Sent by a friend in Berlin. I know of a recording of excerpts, but I hope somebody does the whole thing. April 11, 2007 A Lost 'Boris Godunov' Is Found and Staged By PATRICIA COHEN PRINCETON, N.J., April 8 - In 1936, two of the Soviet Union's greatest artists decided to work on a new theatrical production of Pushkin's "Boris Godunov" for its author's coming jubilee. Sergei Prokofiev wrote 24 musical pieces while the visionary stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold mapped out scenes and started rehearsals. The following year, Stalin's terror fixed its gaze on Meyerhold and he abandoned the project. Three years later, he was dead, shot by a firing squad. Now, thanks to the recent discovery of Meyerhold's original notes and Prokofiev's handwritten score and comments, their collaboration is finally having its world premiere on Thursday night at the Berlind Theater at Princeton University, 70 years after its planned opening. This mammoth undertaking by Princeton, in conjunction with the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow, rescues a production that artists and scholars thought was lost forever. The four sold-out performances will also introduce Meyerhold, a seminal theatrical thinker, to an audience largely ignorant of his work. "I was fairly stunned and I continue to be stunned," said Simon Morrison, an associate professor of music at Princeton, who excavated Meyerhold's notes in 2005 from a sealed section of the Russian archive, to which he managed to gain access. Mr. Morrison, who is writing a book about Prokofiev, said: "This is one of the scores that he composed in the '30s when he was at the top of his game, and it went to waste. He never heard it in his lifetime." "Boris" ran afoul of the government long before Prokofiev and Meyerhold got hold of it. