aug 1, 1874 - Boris Godunov

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Operas on historical themes were popular everywhere in the nineteenth century. This had a special importance in Russia, however, because by the latter half of the nineteenth century it was the only remaining autocratric state in Eurtope. Everywhere else, monarchies had been at least to some degree constitutionalized, promoting varying degrees of democracy. In Russia, however, the tsar's authority was absolute, neither restricted by law nor shared with a parliament. Censorship of public speech and the press was stringent, and open debate about public policy was circumscribed by law. Nowhere else was the content of art subjected to such scrutiny, both by official censors on the lookout for subvesrion and by subversive thinkers on the lookout for ammunition. Nowhere was there less interest in art that would be merely decorative.

Under these circumstances, discussion of political and social issues had to go underground, and liberal opinion usually had to be camouflaged. It was hoped that sophisticated readers would interpret writings, objects, and performances metaphorically, sensitive to their potential contemporary relevance. It was difficult, if not impossible, to say whether or not the subtexts and the values being read into artworks were the artist's own. Interpretation is always a two-way street. In Russia it became a teeming thoroughfare.

Art in Russia sought to be engaged with civic and social issues. Russian aesthetics tended toward teh ethical, and art was valued to the extent that it was seen to do god. This greatly magnified the general drift away from Romanticism toward realism, which regarded beauty with skepticism. It gave outsider artists like Musorgsky, already predisposed toward a countercultural, avant-garde posture, a greatly empowering sense of mision. Moreover, his artistic and aesthetic coming-of-age coincided with the welcome social reforms and easing of censorship during htre reign of Tsar Alexander II. (These social reforms were not to Musorgsky's personal benefit: his family was one of the many petty aristocratic clasn ruined by the emancipation of the serfs.)

Musorgsky evolved his radical new style to subtly address political issues, proclaiming "the past in teh present--there's my task!" He found the ideal subject in Boris Godunov, a little-known play by Pushkin from 1825, composed in deliberate imitation of Shakespeare's histories, particularly the Henry IV playes. Like Shakespeare's King Henry, with his famous soliloquy, "Uneasy lies teh head that wears the crown," Boris Godunov was a troubled ruler. According to widely accepted (but now refuted) tradition, Boris had ascended to the Russian throne in 1598 by having murdered the legitimate heir, the nine-year-old son of Tsar IVan the Terrible. Tormented both by his conscience and by a pretender to teh throne who claimed to be the resurrected child, Boris undergoes a steady decline through the opera, leading tro an early death, as chaos tragically envelops Russia in a "time of torubles."

Pushkin's play dealt with kingship and legitimacy, dangerous subjects to raise in an absolute monarchy. The play was still little known in 1868 because it had been censored until just two years earlier. Nonetheless, it offered Musorgsky what he needed to create a more naturalistic opera: its Shakespearean mixture of poetry and prose, tragedy and comedy; a wide range of character types from beggar to noble, to be characterized by distinctively musicalized speech; a large role for the crowd, which could not be treated as naturalistically as the soloists. The composer evidently did not care that there were hardly any female characters or that Pushkin had only sketchily depicted the one character who might have been suitable for a prima donna role.

Musorgsky originally intended to set every word of Pushkin's Boris Godunov, but in sung form that would have lasted much too long. The play had to be radically scaled down, and only two scenes remained just as Pushkin had written them. Musorgsky otherwise simply threw out every scene in which the title character failed to appear and then mixed in what remained. Almost every line of the oepra's text came from Pushkin, but less than half of Pushkin was used: it was the truth and pretty much nothing but the truth, so to speak, but not the whole truth.

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