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In this Mussorgsky masterpiece, a Russian ruler is haunted by a horrible act he committed years earlier. The concise original version of the opera, focusing on the emotional disintegration of the title character, creates a theatrical experience of searing intensity. Samuel Ramey, recipient of the 2003 San Francisco Opera Medal, returns in the title role. The Washington Post raved: “His electrical presence, his bounding athleticism, his keen intelligence, his dark and chimerically versatile bass voice were all put to the noblest of purposes: a fully fleshed-out, highly complicated portrayal of the flawed Czar.”

In this Mussorgsky masterpiece, a Russian ruler is haunted by a horrible act he committed years earlier. The concise original version of the opera, focusing on the emotional disintegration of the title character, creates a theatrical experience of searing intensity. Samuel Ramey, recipient of the 2003 San Francisco Opera Medal, returns in the title role. The Washington Post raved: “His electrical presence, his bounding athleticism, his keen intelligence, his dark and chimerically versatile bass voice were all put to the noblest of purposes: a fully fleshed-out, highly complicated portrayal of the flawed Czar.”

Setting: Russia and Poland, 1598-1605

In the snowy courtyard of the Novodyevichy Monasterynear Moscow, Russian peasants are goaded by police into demonstrating for Boris Godunov's ascension to the vacant throne of Russia. Shchelkalov, secretary of the Duma (Council of Boyars), announces that Boris refuses. Finally, Boris agrees to accept the crown and acknowledges the acclaim of all Moscow, but in his heart he is haunted by a strange foreboding.

In a dark cell of the Chudov monastery, the old monk Pimen is in his cell finishing his history of Russia. The novice Grigori awakens from a nightmare and asks Pimen about the dead Tsarevich Dimitri. Pimen recounts how Boris ordered the murder of the boy (who would by now have been Grigori's age) so that he could become tsar, himself. Alone, Grigori fumes over Boris's crime, and devises a plan to take justice into his own hands

On the Lithuanian border, an Innkeeper welcomes three guests - two noisy drunken friars, Varlaam and Missail, and Grigori, disguised as a fugitive renegade. When an illiterate border guard enters with a warrant for Grigori's arrest, the disguised man reads it, pretending it describes Varlaam. As the besotted monk arduously reads the true description, Grigori escapes through a window.

In his study in the tsar's palace, Boris comforts his bereaved daughter, who has lost her fiancé. His son Fyodor is studying a map and Boris encourages him with a reminder that the land he seeks to know on paper will one day belong to him. Growing pensive, he sends daughter and son away and receives his shifty adviser, Prince Shuisky, who reports an insurrection from Poland led by someone in the guise of Dimitri. This, combined with Boris's own guilty dreams, drives the tsar to a raging, frenzied hallucination: He "sees" the ghost of the intended heir to his throne.

Outside the St. Basil Cathedral in Moscow, starving Russian peasants, now disenchanted with Boris, argue whether or not Tsarevich Dimitri still lives. When Boris comes out of the church, a simpleton, who has been robbed by a group of urchins, asks the tsar to kill them the way he killed Dimitri. Boris protects the man from Shuisky's order for arrest and asks him to pray for him, but the simpleton says he cannot intercede for a child's murderer.

The Council of Boyars holds a special session in their Granovitaya Hall in the Kremlin to draw up an edict against the false Dimitri. The council does not believe Shuisky's tale of Boris's hysteria until the tsar himself staggers in, protesting his innocence in Dimitri's death. The monk Pimen is enters to tell how a blind shepherd was healed after making a pilgrimage to pray at Dimitri's grave. Boris senses that his death is near and sends for his son, whom he bids farewell and councils to rule wisely, upholding the Orthodox faith. To the solemn tolling of bells, he prays and begs forgiveness. Pointing to his son as the new Tsar, he collapses and dies.

The Three Faces of Boris

By John Schauer

The world’s love affair with Boris Godunov started, as do many tempestuous love affairs, with an initial rejection. On February 17, 1871, Pavel Fyodorov wrote to Modest Mussorgsky: “Dear Sir, By the order of the Director of the Imperial Theaters, I have the honor to advise you that upon examination by the Musical-Theater Committee of the score of your composition, Boris Godunov, this opera was not approved for production on the Russian stage of the Imperial Theaters. Returning the aforesaid score and the libretto of the opera, I sincerely ask you to accept this expression of my respects.”

