The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Modest Mussorgsky · an opera in a prologue and four acts, to the composer’s own libretto in Russian after Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Karamzin’s History of the Russian State · nine scenes, in Mussorgsky’s own version and orchestration of 1872; Rimsky-Korsakov’s edition, the form in which the work long survived, is another hand’s and is not the score judged
Mode
Historical tragedy as a chronicle of separate tableaux; a people’s opera with a tsar in it, set in speech-shaped declamation
Mythos
The guilty king whose crime curses the land: a crown resting on a murdered child, and the child returning as a name, a pretender and a ghost; the holy fool who weeps for the people
Phase
The Time of Troubles, from Boris’s coronation to his death and the Pretender’s march on Moscow; a crowd at the first scene and a crowd at the last
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in a prologue of two scenes and four acts, nine scenes in all, in Mussorgsky’s 1872 score, to his own Russian libretto
Register
From Varlaam’s drunken song to the coronation’s bells, from a nurse’s songs to a tsar’s hallucination and a monks’ chant at his death
Scale
Over a dozen named solo parts, chorus and children’s chorus; a convent, a monastery, an inn, the Kremlin, Poland and a forest; a state, a church and a people
Governing Proposition
A tsar crowned by a crowd driven to beg for him rules on a murdered child’s grave, until a monk takes the child’s name, guilt takes the tsar’s mind, and the crowd that acclaimed him greets the pretender. The wager of the work is that in Russia power is made from a people who are both its victims and its instrument, and that a crime at the root of authority returns through the people, not through justice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The opera begins with one voice. The prelude opens on a solo bassoon, unaccompanied, in a folk-like mode: before the state, the church or the crowd is heard, there is a single line that could be anyone’s song. Then the curtain rises on the courtyard of the Novodevichy Convent, and on a crowd.
The crowd is there to beg Boris to take the crown, and it begs because a police officer with a cudgel drives it to. Shchelkalov comes out to announce that Boris refuses. Pilgrims pass. The acclamation that will crown a tsar is shown being made, by force, from the people it will rule. It is the work’s first proposition, and its last scene will answer it.
The shape of what follows is set here. The 1872 score is a prologue of two scenes and four acts, nine scenes in all, and they do not run into one another as a plot runs. Each is a tableau, a separate place and a separate company: a convent, a square, a monastery cell, a border inn, the tsar’s apartments, two rooms in Poland, the council of state, a forest. Boris appears in three of the nine. The crowd leads four: the convent, the coronation, the inn and Kromy. The opera is a chronicle of a people with a tsar in it, and the form says so before any character does.
Movement II
The second scene of the prologue is the coronation, in the Kremlin square. It begins with bells, and the bells are built on two dominant seventh chords a tritone apart, on A flat and on D, alternating: two chords that share two notes and do not function as the textbooks of the day taught. The sound is the state and the church at once, and it is not a cadence. Over it the chorus of praise rises.
Then Boris’s prayer enters under the praise, and it begins in foreboding. The grandeur and the dread arrive in the same scene, and the dread is his. The crowd that was driven to beg now acclaims, and the bells go on. The act that follows leaves the tsar at once. In Pimen’s cell in the Chudov Monastery, by lamplight, the old monk finishes his chronicle and tells the young monk Grigory of the Tsarevich Dmitry, the child murdered at Uglich. The chronicle names the crime, and in the same scene it makes the man who will avenge it: Grigory resolves to be Dmitry.
The next scene is an inn on the Lithuanian border. Two vagabond monks, Varlaam and Missail, drink there, and Varlaam sings “In the town of Kazan”, his song of the taking of Kazan, brutal and exultant. Grigory is there too, and when the guards come he escapes them across the border. The scene is the opera’s comedy and its roughest music, and it runs longer than its action; but the folk voice of the bassoon has become a whole tavern, and the Pretender has crossed out of Russia.
