Opera Modest Mussorgsky "Boris Godunov" opera in four acts (original 1869 version) World famous Mariinsky Ballet and Opera - established 1783
Running time: 4 hours 05 minutes
Schedule for Modest Mussorgsky "Boris Godunov" opera in four acts (original 1869 version) 2022
Composer: Modest Mussorgsky Principal Chorus Master: Andrei Petrenko Musical Director: Maestro Valery Gergiev Musical Preparation: Irina Soboleva Director: Graham Vick
Orchestra: Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra
Performed in Russian
World premiere: 27 January 1874, Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, Russia
Premiere of this production: 25 May 2012, Mariinsky Theatre
Mussorgsky
Boris Godunov
Musical
Director and Conductor: Valery Gergiev NEW PRODUCTION Mariinsky Theatre As part of the 20th Stars
of the White Nights
Music Festival
Opera in seven scenes Original 1869 version Stage Production by Graham Vick Co-production with the Festspielhaus,
Baden-Baden Musical Director and Conductor: Valery Gergiev
Modest Musorgsky began composing Boris Godunov in October 1868.
The work advanced at the most prodigious rate. The composer needed just
over one year to complete the clavier and the score of the first
version by December 1869. In the autumn of 1870 Musorgsky
presented the completed work to the Board of the Imperial Theatres
in St Petersburg. The music and theatre committee, however, which
included the theatre’s maestro di cappella, rejected it and returned
it to the composer. As Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov subsequently wrote, “The innovative nature and
unusual quality of the music left the honourable committee
in a quandary, and they upbraided the composer, among other things,
for the lack of any significant female role...” The dramaturgy
of the opera in the first version, it must be said, also
drew serious misgivings from Musorgsky’s friends. The critic
Vladimir Stasov chided the composer for “narrowing”
Pushkin’s tragedy to just Tsar Boris’ own
personal drama. As it transpired, this version of the opera was
first staged at the Mariinsky Theatre as late as 1997.
By June 1872 Musorgsky had written a second version of the
opera — without the “Scene near St Basil’s Cathedral” but with the
“Polish Act” and a new final scene (“A Forest near Kromy”).
By the time of the premiere (27 January 1874, at the
Mariinsky Theatre) a clavier of the opera had been published, which
contained the music of both previous versions. This is why there are
three versions of Boris Godunov, and all by the composer.
After the composer’s own versions there followed others by different
composers, the most famous of which is that
by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov that has but
a mere handful of bars that were not amended in some way. Other
versions include those by Pavel Lamm (score and
clavier after the composer’s originals, 1928), Dmitry
Shostakovich (instrumentation of Lamm’s clavier, 1940) and
British conductor and music historian David
Lloyd-Jones (a unified version of the composer’s score
and clavier, 1974 and 1975).
At the Mariinsky-Kirov Theatre the opera has been staged
on numerous occasions, beginning in 1874 — a total
of ten different productions! The production by Vsevolod
Meyerhold (1911, designed by Alexander
Golovin), in which the role of Boris was performed
by Fyodor Chaliapin naturally went down
in the annals of Russian operatic history. In the Soviet era,
Boris was tackled by the acclaimed directors Sergei
Radlov (1928 and 1941, designed by Vladimir
Dmitriev and Fyodor Fyodorovsky),
Ilya Shlepyanov (1949) and Boris
Pokrovsky (1986). The 1869 version was first staged at the
Mariinsky Theatre in 1997 by Alexander
Adabashian then later, in 2002, by Viktor
Kramer together with designer George
Tsypin.
Boris Godunov is the favourite Russian opera
of Graham Vick, who first collaborated with the Mariinsky
Theatre in the 1990s with Sergei Prokofiev’s War and
Peace. Vick is staging the composer’s original 1869 version. Both
the stage director and the designer Stuart Nunn, are keeping
the details about the production under closely guarded wraps.
Graham Vick on the opera’s
ideas: “In the 16th century the All-Russian autocrat Ivan the
Terrible asked for the hand of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Soon
thereafter Holinshed published his historic chronicles in which Shakespeare
discovered the story of one of Scotland’s kings — Macbeth. Three
hundred years later, Karamzin was to write his History of the Russian
State , from which Pushkin borrowed the plot for his play in the
Shakespearean spirit — Boris Godunov. And yet again dim and distant history
was re-evaluated as a universal drama. Existentialist searches
of the 19th century engendered a swamp of nihilistic works that
depicted the human life cycle as one that was preordained to meet with
disaster. From Wagner’s Ring to Musorgsky’s stunning work — Boris,
a man moved by highly complex claims and aspirations, a man
obsessed with the need for eternal life and who created so much —
we come to negation, disappointment and devastation. Pimen tries
to attain immortality not through his pupil Otrepiev but through his
‘baby’ — his Chronicle; Boris seeks eternal life in his son
to whom he bequeaths the throne that brought him himself nothing but
fear and despair. For whose sake? For Fyodor’s or for his own? The church
tries to humanise itself through its union with Boris — aren’t
Otrepiev’s unmasking and the timely requiem for Dmitry just a political
manoeuvre the aim of which is to consolidate worldly power? Great
writers and composers base their works on stories of old, but seeing
the past and foreseeing the future is something they can only
do through the prism of their own experience. This stage
interpretation of Musorgsky’s opera means searching for a theatre
idiom that makes sense in our time; a dialogue that can show us
how we are both like and unlike those distant times.”
Schedule for Modest Mussorgsky "Boris Godunov" opera in four acts (original 1869 version) 2022
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