With this simple note began perhaps the most tangled history of any acknowledged masterpiece in the operatic repertoire. No other opera title is as quick to elicit the question, “Which version?” or to receive as many possible answers once it has been asked.

The problems inherent in sorting out Boris Godunov’s checkered history are common to a large number of operatic and even symphonic works; where Boris surpasses them in complexity is by presenting all those problems in one piece. Like many other operas, Boris exists in more than one version by the composer—one thinks of the works Verdi wrote for Paris and later revised (Les Vêpres Siciliennes, Don Carlos) or almost any opera by Handel. Mussorgsky, like Schumann, has been rather consistently criticized for unidiomatic orchestrations (both of them seemed frequently to think of the orchestra as an enormous piano, the instrument they most intimately understood) that were subsequently “improved” by others. And Boris, like several other masterworks, has had the distinction of being arranged not by anonymous hacks, but by composers of recognized genius—just as Mozart re-orchestrated Handel’s Messiah, and as Berlioz added his own deft touches to several of Gluck’s operas—whose work and musical insight we should respect.

In coming to understand the objections to Mussorgsky’s original version and the subsequent attempts by others to “correct” his “mistakes,” it must be remembered that Russian musicians at that time were divided into two camps: the officially recognized professional composers, who tended to be trained in the European, specifically German, tradition; and the “nationalist” composers, generally amateurs, who sought a distinctly Russian musical idiom. The former group headed by Anton Rubinstein, is perhaps best exemplified by the works of Tchaikovsky (although Tchaikovsky’s style was also heavily influenced by Italian opera and French ballet); the nationalist movement, spearheaded by Glinka, came to be promulgated by that group known as “The Mighty Five”: Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, of whom only the last-named had conventional training in compositional technique.

As originally written and composed by Mussorgsky (he prepared the libretto himself, modeled on Pushkin’s play), Boris Godunov comprised seven scenes in four parts:

a) Outside the Novodievichy Monastery, where the populace is manipulated to call for Boris’s coronation (Act I, scene 1 in the original scheme);
b) Boris’s coronation (Act I, scene 2);
c) Pimen’s cell, where Grigory gets the idea to impersonate Dimitri, the murdered Tsarevich (Act II, scene 1);
d) an inn on the Lithuanian border, where Grigory narrowly escapes arrest (Act II, scene 2);
e) the Tsar’s chambers in the Kremlin in Moscow, where Boris is tormented by guilt and receives news of Grigory’s impending arrival (Act III);
f) outside St. Basil’s Cathedral, where the Simpleton openly accuses Boris of Dimitri’s murder (Act IV, scene 1); and finally,
g) the council room in the Kremlin, where Boris dies (Act IV, scene 2).

The opera in its original form was not a likely candidate for popular acceptance. It focused almost entirely on Boris and the chorus; it had no major female role, and not enough for the tenor; there was no love interest; and it lacked those musical features that were expected, such as clearly defined arias, formal ensembles and dances. Rimsky-Korsakov, who came to play such a decisive role in the course of several of Mussorgsky’s works, has recorded in his memoirs the reaction of the committee that had voted, five to one, to reject Boris in its first incarnation: “The freshness and originality of the music nonplussed the honorable members of the committee who reproved the composer for, among other things, the absence of a reasonably important female role . . . Much of the fault-finding was simply ridiculous . . . Mussorgsky, hurt and offended, withdrew his score, but later though the matter over and decided to make radical changes and additions.”

The changes wrought by Mussorgsky affected not only the dramatic structure of the work, but the overall musical effect as well. As Joseph Kerman has put it, Mussorgsky went to work and inserted many little songs to lighten the show; it is only in the second version of Boris Godunov that the minor characters break into folk songs on every convenient occasion.” The material he added was musically more conventional by the standards of Mussorgsky’s time, and the sections he retained were adjusted to emphasize conventional major-minor tonality and to rely less upon modality—the ancient melodic formulas of the Church, which had contributed so greatly to the primitive feel of the original version.

Mussorgsky’s revisions went through various stages, but by June 1872, he had added (between e and f above) a two-scene act set in Poland, where Grigory enlists the support and love of Marina, thereby providing a major female role and a romantic sub-plot; replaced f with a scene in a forest near Kromy, where Grigory is hailed by the people; rewritten and expanded e; and cut, to various minor degrees, scenes a, b, c, and g. In this form the work was resubmitted to the Musical Theater Committee, which again rejected it.

