had rested on their election by the boyars’ assembly to restore Russia’s
unity, following the ‘Time of Troubles’, a period of civil wars and foreign invasion following the death of Boris Godunov. Perhaps Kar-amzin should have realized that Godunov was not a murderer. But nearly all the documents which he consulted had been doctored by official clerks or monks, and to challenge the Romanov myth would have got him into trouble with the government. In any case, the murder story was far too good for Karamzin to resist. It allowed him to explore the inner conflicts of Godunov’s mind in a way quite unsupported by the evidence. It underpinned his tragic concept of Boris Godunov - a progressive ruler who was haunted by his crime and in the end undone by his own illegitimacy as a Tsar. Karamzin’s History was dedicated to the Emperor Alexander - the reigning Tsar from the House of Romanov - and its vision was overtly monarchist. The moral lesson which he drew from the Godunov story - that elected rulers are never any good - was carefully attuned to the politics of Alexander’s reign. Boris was a Russian Bonaparte.
Pushkin’s Boris Godunov was very closely based on Karamzin’s History, sometimes even lifting sections word for word. The conception of the play is firmly royalist - the people play no active part in their own history. That is the meaning of the famous stage direction ‘the people remain silent’ (‘narod bezmolvstvuet’) with which the drama ends. Musorgsky, too, who followed Pushkin’s text in his first version of the opera (1868-9), portrayed the Russian people as a dark and passive force, mired in the customs and beliefs of the old Russia embodied in Moscow. This conception of the Russians is epitomized in the scene outside St Basil’s on Red Square. The starving people gather there and Boris is confronted by the Holy Fool, who by implication condemns the Tsar’s crimes. But the crowd remains inert, kneeling in supplication to the Tsar, and even when the Holy Fool says he will not pray for the ‘Tsar Herod’, the people just disperse. Hence what might have been a signal for revolt is allowed to pass, and the Holy Fool appears not as the people’s leader but as a voice of conscience and Boris’s remorse.74 It was only with the addition of the ‘Kromy Forest Scene’, in the second version of the opera (1871-2), that Musorgsky introduced the theme of conflict between the people and the Tsar. Indeed, this conflict becomes the motive force of the whole drama, and the people the real tragic subject of the opera. In the Kromy scene the
people are revealed in rebellion, the crowd mocks the Tsar, and folk song is deployed as the embodiment of the people’s voice. Musorgsky was first inspired to insert the scene for musical effect, having been impressed by the choral heterophony of a similar crowd scene in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov. The two men were sharing an apartment (and a piano) at the time and Musorgsky set to work on the Kromy scene just as Rimsky was orchestrating his opera.75 But the substitution of the Kromy scene for the one before St Basil’s (which is what Musorgsky clearly intended) meant a complete switch in the intellectual emphasis of the opera.*
There was no Kromy revolt in Karamzin or Pushkin and, as the Russian music expert Richard Taruskin has brilliantly shown, the Populist redrafting of the opera was rather the result of Musorgsky’s friendship with the historian Nikolai Kostomarov, who also helped him in the planning of Khovanshchina (1874). Kostomarov viewed the common people as the fundamental force of history. His major work The Revolt of Stenka Razin (1859), one of the first fruits of the liberal laws on censorship passed in the early years of Alexander II’s reign, had made him a popular and influential figure in the liberal intellectual circles which did so much to advance the Russian arts in the 1860s and 1870s. In The Time of Troubles (1866) Kostomarov described how the famine led to bands of migrant serfs rallying behind the False Dmitry in opposition to Boris Godunov:
They were prepared to throw themselves with joy at whoever would lead them against Boris, at whoever would promise them an improvement in their lot. This was not a matter of aspiring to this or that political or social order; the huge crowd of sufferers easily attached itself to a new face in the hope that under a new order things would become better than under the old.76
It is a conception of the Russian people - suffering and oppressed, full of destructive and impulsive violence, uncontrollable and unable to control its own destiny - that applies equally to 1917.
* So the tendency of modern productions to include both these scenes, though understandable on the basis of the music, contradicts the will of Musorgsky, who physically
ripped out the St Basil’s scene from the revised version of the score.