Movement III
Act 2 is the tsar’s apartments in the Kremlin, and it is the centre of the work. It opens among his children. Xenia mourns her betrothed; Feodor, the son, is at the map; the Nurse sings them songs. The music here is domestic and in places genre, nursery songs for their own sake. Boris enters as a father, and then is left alone.
His monologue begins “Dostig ya vysshey vlasti” (“I have attained the highest power”). It is a speech, not an aria: the declamation follows the stress and fall of the Russian, and the music becomes song only where his guilt overtakes the words. Under the power he has attained is the child at Uglich. Then Prince Shuisky arrives, sly and courteous, with news of a pretender who has taken Dmitry’s name, and with Uglich itself.
Shuisky goes, and the clock begins to chime. In the chiming Boris sees the child in the corner, and the declamation halts and breaks. It is guilt heard, not tried: no court in the opera ever asks whether Boris ordered the murder, and the work does not answer. It sets his state of mind in sound. Here the form does what a play cannot: the tsar’s speech, the clock and the hallucination are one musical texture, and the scene places the guilt between his children’s play and the state’s news.
Movement IV
Act 3 goes to Poland, to Sandomierz. Marina Mniszech sits among her maidens, and the Jesuit Rangoni binds her ambition to the Church. In a garden by a fountain there is a polonaise, and then the Pretender and Marina sing a love duet. The act was added for the 1872 version, after the directorate rejected the first, and it is an opera of another kind set inside this one: dance rhythms, Western lyrical forms, Catholic intrigue. Poland is heard as foreign, and some of that is design; but the duet speaks the convention the rest of the work refuses, and Rangoni’s intrigue is barely used again.
Act 4 returns to the Kremlin, to the council of the boyars. Shuisky reports Boris’s condition. Then Pimen tells of a miracle at the tomb of Dmitry. The chronicler who named the crime in the first act now brings the child’s tomb into the council of state, and Boris’s end follows.
Boris bids farewell to Feodor and gives him his dying counsel. The father’s love is set inside the council of state, the family inside the government. The bells of the coronation return as a knell, the monks’ chant is heard as he dies, and the man the crowd was driven to crown dies before the council. The scene is grandeur turned to collapse, and the opera’s best-known later edition ends here. Mussorgsky did not.
Movement V
The last scene is a forest clearing near Kromy. The people have risen. They have captured a boyar and mock him; they drive on in a revolutionary chorus. The vagabond monks Varlaam and Missail are among them, and two Jesuits appear. Then the Pretender passes in triumph. The people the cudgel drove to beg in the prologue are a mob now, and they greet a new pretender as they were made to greet the last: one usurpation hands on to the next.
The Holy Fool is left alone in the clearing, and laments: “Leytes’, leytes’, slyozy gor’kiye” (“Flow, flow, bitter tears”). The opera ends on that single voice, a prophecy, not a resolution. Pushkin’s play had ended on the stage direction “Narod bezmolvstvuyet” (“The people are silent”). Mussorgsky’s ending turns that silence into revolt and a lament, and the statement it makes about the people is his own. In 1869 the Holy Fool had met Boris before St Basil’s and refused to pray for “Tsar Herod”; the 1872 score cuts that meeting and moves the lament here, to the end of everything.
The first version was finished in December 1869 and rejected by the Imperial Theatres directorate in February 1871. Three scenes of the revision were given at the Mariinsky in February 1873, and the whole opera on 8 February 1874, conducted by Eduard Nápravník; Bessel published the vocal score that year. It drew hostile reviews and left the repertory after a few seasons. From 1896 it lived chiefly in Rimsky-Korsakov’s edition, re-orchestrated, re-harmonised and reordered to end on Boris’s death, and in that form, with Chaliapin’s Boris and Diaghilev’s Paris season of 1908, it conquered the world. Lamm’s edition of 1928 and Lloyd-Jones’s of 1975 restored the composer’s text, and Shostakovich made a third orchestration in 1939 to 1940. The work the composer finished ends in a forest, with one voice weeping.