Boris, however, was beginning to win what today would be called a cult following, due to private performances of excerpts; and after three scenes (the Inn scene and Polish act) were performed publicly in February 1873. Mussorgsky’s friend Julia Platonova (a renowned singer who performed the role of Marina) demanded the Mariinsky Theater produce the complete opera, or she would terminate her contract with them. The theater committee acceded to her demands, and a vocal score was prepared and published in January 1874, less than two weeks before the work’s premiere in St. Petersburg. By this time Mussorgsky had decided to reverse the order of the final two scenes, so that the opera ended not with Boris’s death, but with the Simpleton’s lament in the forest at Kromy. (Other changes made expressly for the premiere production need not concern us here.)

Although reviews of the premiere were nearly unanimously negative, the performance was a popular success (Mussorgsky-s friend Stassov records that the composer took nearly 20 curtain calls). Between the premiere and October 1882 (less than two years after Mussorgsky’s death), the opera was performed 26 times to well-sold houses (although the final scene in the Kromy forest was suppressed after 1876, presumably for political reasons). Boris was not seen on the Mariinsky stage again until 1904, when it was revived in a version by Rimsky-Korsakov.

In his memoirs, Rimsky-Korsakov describes the first manifestations of the sad developments that were to lead to Mussorgsky’s demise: “In general, after the production of Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky appeared in our midst less frequently, and a marked change was to be observed in him . . . This is approximately the period when he fell to loitering at the Maly Yaroslavyets and other restaurants until early morning over cognac, alone or with companions then unknown to us . . . what was the cause of Mussorgsky’s spiritual and mental decay? To a considerable degree it was due at first to the success of Boris (owing to which his pride and ambition as an author began to grow); later on it was due to its failure . . .There were rumors afloat that the opera had displeased the Imperial family; there was gossip that its subject was unpleasant to the censors; the result was that the opera was stricken from the repertory . . . Though still keeping up friendly relations with Cui and Borodin as well as with me, Mussorgsky regarded me with a certain suspicion. My studies in harmony and counterpoint, which had begun to absorb me, did not please him at all. It looked as though he suspected me of being the conservative professor, who might convict him of parallel fifths [a forbidden progression in strict counterpoint], and this was unbearable to him. As for the Conservatory, he could not endure it at all.”

Rimsky-Korsakov may well have been correct. In 1870, Mussorgsky had written to two friends, “I am very doubtful about German vocal music in general and modern German music in particular. German men and women sing like roosters, imagining that the more their mouths gape and the longer they hold their notes, the more feeling they show . . .for my taste the Germans, moving from their leather fried in pork-fat to the seven-hour operas of Wagner, offer nothing attractive for me . . . I do not envy the Germans and I do not laugh at them, because one can’t laugh at that which is boring, but may only avert one’s face.”

Ironically, it was the “seven-hour operas of Wagner” that served as the impetus for Rimsky-Korsakov to enter the history of Boris and give it new life. In the middle of the 1888–89 season at the Mariinsky Theater, a Czech impresario brought a German opera company to produce Wagener’s Ring of the Nibelung. Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov attended the rehearsals, score in hand, and fell under the influence of the notorious German musical revolutionary: “Wagner’s method of orchestration struck Glazunov and me, and thenceforth Wagner’s devices gradually began to form a part of our orchestral tricks of the trade. My first application of Wagner’s orchestral methods and of an increased wind choir was in my orchestration of the Polish dance from Boris Godunov for a concert performance. As regards orchestration, this Polonaise was one of the less successful portions of Mussorgsky’s opera. The composer had first orchestrated it . . . almost exclusively for bowed instruments. Mussorgsky conceived the unfortunate and wholly indefensible idea of imitating the vingt-quatre violons du roi—that is, the orchestra of the time of the composer Lully (Louis XIV). What connection there was between this orchestra and the time of the False Dimitri, as well as the life of Poland of that period, is incomprehensible . . . Yet in its music the Polonaise was characteristic and beautiful, for this reason I undertook to turn it into a concert piece, the more so as Boris Godunov was no longer on the boards.”

Rimsky-Korsakov turned to Boris again in 1892, when he arranged the Coronation Scene for another concert. “The effect achieved was magnificent,” he was quick to admit, “and this was conceded even by those of Mussorgsky’s admirers who had been ready to accuse me of spoiling his works, because of the alleged Conservatory learning I had acquired—learning that ran counter to the freedom of creative art, such as Mussorgsky’s harmonic incoherence. By the way, in this scene I was particularly successful with the bell-tolling, which sounded so beautiful under Mussorgsky’s fingers on the piano and failed so utterly in the orchestra.”

