Boris Godunov Premieres

Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov put Russian history and the crowd at the centre of opera in 1874.

Related

RomanticOperaMotiveVoice

Time and place

8 February 1874, new style, which was 27 January in Russia, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, with his own libretto after Pushkin's historical play, was performed in the 1872 revision. The first version of 1869 had been rejected by the theatre, partly because it had no leading female role.

What happened

The opera sets the Russian Time of Troubles at the end of the sixteenth century: Boris seizes the throne, the false Dmitri rises against him, and the people veer between famine and fear. Mussorgsky made the crowd a real character, with the coronation, the Polish ball and the Kromy scene taking turns on stage. Solos are often written as speech-like recitative, with short lines and hard accents, while harmony uses parallel chords and folk modes rather than polished resolutions.

What changed

Russian history and the collective actions of ordinary people could carry a grand opera without myth or courtly love. Recitative stopped being a passage between arias and took on the heaviest dramatic work. Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich later made orchestral versions, and the argument over versions became part of opera history. Mussorgsky's own score was rediscovered in the twentieth century.

Listen to the turn

Begin with Boris's solo, its phrases often falling at the end like a man talking to himself. Then hear the crowd's chorus, short lines piling up without a tidy tune. Finally the promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition, the same hand turning pictures into sound. All three show that music can speak without a beautiful melody.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; see Opera and Motive, and Voice.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry "Boris Godunov" — versions and premiere checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, Mussorgsky, Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton University Press) — text setting checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.