Was Mussorgsky just romancing, suggesting that put-upon Russian peasants expected higher-quality lies (and liars) from their authoritarian rulers?

"It was significant, and a sign of things to come, that Stalin, by his own admission, preferred the company of criminals to that of revolutionaries, 'because there were so many rats among the politicals.'"
--from "Rise of a Gangster," Orlando Figes's review of Simon Schag Montefiore's Young Stalin in the new (Nov. 8) New York Review of Books


[7:55] "With my family I hoped to find solace.
For my daughter I prepared a splendid wedding feast--
for my tsarevna, my Pure Little Dove.
[7:15] Like a storm, death carries off the bridegroom."
--Tsar Boris, soliloquizing in the imperial apartments of the Kremlin in Act II of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov

[The above clip is from a 1985 concert (rather than staged) performance by the Finnish bass Matti Salminen, with Zubin Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic. Important parts of Salminen's voice pack a wallop, and he's certainly not casual about the music, though a lot of the vowels are distinctly odd--is this what Russian sounds like with a Finnish accent? The clip continues with the Clock Scene from later in the act, as Boris begins to do his version of Nixon in the last White House days. Way down below we've also got a staged performance of Boris's monologue--from the Bolshoi Opera, no less--in some ways better, in some ways not so good.]


A lot of people find Russian history and politics interesting--or not--because it all seems so crazy, so different from ours. I'm inclined to think of it more as a somewhat exaggerated or "heightened" version of ours. Wouldn't you think, for example, that Dick Cheney or Karl Rove would understand Stalin's preference for criminals over revolutionaries in the choice of associates? (Could Chimpy the Prez ever have been installed in the White House if the campaign hadn't had its cohort of reliable GOP hoodlums to unleash in Florida?)

So far Orlando Figes's review of Young Stalin isn't up on the New York Review of Books website (www.nybooks.com), but only a couple of items from the issue have been posted, so we don't know yet whether it will be among the online freebies. (I'll keep you posted.) Meanwhile, here is a fuller version of the point about Stalin's preference for criminals over ideologues:

It was significant, and a sign of things to come, that Stalin [seen here in 1902, at 23], by his own admission, preferred the company of criminals to that of revolutionaries, "because there were so many rats among the politicals." He always had a loathing and mistrust of revolutionary intellectuals; he suspected them of treachery, kept them at a distance from himself (or simply wiped them out), and relied instead on criminals whose loyalty he could easily manipulate. "In power," Montefiore writes, Stalin "shocked his comrades by promoting criminals in the NKVD [the political police], but he had used criminals all his life."

One of the spookier nights in my memory was one I spent surrounded by Boris Godunov materials: Pushkin's play and a patchwork of scores and librettos of the various versions of Mussorgsky's opera, both the composer's own and the heavy reworking undertaken by his friend and champion Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The play and opera highlight a crucial moment in Russian history: the first rupture in the legitimate succession of the monarchy, setting the stage for the grim period known, appropriately enough, as the Time of Troubles. (Mussorgsky would also attempt to dramatize the second break in the imperial succession, in his unfinished masterpiece Khovanshchina, which encapsules a prolonged period of chaos and bloodshed that eventuated in the accession of Peter the Great, bringing an end to the chaos but an at least temporary uptick in the bloodshed, as outstanding scores were settled.)

That night I may not have felt quite like the aged monk Pimen in Boris Godunov, scrivening away at his voluminous chronicle of the history of Russia, but it had some of that feeling, pondering the inscrutabilities of life in the Kremlin there in the wee hours of the morning. And in that setting I heard, rather eerily, news of the death of one of the Kremlin's more byzantine masters, Leonid Brezhnev.

Here's a practical tip: Don't get me started on Boris Godunov.

Oops, too late! It's not your fault, of course. It happens that recently, faced with a getaway bus trip of a few hours, I packed a performance of Boris that hardly qualifies as new, having been recorded (in stereo) in 1972, but was new to me. (It's one of many live performances issued in surprisingly satisfactory sound on the usually dirt-cheap Gala label.) It was prepared specifically for broadcast by Italian Radio's Rome division, which has a long history of importing sympathetic maestri and singers to collaborate with the resident forces on surprisingly persuasive original-language performances of non-Italian operas, the most spectacular specimen being the complete Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Wilhelm Furtwaengler in 1953, now a staple of the Wagner discography.