In November of 1896, a more or less complete version of Boris, arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov, was presented, based upon the 1874 vocal score. A decade later, he turned again to Mussorgsky’s masterpiece and arranged those portions he had omitted in 1896; and he put his final touches on the piece for the first performance given outside of Russia, when Diaghilev brought Boris to Paris in May 1908. (Rimsky-Korsakov never did orchestrate the St. Basil scene; that was done by Ippolitov-Ivanov in a style that would fit in with the rest of the Rimsky-Korsakov version.)

In view of the invective that has been heaped upon Rimsky-Korsakov by some purists, it should be pointed out that he was not attempting to usurp the fruits of his friend’s genius, but to popularize an unconventional work that had fallen out of favor due to what Rimsky-Korsakov described in the preface to his version as “impractical difficulties, fragmentary musical phrases, clumsy vocal writing, harsh harmonies and modulations, faulty counterpoint, poverty of instrumentation, and general weakness from a technical point of view.” Today it is tempting to snicker at such judgments, but in an era that seems to have very little esteem for discipline, it is perhaps too easy to ridicule the standards of a time that was more ordered, at least musically, and valued personal idiosyncrasy far less than we do today.

Although Rimsky-Korsakov’s changes are today considered extensive, he felt he had not gone too far: “Although I have revised it, the opera still remains entirely the creation of Mussorgsky since I have only refined it and put it in order technically, making its lofty significance clearer and more accessible to all, while at the same time putting an end to all carping criticism of this work.”

He went further in his memoirs, where he said, “Having arranged the new version of Boris Godunov, I had not destroyed its original form, had not painted out the old frescoes for ever. If ever the conclusion is arrived at that the original is better, worthier than my revision, mine will be discarded, and Boris Godunov will be performed according to the original score.”

It was to be a while before the original frescoes could be viewed again and re-evaluated. Although Saint-Saëns brought a piano-vocal score of Mussorgsky’s version from Russia in 1874, there was little widespread interest in it until 1922, when Robert Godet compared piano scores of Mussorgsky’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s versions and declared: “The difference in the two versions does not lie in slight transpositions and casual retouching; they attest, on the contrary, to the flagrant and persistent antagonism of the two mentalities. It appears difficult indeed, after a first inspection of the documents, not to become indignant over the sacrilege, to cry, one is never betrayed save by one’s friends!”

In 1928, Russian musicologist Pavel Lamm brought out an edition of the 1871 and 1874 versions in both piano-vocal and full orchestral scores, although the orchestral version was printed in a limited edition and not put on sale (currently available in a four-volume reprint by Belwin-Mills, it is the edition used for the San Francisco Opera performances of 1973). A new, scholarly edition of the full orchestral score, expertly edited and annotated by David Lloyd-Jones, was published by Oxford University Press in 1975, and became the basis for subsequent productions of Boris Godunov at the Metropolitan and here in San Francisco.

Interestingly, despite the modern mania for “authenticity,” acceptance of Mussorgsky’s original version has not been immediate and universal. Many who have become familiar with the piece through Rimsky-Korsakov’s popularization of it are reluctant to relinquish the gorgeous veneer he applied to lovingly. And even some who reject Rimsky-Korsakov’s tampering as excessive, have some difficulty embracing the stark originality that kept Boris from wining a place in the repertory on its own. Several have tried their own hand at touching up the original, not as Rimsky-Korsakov had, with lush orchestration as well as countless minute adjustments of harmony and melody, but more in the way that Mahler attempted to polish the supposedly crude orchestration of Schumann’s four symphonies, without altering the music.

The most illustrious of Rimsky-Korsakov’s successors would have to be Dimitri Shostakovich, who re-orchestrated Boris in a 1940 version that was heard at San Francisco Opera in 1966.

In Testimony, Shostakovich’s controversial memoirs edited by Solomon Volkov and published in 1979, the composer says, “Rimsky-Korsakov was despotic and tried to make the score submit to his own style, rewriting a lot and adding his own music.   I changed only a few bars and rewrote very little. But certain things did have to be changed . . .

