in real life he really was a bit of a cad actually and a ladies man. And he seems to be particularly good wonderful Pinkerton in Madden Butterfly and the Seducer in Samuel Barbara’s opera. Vanessa is also one of his great roles.

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Next I’m going to give you a glimpse of the great Chaliapin in live performance. When the technology became available in the late 1920s with the invention of electrical recording, HMV recorded big chunks of live performances of Chaliapin at Covent Garden. They knew this was something unique and historic and should really be recorded for the future. It’s an exciting performance. It’s a strange one. It’s trilingual. Chaliapin of course sings in Russian. The singer who sings at the Tsesarevich, it’s a soprano role, was an Italian, Margarita Carrozio, She sings in Italian. And the chorus, I mean, in England, I suppose, French was the all purpose foreign language. So the chorus sing in French. But it, to me, it’s absolutely amazing to be able to hear Chaliapin on stage in this great performance.

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Chaliapin of course nothing could be allowed to upstage him. And that was the final scene of the opera. But it’s usually these days, well always now I suppose, it ends with the lament of the idiot or the simpleton. Very moving lament for Russia. It’s a lament for Russia. And it seems tragically of course, more relevant than ever. Here sung by the great Ivan Kozlovsky.

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Well, I’m going to finish here and open up the questions.

Q&A and Comments

An opera tour in St. Petersburg, I’ve seen another opera about him. The story , know it’s by Rimsky-Korsakov, it’s not by Mussorgsky. Yeah, opera is certainly a very, I think it’s in Russia, it’s a more kind of essential popular entertainment than it is in the West. Khovanshchina, yes, that is by, that may be what you saw, that is by Mussorgsky. The meta perversion and amazing production with fantastic performers. You can see it met on demand. Lucky you to see it inside the Kremlin. That must have been extraordinary. Khovanshchina, English national opera some years ago when the, well without the chorus, that would be a bit sad. Chorus plays such an important role really in all these Russian operas.

Tarkowski version is amazing on DVD. We have a Boris who is taken over the country. I’m not quite sure what you you mean by that. Because as I said, I don’t think Putin is a Boris because Boris had a conscience. And I don’t think Putin, he’s pretty ruthless. I don’t think he’s got much of a conscience. Yes, it is clear why Boris does, because he knows that it’s tainted because of the murder of the true heir to the throne. The Slava, Slava. Yes, it’s a traditional, I think Russian thing. I think they’re both Mussorgsky are using a traditional theme.

Q: Would you consider a Pinza one of the top Boris singers? A: I do have that recording. He sang it at the Met. Of course, he sang it in Italian. He didn’t sing it in Russian. I need to listen to it again. I recently read it. I mean, I love Pinza. He’s my absolute favourite base. The first time I heard that, I wasn’t satisfied. But I think I need to have another go at it. And I’m afraid when it comes to Russian stresses in Slavic languages, I’m not going to be there for you, I’m afraid.

Glad you liked it, Annette. And I’m very happy that you like my choice of recordings. I do think an awful lot about that when I put these lectures together. If you are confused, Abigail, so yes, it doesn’t really connect to the overall plot. It is confusing. Boris frequently given in English. English before, I dunno. Do you know that I saw it in English at ENO and it was in a much praised performance with a very fine singer, John Tomlinson. I admire him hugely, but at the end of the performance, I thought, do you know, I don’t think I ever want to see this opera again unless somebody can dig up Chaliapin or Boris Christoff.

But later in the run, the role was taken over by an Israeli based baritone called Gidon Saks. And I would say that next to Christoff, that was the greatest performance I’ve ever seen. He was tremendous. He was absolutely amazing. He had no inhibitions. That’s what you need. He could cry. He could laugh. He just gave it his all. So again, a really wonderful singer, and I’m not quite sure why he didn’t have a much bigger career. Yes, does Ann also correcting my… I’m never going to get it right with the stresses, I’m afraid in Slavic languages. Thank you all very much, and I’m glad you liked the voices.

And so next week or next yes, Wednesday, we’re on to Ivan the Terrible. Thanks. Bye everybody.