’History is my nocturnal friend’, Musorgsky wrote to Stasov in 1873; ‘it brings me pleasure and intoxication.’77 It was Moscow that had infected him with the history bug. He loved its ‘smell of antiquity’ which transported him ‘into another world’.78 For Musorgsky, Moscow was a symbol of the Russian land - it represented a huge weight of inertia in the customs and beliefs of old Russia. Beneath the thin veneer of European civilization that Peter had laid down, the common people were still the inhabitants of ‘Jericho’. ‘Paper, books, they’ve gone ahead, but the people haven’t moved’, the composer wrote to Stasov on the bicentennial jubilee of Peter’s birth in 1872. ‘Public benefactors are inclined to glorify themselves and to fix their glory in documents, but the people groan, and drink to stifle their groans, and groan all the louder: “haven’t moved!”’79 This was the pessimistic vision of old Russia that Musorgsky had expressed in the last prophetic words of the Holy Fool in Boris Godunov:
Darkest dark, impenetrable dark Woe, woe to Rus’ Weep, weep Russian people Hungry people.
After Godunov he began immediately on Khovanshchina, an opera set amid the political and religious struggles in Moscow from the eve of Peter’s coronation in 1682 to his violent suppression of the streltsy musketeers, the last defenders of the Moscow boyars and the Old Belief, who rose up in a series of revolts between 1689 and 1698. More than a thousand musketeers were executed on the Tsar’s orders, their mangled bodies displayed as a warning to others, in reprisal for their abortive plot to replace Peter with his sister Sophia, who had ruled as regent in the 1680s when he was still too young to govern by himself. As a punishment for her role in the revolts, Peter forced Sophia to become a nun. The same fate befell his wife, Eudoxia, who had sympathized with the insurrectionaries. The Streltsy revolt and its aftermath marked a crossroads in Russian history, a period when the new dynamic Petrine state clashed with the forces of tradition. The defenders of old Russia were represented in the opera by the hero Prince Khovansky, a Moscow patriarch who was the main leader of
the streltsy musketeers (Khovansbchina means ‘Khovansky’s rule’); and by the Old Believer Dosifei (a fictional creation named after the last patriarch of the united Orthodox Church in Jerusalem). They are connected by the fictional figure of Marfa, Khovansky’s fiancee and a devout adherent to the Old Belief. Marfa’s constant prayers and lamentations for Orthodox Russia express the profound sense of loss that lies at the heart of this opera.
The Westernists viewed Khovansbchina as a progressive work, a celebration of the passing from the old Moscow to the European spirit of St Petersburg. Stasov, for example, tried to persuade Musorgsky to devote more of Act III to the Old Believers, because this would strengthen their association with ‘that side of ancient Russia’ that was ‘petty, wretched, dull-brained, superstitious, evil and malevolent’.80 This interpretation was then fixed by Rimsky-Korsakov, who, as the editor of the unfinished score after Musorgsky’s death in 1881, moved the prelude (‘Dawn over the Moscow River’) to the end, so that what in the original version had been a lyrical depiction of the old Moscow now became the sign of Peter’s rising sun. All before was night.
This simple message was reinforced by an act of vandalism on Rimsky’s part. To the end of the opera’s final chorus, a melismatic Old Believers’ melody that Musorgsky had transcribed from the singing of a friend, Rimsky added a brassy marching tune of the Preobrazhensky Regiment - the very regiment Peter had established as his personal guard to replace the streltsy musketeers (it was Musorgsky’s regiment as well). Without Rimsky’s programmatic alterations the Old Believers would have had the fifth and final act of the opera to themselves. The fifth act takes its subject from the mass suicides of the Old Believers in response to the suppression of the Streltsy revolt in 1698: some 20,000 Old Believers are said to have gathered in churches and chapels in various remote regions of the Russian north and burned themselves to death. At the end of Musorgsky’s original version of the opera the Old Believers marched off to their deaths, singing chants and prayers. The opera had thus ended with a sense of loss at the passing of the old religious world of Muscovy. As far as one can tell, it had been Musorgsky’s aim to close Khovansbchina in this melancholic vein, in the same pianissimo and pessimistic mood as Boris Godunov. He had never felt the need to ‘resolve’ the opera with a forward moving plot, like that
imposed on it by Rimsky-Korsakov. Deadlock and immobility were Musorgsky’s