“Mussorgsky has marvelously orchestrated moments, but I see no sin in my work. I didn’t touch the successful parts, but there are many unsuccessful parts because he lacked mastery of the craft, which comes only through time spent on your backside, no other way. For instance the Polonaise in the Polish act is abominable, yet it’s an important moment. The same holds for Boris’s coronation. And that bell—now, what kind of bell is that? It’s just a pathetic parody. These are very important scenes and can’t be tossed away.

“Of course, there was one notable character, Boris Asafiev, who proposed that there was a theoretical basis for Mussorgsky’s incompetence . . . Asafiev maintained that all the scenes I just mentioned were orchestrated wonderfully by Mussorgsky, that it was part of his plan. He intended the Coronation Scene to be lackluster to show that the people were against Boris’s coronation. This was the people’s form of protest—clumsy orchestration. And in the Polish act, Asafiev would have you believe, Mussorgsky was exposing the decadent gentry, and therefore let the Poles dance to poor instrumentation. That was his ay of punishing them.”

However excessive Shostakovich’s sarcasm may be, the debate over versions of Boris Godunov will probably continue for some time. Without question, we can only gain in understanding and appreciation of the work by having Mussorgsky’s original available in score and on stage. And few would wish for the total extinction of Rimsky-Korsakov’s masterful revision, however far it may have veered from Mussorgsky’s intentions, any more than we would want to lose Respighi’s orchestrations of “ancient airs and dances,” or Bach’s arrangements of Vivaldi’s violin concertos. It is perhaps a reflection of our ambivalence that even productions of Boris using Mussorgsky’s orchestration generally incorporate both the St. Basil and Kromy Forest scenes, an arrangement the composer never considered.

As Joseph Kerman puts it, “The plain fact is that all versions of Boris Godunov except the very first are pastiches, and that even the composer’s own pastiche—the second version—lacks final authority.” Yet it is also a fact that we would be foolish to discard forever the wonderful embellishments added to the score by Mussorgsky and others. Its’ a dilemma that started with that one little letter in 1871, and we will probably have to confront it for as long as Boris Godunov continues to fascinate.

This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1983.

The Three Faces of Boris

By John Schauer

The world’s love affair with Boris Godunov started, as do many tempestuous love affairs, with an initial rejection. On February 17, 1871, Pavel Fyodorov wrote to Modest Mussorgsky: “Dear Sir, By the order of the Director of the Imperial Theaters, I have the honor to advise you that upon examination by the Musical-Theater Committee of the score of your composition, Boris Godunov, this opera was not approved for production on the Russian stage of the Imperial Theaters. Returning the aforesaid score and the libretto of the opera, I sincerely ask you to accept this expression of my respects.”

With this simple note began perhaps the most tangled history of any acknowledged masterpiece in the operatic repertoire. No other opera title is as quick to elicit the question, “Which version?” or to receive as many possible answers once it has been asked.

The problems inherent in sorting out Boris Godunov’s checkered history are common to a large number of operatic and even symphonic works; where Boris surpasses them in complexity is by presenting all those problems in one piece. Like many other operas, Boris exists in more than one version by the composer—one thinks of the works Verdi wrote for Paris and later revised (Les Vêpres Siciliennes, Don Carlos) or almost any opera by Handel. Mussorgsky, like Schumann, has been rather consistently criticized for unidiomatic orchestrations (both of them seemed frequently to think of the orchestra as an enormous piano, the instrument they most intimately understood) that were subsequently “improved” by others. And Boris, like several other masterworks, has had the distinction of being arranged not by anonymous hacks, but by composers of recognized genius—just as Mozart re-orchestrated Handel’s Messiah, and as Berlioz added his own deft touches to several of Gluck’s operas—whose work and musical insight we should respect.

In coming to understand the objections to Mussorgsky’s original version and the subsequent attempts by others to “correct” his “mistakes,” it must be remembered that Russian musicians at that time were divided into two camps: the officially recognized professional composers, who tended to be trained in the European, specifically German, tradition; and the “nationalist” composers, generally amateurs, who sought a distinctly Russian musical idiom. The former group headed by Anton Rubinstein, is perhaps best exemplified by the works of Tchaikovsky (although Tchaikovsky’s style was also heavily influenced by Italian opera and French ballet); the nationalist movement, spearheaded by Glinka, came to be promulgated by that group known as “The Mighty Five”: Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, of whom only the last-named had conventional training in compositional technique.

