For several years I have set up my Xfinity service to record broadcasts of Great Performances at the Met. These are “live” performances by the Metropolitan Opera captured on high-definition video. Usually, that video is first transmitted to select venues, primarily movie theaters, for the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD series. However, the videos are recorded, archived, and then usually turned over at a later date to PBS for the aforementioned broadcast.
This season marked the return of performances by the Metropolitan Opera, and the first of the productions to be transmitted as Live in HD was a new staging of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov produced by Stephen Wadsworth and conducted by Sebastian Weigle. The Met decided to present the version based on the original score, which Mussorgsky completed in 1869. The music subsequently went through a series of revisions, first by Mussorgsky himself in 1872, followed by two revisions by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov in 1896 and 1908. (Dimitri Shostakovich would later take his own approach to revision in 1940.)
The original version consisted of four “Parts;” and Wadsworth’s staging presented them without any intermissions. The overall duration was about two and one-quarter hours. Part 1 consists of two scenes, the first involving an anxious crowd receiving reports of extended deliberations over the choice of a new tsar and second presenting Boris’ coronation. Part 2 is a subplot about Grigorly, a novice in the Chudov Monastery, who imagines that he is the rightful heir to the throne and flees across the Lithuanian border to lay plans for usurping the throne. (In the original version that is the last we see of him.) Part 3 consists of a single scene devoted to “family life” in the Kremlin and Boris’ uneasy head that bears the crown. The final part also consists of two scenes. The first, which takes place before the Cathedral of the Intercession, involves a yuródivyy (Holy Fool), who accuses Boris of having murdered the rightful heir to the throne, followed by the second scene in which Boris dies, apparently of grief and/or guilt.
Mussorgsky wrote his own libretto, drawing upon both Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and the History of the Russian State by Nikolay Karamzin. His decision to structure the opera as a series of disjointed episodes suggests that he was more interested in reflecting on history, rather than narrating it. The subsequent versions of the score and libretto were basically efforts to provide clearer narration. Presumably, Mussorgsky originally assumed that audiences would be familiar with the basic history behind the narrative, while later versions of the libretto compensated for unfamiliarity with that “basic history.”
Thus, appreciating the original version would probably be problematic for contemporary audiences, even those in Russia. Rather than trying to figure out how to provide explanatory background, Wadsworth decided to focus on the wide spectrum of dispositions that unfold during the four Parts of the score. Primarily, this involves the wide gulf between Boris himself and the vast number of Russian people for whom governance was an obtuse mystery. Wadsworth establishes this imbalance of perspectives by bringing the yuródivyy into the very opening scene and making a presence in every subsequent crowd scene. This builds up an inertia when the yuródivyy finally comes face-to-face with Boris, beginning the monarch’s path of steep descent.
From a musical point of view, Boris is at the center of the narrative, even when he is not on stage. Bass René Pape’s realization of this character was so intense that memories of his presence would reverberate even when he was not on stage. Thus, when we see Boris overcome by guilt during Part 4:
we realize that even during his coronation, he was anticipating a tragic conclusion to this reign:
Both images taken from the Metropolitan Opera Web page for this opera production
Wadsworth thus took a mere skeleton of a narrative and realized it through a plot-line of gradual, but inevitable, descent, expressed primarily through development of the title character. As a result, while the libretto itself may be more fragmented than one expects, Wadsworth’s staging was consistently compelling in its coherence. There could not be a better reminder that opera only lives though a healthy engagement between the music and the staging.
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