The Rome Boris conductor is one of the foremost operatic conductors of the Soviet era, Boris Khaikin, and the large cast, of generally high quality, is headed by the Bulgarian bass Nicolai Ghiaurov [seen here in the title role], then still in his imposing vocal prime. Since any halfway decent performance of Boris is bound to draw me into the opera's clutches, I had no hope of resisting this one, which is way more than halfway decent. And I'm still firmly in the opera's grip.

None of this is your fault, of course, so I'll try to limit myself to skimming a tiny bit of the surface of this endlessly engrossing musico-dramatization, partly historical and partly fictionalized, of Boris Godunov's ascension to the throne of Russia in 1598 and the unraveling of his reign six years later.

If you put Boris Godunov together with the still vaster and more complex (not to mention even more depressing) Khovanshchina, which alas the hopelessly alcoholic composer never managed to complete (in some ways it's remarkable that he made it past his 42nd birthday, if only by a week), the portrait painted of the Russian people isn't flattering: willing, even demanding, to surrender every vestige of free choice to authoritarian leaders of one sort or another.

If this sounds eerily like a strain in American political life--as documented recently, for example, by John Dean in Conservatives Without Conscience (Viking, 2006), his realization of a project conceived by the late Barry Goldwater--well, maybe it's not just those wacky Russian peasants who crave to be led by the nose.

Mussorgsky follows Pushkin's play Boris Godunov, which he in fact followed fairly closely in the opera's original version, in making clear that there's nothing spontaneous about the crowd gathered outside Novodevichy monastery, where Boris is in retreat, clamoring for him to save Russia by taking the throne left vacant by the death without heir of Boris's brother-in-law, the sainted (if feeble-minded*) Tsar Feodor I, who had given the country a time of relative peace and stability following the turbulent reign of his father, Tsar Ivan IV, better known to us as Ivan the Terrible. The first voice we hear after the opera's hauntingly melancholy prelude is a police officer haranguing the crowd to get down on their knees and do some serious imploring.

For that imploring, Mussorgsky showed himself an unsurpassed master of the great tradition of Russian choral singing. When the peasants aren't grumbling (and being duly threatened by officer Nikich), they sound awfully believable. Is this sincerity or the elusive but precious art of faking sincerity?

There's something even more striking about this whole scene, stage-managed as it is with a panache and thoroughness worthy of Karl Rove. The people's impassioned pleadings fail! Seemingly out of nowhere, but presumably from inside the monastery, appears an august presence, the boyar (nobleman) Andrei Shchelkalov, secretary of the Duma, the fledgling Russian parliament, then still a council of nobles that advised the tsar.

Shchelkalov bears sad tidings: Boris, unyielding, refuses even to consider assuming the throne of a Russia awash in the evil of lawlessness. There is nothing for it but for the people to pray to God to brighten Boris's weary soul:


The performance is from the heavily abridged but still fascinating 1954 color film version of Boris directed by Vera Stroyeva, with a cast of Bolshoi regulars lip-synching lustfully. And characteristically for this opera, one of the best singers in the cast, the baritone Ilya Bogdanov, is assigned to the small role of Shchelkalov, whose contribution consists of this address to the peasants and one to the assembled boyars in Act IV as Boris's time is drawing to a close.

There's a 1987 Bolshoi Boris on video, where there's no mistaking the seemingly irreversible decline in the company's musical and especially vocal standards which set in in the late Soviet period, and perhaps the most distinctive performance is given by the veteran baritone Yuri Mazurok as Shchelkalov. Nearing the end of a distinguished international career, Mazurok has to pull himself together and give it everything he's got, and in fact works visibly harder than he appeared to in so many earlier performances where he seemed content to let that fine baritone do all the work for him.

Shchelkalov's music isn't easy, and it can't be faked. It has an authority, and dignity, and humility (again, real or faked--who knows?) unlike anything else in the literature I can think of. In our clip, we can hear that Bogdanov isn't as young as he once was (he'd already sung the role in a 1948 recording of Boris), yet isn't this still one classy, and powerful, piece of singing?

Of course it's still all fake, all part of the carefully managed effort to put Boris on the throne. And yet the powers behind the scenes offer their subjects lies--and a liar--of the highest quality.

Or perhaps it's just that those prayers Shchelkalov exhorts from the crowd really work miracles. Because a change of scene now whisks us off to Moscow, to the square in the Kremlin, for the famous Coronation Scene. (Mission accomplished?) Yet another chorus of led-by-the-nose Russians cheers the coronation of Tsar Boris.