As originally written and composed by Mussorgsky (he prepared the libretto himself, modeled on Pushkin’s play), Boris Godunov comprised seven scenes in four parts:

a) Outside the Novodievichy Monastery, where the populace is manipulated to call for Boris’s coronation (Act I, scene 1 in the original scheme);
b) Boris’s coronation (Act I, scene 2);
c) Pimen’s cell, where Grigory gets the idea to impersonate Dimitri, the murdered Tsarevich (Act II, scene 1);
d) an inn on the Lithuanian border, where Grigory narrowly escapes arrest (Act II, scene 2);
e) the Tsar’s chambers in the Kremlin in Moscow, where Boris is tormented by guilt and receives news of Grigory’s impending arrival (Act III);
f) outside St. Basil’s Cathedral, where the Simpleton openly accuses Boris of Dimitri’s murder (Act IV, scene 1); and finally,
g) the council room in the Kremlin, where Boris dies (Act IV, scene 2).

The opera in its original form was not a likely candidate for popular acceptance. It focused almost entirely on Boris and the chorus; it had no major female role, and not enough for the tenor; there was no love interest; and it lacked those musical features that were expected, such as clearly defined arias, formal ensembles and dances. Rimsky-Korsakov, who came to play such a decisive role in the course of several of Mussorgsky’s works, has recorded in his memoirs the reaction of the committee that had voted, five to one, to reject Boris in its first incarnation: “The freshness and originality of the music nonplussed the honorable members of the committee who reproved the composer for, among other things, the absence of a reasonably important female role . . . Much of the fault-finding was simply ridiculous . . . Mussorgsky, hurt and offended, withdrew his score, but later though the matter over and decided to make radical changes and additions.”

The changes wrought by Mussorgsky affected not only the dramatic structure of the work, but the overall musical effect as well. As Joseph Kerman has put it, Mussorgsky went to work and inserted many little songs to lighten the show; it is only in the second version of Boris Godunov that the minor characters break into folk songs on every convenient occasion.” The material he added was musically more conventional by the standards of Mussorgsky’s time, and the sections he retained were adjusted to emphasize conventional major-minor tonality and to rely less upon modality—the ancient melodic formulas of the Church, which had contributed so greatly to the primitive feel of the original version.

Mussorgsky’s revisions went through various stages, but by June 1872, he had added (between e and f above) a two-scene act set in Poland, where Grigory enlists the support and love of Marina, thereby providing a major female role and a romantic sub-plot; replaced f with a scene in a forest near Kromy, where Grigory is hailed by the people; rewritten and expanded e; and cut, to various minor degrees, scenes a, b, c, and g. In this form the work was resubmitted to the Musical Theater Committee, which again rejected it.

Boris, however, was beginning to win what today would be called a cult following, due to private performances of excerpts; and after three scenes (the Inn scene and Polish act) were performed publicly in February 1873. Mussorgsky’s friend Julia Platonova (a renowned singer who performed the role of Marina) demanded the Mariinsky Theater produce the complete opera, or she would terminate her contract with them. The theater committee acceded to her demands, and a vocal score was prepared and published in January 1874, less than two weeks before the work’s premiere in St. Petersburg. By this time Mussorgsky had decided to reverse the order of the final two scenes, so that the opera ended not with Boris’s death, but with the Simpleton’s lament in the forest at Kromy. (Other changes made expressly for the premiere production need not concern us here.)

Although reviews of the premiere were nearly unanimously negative, the performance was a popular success (Mussorgsky-s friend Stassov records that the composer took nearly 20 curtain calls). Between the premiere and October 1882 (less than two years after Mussorgsky’s death), the opera was performed 26 times to well-sold houses (although the final scene in the Kromy forest was suppressed after 1876, presumably for political reasons). Boris was not seen on the Mariinsky stage again until 1904, when it was revived in a version by Rimsky-Korsakov.

In his memoirs, Rimsky-Korsakov describes the first manifestations of the sad developments that were to lead to Mussorgsky’s demise: “In general, after the production of Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky appeared in our midst less frequently, and a marked change was to be observed in him . . . This is approximately the period when he fell to loitering at the Maly Yaroslavyets and other restaurants until early morning over cognac, alone or with companions then unknown to us . . . what was the cause of Mussorgsky’s spiritual and mental decay? To a considerable degree it was due at first to the success of Boris (owing to which his pride and ambition as an author began to grow); later on it was due to its failure . . .There were rumors afloat that the opera had displeased the Imperial family; there was gossip that its subject was unpleasant to the censors; the result was that the opera was stricken from the repertory . . . Though still keeping up friendly relations with Cui and Borodin as well as with me, Mussorgsky regarded me with a certain suspicion. My studies in harmony and counterpoint, which had begun to absorb me, did not please him at all. It looked as though he suspected me of being the conservative professor, who might convict him of parallel fifths [a forbidden progression in strict counterpoint], and this was unbearable to him. As for the Conservatory, he could not endure it at all.”