Act III · The Twelve
The chronicle form invites the subtractive test, and the spine resists it. The prologue’s forced acclamation is required, because Kromy answers it with the same crowd unleashed. Pimen’s cell names the murdered child and creates the Pretender in one scene. The Kremlin scene with the clock is the centre, and the death needs it. What holds the axis lowest is give in three places. The Polish act, written in answer to the directorate, holds two scenes whose intrigue the rest of the opera barely uses, and its love duet could go with little loss. The nursery songs are genre pieces. The inn, though the escape happens there, is longer than its action.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: in Russia power is made from a people who are both its victims and its instrument, and a crime at the root of authority returns through the people, not through justice. The prologue shows acclamation produced by a cudgel. At Kromy the same people turn from victims to a mob that mocks a boyar and greets a new pretender, so one usurpation hands on to the next. Boris’s guilt is disclosed as a mind’s state, not a trial. The declamation brings Russian speech, peasant and tsar, into music. Held down because the frame is Pushkin’s, and because the 1872 score cuts the Holy Fool’s confrontation with Boris.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height is reached often, and in more than one kind. The coronation is grandeur: the bells, the chorus of praise, and Boris’s prayer entering in foreboding. Pimen’s narration is a calm of great age. The monologue and the clock scene are the sublime of dread: the chimes, the halting declamation, the child seen in the corner. The death is grandeur turned to collapse, with the monks’ chant heard as Boris dies. Kromy rises by force and falls to the Holy Fool alone; the work’s last height is a single quiet voice. Held off the top by the Polish act, where the polonaise and the fountain duet are charm, and by the inn and the nursery.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The archetype is built and bears the work. A ruler’s crown rests on a murdered child, and the child returns: as a name in a chronicle, as a pretender who takes it, as a ghost in a clock’s chiming. That is the guilty king whose crime curses the land, the pattern of Oedipus and Macbeth, made Russian. Around it stand archetypes that stay particular: Pimen writing history in a cell; the Holy Fool, given the last word; the people, chorus of a tragedy whose protagonist it outlives. Held below the top by the Polish act, whose Marina and Rangoni are operatic types, and by the 1872 loss of the meeting of king and holy fool.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the opera of the 1860s, Italian and French in the imperial theatres, and Glinka’s Russian line. The departures are many: a libretto built from a chronicle play of separate tableaux; declamation that follows the stress and contour of Russian speech, grown from Mussorgsky’s setting of Gogol’s Marriage and from Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest; harmony drawn from folk polyphony and church modes, with progressions that do not function as the textbooks taught; a people as protagonist; an ending on a holy fool alone. The stake was real: a composer without conservatory training, a first version rejected, hostile reviews, and a few seasons in the repertory. Held below the top because the revision conceded ground to convention.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and much of what the work knows is lost. The chronicle of tableaux knows that history passes over its rulers: the scenes do not lead into one another as plot, and the people’s scenes frame the tsar’s. Boris’s tragedy is in his speech, so his music is declamation. The bells are the form of state and church at once. Set as a number opera, the work would know a tyrant’s fall; set as it is, it knows a people’s history with a tyrant in it. The cost: the tableaux can be reordered without collapse, as a later edition proved, and the Polish act is a container for an opera of another kind.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, and a century of it: Paul Lamm’s edition of the composer’s scores (1928) and the argument it began; Asafyev’s writing; David Lloyd-Jones’s edition (1975); Caryl Emerson’s Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (1986); Richard Taruskin’s Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993); Emerson and Robert William Oldani’s Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov (1994). The questions stay open: which version is the work, and whether 1872 fulfils or compromises; whether the opera trusts the people or despairs of them; whether Boris is guilty, which history doubts and the opera does not answer. Held below the top because much of the return is to the versions question, which concerns the text as much as the depth.