The mood of the new tsar himself, however, is reflective and gloomy. This is definitely not a speech crafted to Rovian specifications. Boris declares himself filled with dread. The performer here is probably the finest Russian pure singing bass of the '50s and '60s, Ivan Petrov:


I know, given the monumental depradations of the Bush regime, it's petty of me to nurse my private grudge, but I still can't forgive the vile, shoddy quality of the lies and liars we've had foisted on us by the regime's voices of authority, that loathsome medley of cheesy pols, religious loons, and supporting thugs, crooks, and crackpots.

Most insulting, of course, is the titular ringleader, whose pea-brained message is, approximately:

"I'm a MO-ron, and we is all God's MO-rons, put here to cretinize and destroy this danged planet while we wait to get rapturized."

Again, it may seem a petty complaint alongside the substantive monstrosities wrought by this regime, but it galls me no end that there appears to be no shame or even guilt felt by those assorted perpetrators. Chimpy the Prez, for one, swathed in his Yale- and Harvard-bred moronitude, shows not a glimmering of awareness of his part in the seven-year reign of lawlessness, destruction, and death he has inflicted on an undeserving world.

Not so Tsar Boris. Which brings us to his monologue. In an opera of astounding beauties (beauties all the more astounding for the general ugliness of the subject matter), I think it's these four minutes I treasure most.

We have to make clear that Mussorgsky here follows Pushkin in a leap of historical license. The leap proceeds from historical fact: Ivan the Terrible indeed left another potential heir, a young half-brother of Feodor. The tsarevich Dmitri, the issue of the terrible Ivan's seventh marriage, was a child of three when his father died. It's also a matter of historical fact that he died some years later.

At this point we move into the world of, er, embellishment--with a reminder that conspiracy theorizing is far from a modern invention. Already in Boris's time there was speculation that the death of the young tsarevich Dmitri was, shall we say, managed, and that perhaps Boris himself had a hand in removing this obstacle to his possible eventual accession to the throne. Historians have all sorts of objections to this speculation, for which there is absolutely no proof.

However, Boris's guilt is a given in Pushkin and Mussorgsky. He did it. He ordered the death of the child Dmitri. Indeed, in the course of the play and opera we are given conclusive eyewitness proof, and Boris in fact welcomes it! His immediate problem is the spreading report of a young man who claims to be the not-dead-after-all Dmitri, rightful heir to the throne. For Boris, there is reassurance in confirmation that the murder he ordered was duly carried out.

(In the end, in a scene added by Mussorgsky to follow the death of Boris, we see the pretender, newly crossed over the border from Poland into Russia, where he is hailed by the local led-by-the-nose chorus as their latest savior. And this pretender actually made it to the throne as Tsar Dmitri I, to be followed by yet another pretender as Dmitri II. At that point either the supply of fake Dmitris ran out or the Russian people got tired of this particular scam.)

Unfortunately for Boris, unlike our run of modern-day authoritarians, he has a working conscience. And now, as history has begun to turn on him, he is haunted by his guilty conscience. It leaves no aspect of his life untouched.

In the scene we know as Act II of the four-act revision), a remarkable "private" scene that existed in the original version but that Mussorgsky rewrote almost entirely in the course of his grueling labors on Boris, we are first introduced to Boris's two fine children, the grieving tsarevna Xenia, the tsar's "Pure Little Dove," in mourning for her dead fiance (I happen just to have been listening to the 1959 Met broadcast of Boris, in which the soprano Emilia Cundari is a heartbreakingly lovely Xenia), and her younger brother, the tsarevich Feodor (namesake of both his uncle the late tsar and of his father's father), being studiously groomed by his father for his future. Just as Boris has taken his own rule seriously, he expects his son to have a thorough grounding in reality-based learning--young Feodor displays a command of geography that would put a certain squatter in the Oval Office to shame, if he were capable of shame.

Boris enters, throwing a scare into the children's good-hearted Nurse. Then, left alone, he reflects. "I have attained the highest power," he sings. "For six years I have ruled as tsar serenely." But "there is no happiness for my tortured soul." The seers' prophecies of a long, healthy reign are no help. "Neither life, nor power, nor fleeting glory, nor the cries of the crowd give me pleasure."

Now the music changes character, giving way to a web of "family" musical motives, as Boris ponders the happiness he hoped to find in the bosom of his family. (Most singers of the role naturally try to find a vocal change that will mirror the different part of Boris's character which comes into play here, as Matti Salminen does above. Yevgeny Nesterenko, in our second clip below, just sings it all very well. Interestingly, the music is specific enough that the point still gets made.) And then comes the storm of death making off with Xenia's beloved.

Boris understands. The death of his son-in-law-to-be, the devastation of his Pure Little Dove, is punishment for his crimes:

"Heavy is the hand of the terrible judge.
Horrible the sentence of the guilty soul."

