Let me start by noting that this was the evening for which I had postponed
our Valentine's Day trip to Hawaii.  That's heavy baggage.

Yesterday (2/18/99) I attended the Washington Opera Company's performance
of Mussorgsky's *Boris Godunov* at the Kennedy Center.  The 8:00 pm curtain
was preceded by an insights lecture at 6:30 which I also attended.  Here
are some of the points that I found interesting and remember.

The speaker was James Billington, who is the Librarian of Congress.  He's
also an honors graduate of Princeton, a Rhodes scholar, has taught at
Harvard and Princeton and can recall attending Boris performances going
back to when Ezio Pinza sang it in Italian.  He drew some chuckles from the
audience as he contrasted the dying Boris' defiantly forceful Russian "Ya
tsar yishCHAW!" (I'm still the czar) w/ the gentle almost caressing Italian
"son' cesare ancora!" His lecture was more about Russian, and Slavic
cultural history, than about the opera.  He noted that slavic opera began
in what is now the Czech republic, noting the many operas of Smetana and
Dvorak (other than Bartered Bride) that are barely known outside their
country.  He also mentioned a Polish opera by a teacher of Chopin (not
Elsner) the score of which has gotten lost and the plot of which involves
the American Revolution.

Russian operatic composers in the last century, possibly in reaction
against what they often saw as an effete Western cultural medium, sought
to evolve their own style of opera.  (Billington noted the fortuitous
circumstance that the name Mussorgsky sounded like it came from, if it
didn't actually come from, the Russian "musor" which means "refuse",
"garbage", etc., and that Mussorgsky declared his intention in writing
his own libretto to Boris to "plow up the black earth".) Russian opera
concerned itself less w/ tenor/soprano episodes than w/ playing bass voices
against a chorus, the two key elements in the Russian Orthodox Church
liturgy.  Balakirev, possibly the patriarch of the emerging nationalist
minded Russian composers, sought to find in the voices of the people in
the streets the music that he wanted to compose, specifically the voices of
his native Nizhny Novgorod.  Apparently he got himself a job as a railroad
porter in Moscow so he could hear the voices of the people coming in from
Nizhni Novgorod when he couldn't go there himself.  This absorbtion in
taking music from the babble of the crowds finds itself in the crowd scenes
which punctuate Boris, of which Billington played us some examples.

As a specific example of this, which also reflected the political
liberalization in Russia under Czar Alexander II (who had liberated the
serfs...only to be assassinated about 20 years later) ran a tape of the
scene where the "holy fool" (*not* the "simpleton", as he is incorrectly
referred to outside Russia) is taunted by street urchins ho take his kopek
from him.  In the midst of this Boris makes his appearance, and the fool
takes the opportunity to tell him of his plight urging that the boys be
caught and killed just as he had killed young Dimitri.  Boris waves away
the guards about to seize him for his act of lese majeste and begs the holy
fool to pray for him, which the latter refuses to do as he cannot pray for
Czar Herod.  In the tape, apparently made during the Soviet era, the fool's
role was sung by a well known gifted singer (Kaslovsky?) from the Ukraine,
which had suffered greatly during the pre-WWII colectivization, and was
viewed by the oppressed (though apparently not by the oppressors) as a
rebuke to the currently existing regime.

The lecture went on interweaving Russian political history w/ discussion
of Slavic and Russian culture and obviously my attempts to describe what
I recall best can't do justice to it.  The lecture did leave me keyed up
for the opera that was to follow.

The cast included Samuel Ramey as Boris, Laura Lewis as Xenia, his
daughter, Wendy Hoffman as the nurse, Wieslaw Ochman as Shuisky, Daniel
Sumegi as Shchelkalov, Sergei Alexashkin as Pimen, Patrick Denniston as
Grigory, the false Dimitri; Victoria Livengood as Marina, Alan Held as
Rangoni, Stefan Szkafarowsky as Varlaam, Francis Egerton as Missail, Joyce
Castle as the innkeeper, Pierre Lefebvre as the "simpleton", Jason Stearns
as Nikitich, Corey Evan Rotz as a Boyar-in-attendance, and John Marcus
Bindel as a Frontier guard.  It was conducted by Isaac Karabtchevsky.  Even
I recognized Ramey's name and I suppose other opera mavins will recognize
other names from prestigious houses like La Scala, the Met, Wiener
Staatsoper, Mariinsky Theater, where the program notes indicated they have
sung.  So what was my impression of the opera?

Simply stated, this production, seemed to me to be Wozzeck w/out the jokes.

The production, listed as lasting three hours and fifty minutes including
one (sic) intermission, actually lasted about a half hour longer.  I got
out of the theater at 12:20 am.  Four hours of agony, suffering, relieved
only by the innkeeper scene, and the intrigue-laden "romance" between
Grigory and Marina about neither of whom I gave a damn.

I have listened to recordings of this opera and liked it, so my feelings
last night must have been the performance or the fact that for me the
visuals detract from the music.  I liked the orchestral portions and the
choral portions.  The individual singing which I had been advised were
neither recitatives nor arias, seemed to me something in between and
totally tedious.  Yes, even Ramey.  He's a fine actor, but his "Ya tsar
yischaw", which had electrified me when I heard Raimondi or Chaliapin sing
it on recordings, might almost have been Pinza singing it in Italian!  I
found it interesting that Marina did much of her singing w/ her back to the
audience.  Not that I cared.  I found neither her plotings w/ the Jesuit
(Rangoni) nor her duets w/ Grigory memorable.  The final scene after Boris'
death dwells and dwells upon the torment of a captured Boyar who is
stripped and torn apart and two Jesuits are lynched, mercifully off stage.
The crowds cheer the arrival of the "true Dimitry" while at the same time
cursing Boris for having murdered him w/out apparently recognizing the
inconsistency of all this.  I guess that's the way of crowds.

What did I like about the production?

Mostly staging.  The pinpoints of light in the total darkness at
the opera's beginning, the flashing polished battle-axe blades in the
coronation scene, the scene of the inn near the Lithuanian border, Boris'
scene w/ his children (written, I suspect to make us sympathetic to a Czar
who had acquired the throne through murder and totally misgoverned the
country afterwards), the gigantic beach ball rolling back and forth behind
the open door/arch way which I finally realized was a pendulum marking the
inexorable passage of time.

On the one hand, I thought, "I postponed my trip for this?" but I know that
it would have been impossible for me to have missed a production of Boris
when it came to town.  When I want to hear the opera again, I'll turn to my
recordings.

Walter Meyer