Rimsky-Korsakov may well have been correct. In 1870, Mussorgsky had written to two friends, “I am very doubtful about German vocal music in general and modern German music in particular. German men and women sing like roosters, imagining that the more their mouths gape and the longer they hold their notes, the more feeling they show . . .for my taste the Germans, moving from their leather fried in pork-fat to the seven-hour operas of Wagner, offer nothing attractive for me . . . I do not envy the Germans and I do not laugh at them, because one can’t laugh at that which is boring, but may only avert one’s face.”

Ironically, it was the “seven-hour operas of Wagner” that served as the impetus for Rimsky-Korsakov to enter the history of Boris and give it new life. In the middle of the 1888–89 season at the Mariinsky Theater, a Czech impresario brought a German opera company to produce Wagener’s Ring of the Nibelung. Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov attended the rehearsals, score in hand, and fell under the influence of the notorious German musical revolutionary: “Wagner’s method of orchestration struck Glazunov and me, and thenceforth Wagner’s devices gradually began to form a part of our orchestral tricks of the trade. My first application of Wagner’s orchestral methods and of an increased wind choir was in my orchestration of the Polish dance from Boris Godunov for a concert performance. As regards orchestration, this Polonaise was one of the less successful portions of Mussorgsky’s opera. The composer had first orchestrated it . . . almost exclusively for bowed instruments. Mussorgsky conceived the unfortunate and wholly indefensible idea of imitating the vingt-quatre violons du roi—that is, the orchestra of the time of the composer Lully (Louis XIV). What connection there was between this orchestra and the time of the False Dimitri, as well as the life of Poland of that period, is incomprehensible . . . Yet in its music the Polonaise was characteristic and beautiful, for this reason I undertook to turn it into a concert piece, the more so as Boris Godunov was no longer on the boards.”

Rimsky-Korsakov turned to Boris again in 1892, when he arranged the Coronation Scene for another concert. “The effect achieved was magnificent,” he was quick to admit, “and this was conceded even by those of Mussorgsky’s admirers who had been ready to accuse me of spoiling his works, because of the alleged Conservatory learning I had acquired—learning that ran counter to the freedom of creative art, such as Mussorgsky’s harmonic incoherence. By the way, in this scene I was particularly successful with the bell-tolling, which sounded so beautiful under Mussorgsky’s fingers on the piano and failed so utterly in the orchestra.”

In November of 1896, a more or less complete version of Boris, arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov, was presented, based upon the 1874 vocal score. A decade later, he turned again to Mussorgsky’s masterpiece and arranged those portions he had omitted in 1896; and he put his final touches on the piece for the first performance given outside of Russia, when Diaghilev brought Boris to Paris in May 1908. (Rimsky-Korsakov never did orchestrate the St. Basil scene; that was done by Ippolitov-Ivanov in a style that would fit in with the rest of the Rimsky-Korsakov version.)

In view of the invective that has been heaped upon Rimsky-Korsakov by some purists, it should be pointed out that he was not attempting to usurp the fruits of his friend’s genius, but to popularize an unconventional work that had fallen out of favor due to what Rimsky-Korsakov described in the preface to his version as “impractical difficulties, fragmentary musical phrases, clumsy vocal writing, harsh harmonies and modulations, faulty counterpoint, poverty of instrumentation, and general weakness from a technical point of view.” Today it is tempting to snicker at such judgments, but in an era that seems to have very little esteem for discipline, it is perhaps too easy to ridicule the standards of a time that was more ordered, at least musically, and valued personal idiosyncrasy far less than we do today.

Although Rimsky-Korsakov’s changes are today considered extensive, he felt he had not gone too far: “Although I have revised it, the opera still remains entirely the creation of Mussorgsky since I have only refined it and put it in order technically, making its lofty significance clearer and more accessible to all, while at the same time putting an end to all carping criticism of this work.”

He went further in his memoirs, where he said, “Having arranged the new version of Boris Godunov, I had not destroyed its original form, had not painted out the old frescoes for ever. If ever the conclusion is arrived at that the original is better, worthier than my revision, mine will be discarded, and Boris Godunov will be performed according to the original score.”