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: the work reorganised what opera could be, with speech-shaped declamation as the norm, harmony freed from functional progression by modal and folk practice, the people as protagonist and history as chronicle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande bears its declamation and its non-functional harmony; Ravel and Stravinsky took from it; Shostakovich re-orchestrated it and built operas and symphonic irony on its model; Prokofiev’s War and Peace follows its chronicle form; the Russian historical opera after it stands on it. The reach was wide and late, and the world first met the work in another man’s edition: delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The work survives whole: the composer’s scores of 1869 and 1872 exist, are published and are performed, and it has been continuously present since 1908 at the latest, at the centre of the Russian repertory and of every major house, with a recorded tradition from Chaliapin to the present. The charge is that its presence was long another man’s text. From 1896 until about the 1970s it lived chiefly in Rimsky-Korsakov’s re-harmonised and reordered edition, ending on Boris’s death, and Mussorgsky’s own sound was little heard for most of a century. The presence of the work is wide; the presence of the work as made is about fifty years old. A tenth is charged for the displaced text.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The prosody is the summit of the making: Russian set so that the music bends to the words’ stress and pitch, in Pimen’s steady narration, Shuisky’s sly courtesy, Varlaam’s drunken bawling and Boris’s broken speech in the clock scene. The harmony is exact for its ends: the bells, the modal chorus writing, the chromatic dread of the hallucination. The dark, spare orchestration, long called crude, is now heard as right for the work. The costs are real: the counterpoint is thin; the joins between tableaux are abrupt rather than made; the Polish dance and duet are conventional; the scoring is uneven in balance. Otello commands every element of its medium; this work commands the elements it needs.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Varlaam’s drunken song at the inn and Boris’s death in the Duma. One law governs both: Russian speech and song, folk and sacred, as the matter of the music; tsar and vagabond are made of the same modal and declamatory stuff. The bells of the coronation return as the knell of the death scene, and the crowd of the prologue returns at Kromy: the work begins and ends in the people. The strain is the Polish act, whose dance rhythms and Western lyrical forms can be heard as Poland through a Russian ear; but its love duet speaks the convention the rest refuses, not as a portrait of it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many, and integrated: the state, in the coronation, the Duma and the boyars’ intrigue; the church, in the convent, the monastery, the chronicle and the chant at the death; the people, as crowd, pilgrims, vagabonds and peasants in revolt; the family, in Boris with Xenia and Feodor; consciousness, in the monologue and the hallucination; history, written by Pimen and enacted; nations and borders, at the Lithuanian inn and in Poland; the sacred in its folk form, in the Holy Fool. The Kremlin scene sets a tsar’s guilt between his children’s play and the state’s news. Held below the top: labour appears only as hunger, nature hardly at all.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.3, then The Sublime at 9.2. A departure on every front at once, speech-shaped declamation, modal harmony, a people as protagonist and an ending on a holy fool alone, made at real cost by a composer without a conservatory behind him; and height reached often and in many kinds, from the coronation’s grandeur and the clock scene’s dread to the single voice at Kromy.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3: the chronicle’s spine is required, but the Polish act holds two scenes whose intrigue the rest barely uses, the nursery songs are genre pieces, and the inn is longer than its action. Next above it, The Living Form at 8.7: the tableaux can be reordered without collapse, and the Polish act is a container for an opera of another kind.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the score and libretto of Boris Godunov in Mussorgsky’s own version of 1872, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The unit is the 1872 version in the composer’s orchestration: a prologue of two scenes and four acts, nine scenes, ending in the forest near Kromy, the last form Mussorgsky completed and the one staged in his lifetime. The version of 1869, seven scenes with the St Basil’s scene and without the Polish act or Kromy, is a separate object and is named only where it bears on a judgement; stagings that splice St Basil’s into the 1872 score are not the unit. Rimsky-Korsakov’s edition, the form in which the work long survived and was known to the world, is a reworking by another hand after the work was complete: it is weighed on The Imperishable alone, as part of how the work survived, and is neither credited nor charged elsewhere. Words and music are scored together, on Mussorgsky’s Russian as he set it. Russian is quoted, transliterated, only in fragments of four words or fewer whose words are certain; every English gloss is the desk’s own and is not charged to the work. The scene plans of the two versions were tabulated by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, bar counts and timings within scenes, and the reasons the directorate gave for its rejection, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.