Here, then, is our staged performance of Boris's monologue (without subtitles, I'm afraid), by Yevgeny Nesterenko, the only really first-class singing bass Russia seems to have produced in the last 30 years. As suggested above, he doesn't do much more than sing the music very well and maintain his dignity, but he makes those virtues count for a fair amount:


I don't know that I've succeeded in explaining how this chunk of Boris's monologue moves me so, more perhaps than any other moment in the opera. To give you an idea how perspectives vary, though, while I was shopping for video clips and "auditioned" the performance of the monologue by the veteran bass Alexander Pirogov in the 1954 film, I was startled to find this entire little chunk cut!


BORIS GODUNOV FOR HOME CONSUMPTION

This is tough. There's a heap of Boris recordings I wouldn't part with, but if I could have only one, I don't know what I'd say. It would probably be drawn from three variously flawed '60s-early '70s recordings of the Rimsky edition: the Bolshoi recording conducted by Alexander Melik-Pashayev, done in two versions, first with Ivan Petrov in the title role, and then with Boris's scenes rerecorded by the Canadian baritone George London; the gravelly-voiced but commanding Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff's EMI stereo remake, done in Paris under Andre Cluytens; and the Karajan/Decca recording made in Vienna, with the vocally plush Nicolai Ghiaurov in the title role. Actually, I might prefer the Gala issue of that 1972 Rome Radio performance, though of course it doesn't come with printed texts.

Of course, it's important to hear--at least once--Mussorgsky's own versions (yes, there are two, or actually two and a half), which purists insist are more original and powerful by virtue of being leaner in texture, less overtly theatrical, more primitive and daring in harmony than Rimsky's rewrite. For me that translates to "drabber," vocally paler, and orchestrally pallid. Clearly Rimsky went way further than trying to give us Boris the way he thought Mussorgsky would have written it if he'd had Rimsky's practical skill. But there's no question in my mind that Rimsky understood at every turn what Mussorgsky was trying to do, or that his version "plays" beautifully.

If I had to pick one recording of the composer's own Boris (his final version, that is), I'm surprised to say it would probably be the Abbado/Sony with the Berlin Philharmonic and a number of quite good singers (and, naturally, some less good ones), plus an agglomeration of choruses under the direction of longtime Bayreuth Festival chorus master Norbert Balatsch. I should say, though, that I've never heard the Kirov recording conducted by Valery Gergiev, which gives us the fixings for both of the basic Mussorgsky versions in a set that's supposed to be five CDs-for-the-price of-two, but only if you pay bust-out retail; the places I usually buy from normally charge for at least four if not all five of the CDs--too rich for my blood. (In any case I'm not a great Gergiev fan, and the cast doesn't thrill me, which I guess is why I haven't sprung for those big bucks.)

Unless I've missed something, all the other performances mentioned here are based of Rimsky's edition, with the qualifier that a couple--the Karajan/Decca and the Khaikin/Rome ones--reinstate the scene in front of St. Basil's Cathedral from the original version, which was cut by the composer himself. As a result, Rimsky dutifully omitted it. Rimskyites who wish to include it normally use a rendering by the composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov.

I assume that some company currently offers on CD the live-performance Boris excerpts recorded by the legendary Feodor Chaliapin, almost certainly the greatest singing actor of the 20th century. Being able to hear him in actual performance in his most famous role--I can't imagine being without these.

On video, well, hmm. The 1954 Russian film is out on DVD, and the other video versions I've seen all have some merits. Probably the most "ups" and fewest "downs" are to be found in the 1978 Boishoi performance available from Kultur (avoid the cheaper but technically much inferior edition in circulation--I bought it, but don't you!), conducted again by the excellent Boris Khaikin, with Yevgeny Nesterenko still in fine form in the title role. This performance is not to be confused with the largely geriatric 1987 Boris mentioned above (its cast might have been one to reckon with 10 or 15 years earlier), also available from Kultur, distinguished as noted by the veteran Yuri Mazurok's moving Shchelkalov. You don't buy a Boris for the Shchelkalov, though. At any rate, I don't.

- - - - - - - - - - -

*Literally feeble-minded, that is. Feodor is generally thought to have been mentally retarded (which might itself have been a relief to the Russian people from his "terrible" father--except we're told that the Russian grozniy means "terrible" more in the sense of "His terrible swift sword"; my dictionary offers "terrible, formidable, redoubtable"), but was apparently beyond question pious. Wikipedia notes: "He is known as Feodor the Bellringer in consequence of his inclination to travel the land and ring the bells at churches."
#