It was to be a while before the original frescoes could be viewed again and re-evaluated. Although Saint-Saëns brought a piano-vocal score of Mussorgsky’s version from Russia in 1874, there was little widespread interest in it until 1922, when Robert Godet compared piano scores of Mussorgsky’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s versions and declared: “The difference in the two versions does not lie in slight transpositions and casual retouching; they attest, on the contrary, to the flagrant and persistent antagonism of the two mentalities. It appears difficult indeed, after a first inspection of the documents, not to become indignant over the sacrilege, to cry, one is never betrayed save by one’s friends!”

In 1928, Russian musicologist Pavel Lamm brought out an edition of the 1871 and 1874 versions in both piano-vocal and full orchestral scores, although the orchestral version was printed in a limited edition and not put on sale (currently available in a four-volume reprint by Belwin-Mills, it is the edition used for the San Francisco Opera performances of 1973). A new, scholarly edition of the full orchestral score, expertly edited and annotated by David Lloyd-Jones, was published by Oxford University Press in 1975, and became the basis for subsequent productions of Boris Godunov at the Metropolitan and here in San Francisco.

Interestingly, despite the modern mania for “authenticity,” acceptance of Mussorgsky’s original version has not been immediate and universal. Many who have become familiar with the piece through Rimsky-Korsakov’s popularization of it are reluctant to relinquish the gorgeous veneer he applied to lovingly. And even some who reject Rimsky-Korsakov’s tampering as excessive, have some difficulty embracing the stark originality that kept Boris from wining a place in the repertory on its own. Several have tried their own hand at touching up the original, not as Rimsky-Korsakov had, with lush orchestration as well as countless minute adjustments of harmony and melody, but more in the way that Mahler attempted to polish the supposedly crude orchestration of Schumann’s four symphonies, without altering the music.

The most illustrious of Rimsky-Korsakov’s successors would have to be Dimitri Shostakovich, who re-orchestrated Boris in a 1940 version that was heard at San Francisco Opera in 1966.

In Testimony, Shostakovich’s controversial memoirs edited by Solomon Volkov and published in 1979, the composer says, “Rimsky-Korsakov was despotic and tried to make the score submit to his own style, rewriting a lot and adding his own music.   I changed only a few bars and rewrote very little. But certain things did have to be changed . . .

“Mussorgsky has marvelously orchestrated moments, but I see no sin in my work. I didn’t touch the successful parts, but there are many unsuccessful parts because he lacked mastery of the craft, which comes only through time spent on your backside, no other way. For instance the Polonaise in the Polish act is abominable, yet it’s an important moment. The same holds for Boris’s coronation. And that bell—now, what kind of bell is that? It’s just a pathetic parody. These are very important scenes and can’t be tossed away.

“Of course, there was one notable character, Boris Asafiev, who proposed that there was a theoretical basis for Mussorgsky’s incompetence . . . Asafiev maintained that all the scenes I just mentioned were orchestrated wonderfully by Mussorgsky, that it was part of his plan. He intended the Coronation Scene to be lackluster to show that the people were against Boris’s coronation. This was the people’s form of protest—clumsy orchestration. And in the Polish act, Asafiev would have you believe, Mussorgsky was exposing the decadent gentry, and therefore let the Poles dance to poor instrumentation. That was his ay of punishing them.”

However excessive Shostakovich’s sarcasm may be, the debate over versions of Boris Godunov will probably continue for some time. Without question, we can only gain in understanding and appreciation of the work by having Mussorgsky’s original available in score and on stage. And few would wish for the total extinction of Rimsky-Korsakov’s masterful revision, however far it may have veered from Mussorgsky’s intentions, any more than we would want to lose Respighi’s orchestrations of “ancient airs and dances,” or Bach’s arrangements of Vivaldi’s violin concertos. It is perhaps a reflection of our ambivalence that even productions of Boris using Mussorgsky’s orchestration generally incorporate both the St. Basil and Kromy Forest scenes, an arrangement the composer never considered.

As Joseph Kerman puts it, “The plain fact is that all versions of Boris Godunov except the very first are pastiches, and that even the composer’s own pastiche—the second version—lacks final authority.” Yet it is also a fact that we would be foolish to discard forever the wonderful embellishments added to the score by Mussorgsky and others. Its’ a dilemma that started with that one little letter in 1871, and we will probably have to confront it for as long as Boris Godunov continues to fascinate.

This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1983.

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