Modest Musorgsky: Boris Godunov

• The State Academic Bolshoi Theater, Moscow

• Production Premiere: April 25, 2007

• Performances Attended: September 14 and 15, 2008

• Conductor: Alexander Vedernikov

• Director: Alexander Sokurov Set Design: Yuri Kuper

• Costume Design: Pavel Kaplevich

• Lighting Design: Damir Ismagilov

• Boris: Mikhail Kazakov and Taras Shtonda

• Prince Shuisky: Maxim Paster

• Pimen: Alexander Naumenko

• Grigory/The Imposter: Yevgeny Akimov

• Marina Mniszek: Elena Manistina

• Rangoni: Pyotr Migunov

For this wholly new production of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, conductor Alexander Vedernikov and film director Alexander Sokurov chose the 1871 redaction of the opera, with nine scenes in five acts. The major differences from the more commonly performed versions are a smaller orchestra and the omission of the Kromy scene. In an interview printed in the book-length program, Vedernikov characterizes the 1871 redaction as the earliest version to feature both the scene at the Polish court and the mass scene at the Cathedral of St. Basil, which punctuate the vast emotional range of the opera. In Vedernikov's view, supported by Sokurov, the chronological and musical overlaps between the scenes at St. Basil and Kromy make them mutually exclusive, a fact unappreciated in the 1948 production (which continues in the Bolshoi repertory, having been fully restored in June 2006). Instead, this version ends with the death of Tsar Boris in his private quarters, in the company of his young heir and a handful of boyars (fig. 1).

At first glance, the 1871 version is a much more dramatic work, focused more on the protagonist and his personal struggles than on the broader historical and orchestral panoramas familiar to operagoers, especially in Russia. It is in all respects smaller in conception and ambition and, shorn of the Kromy scene, likely to seem anticlimactic or even fragmentary. These same qualities allow the details of the musical and dramatic design to emerge with greater relief. Instead of an epic panorama, the opera presents a clinical analysis of what Sokurov calls "the mechanisms of power," in which power is a decidedly "human creation" and is "exercised by people."¹ The music not only survives this paring down, it flourishes. The question is whether the refreshingly spare and clear music is enhanced or obscured by Sokurov's staging.

Figure 1.

Boris Godunov. Photo by Damir Yusupov, appears courtesy of the Bolshoi Theatre.

Sokurov's comments on his first staging of an opera betray some of the same contradictions as his statements on his films. Despite his often experimental use of optics and montage, Sokurov prefers to claim that cinema can be considered an art only insofar as it successfully imitates painting or literature (by which he usually means the canonical works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Adopting a similarly reverential attitude to opera, Sokurov has approached Boris Godunov with the overriding concern that he remain true to "the ethical and aesthetic principles" of the medium, which he understands in a fundamentally conservative and essentializing manner:

Of particular importance for the Russian opera tradition, it seems to me, is an evolutionary, evolving attitude to a work. After all, the majority of Russian operas in one way or another touch upon history, the historical core, where it is very dangerous to violate ethical conventions because then the very gist of the work starts to change, and the music too—it sounds different if suddenly, via the scenography or the costumes, we effect an abrupt break with a certain historical quality, essence, the correlation of events in time.

(41)

There is, at first glance, little hint of irony in this studied anachronism, and the only challenge to traditionalist Russian tastes might be a fleeting glimpse of a nude Marina Mniszek in an ornate mirror. Sokurov regards "the entire story of the murdered tsarevich" to be "only Boris's projection onto his own life" (41), and one could say that, by underscoring the psychological drama of Boris Godunov and his son, Sokurov has read the opera in the vein of the realist novels of Musorgsky's day. In contrast to Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 staging of Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera House in London...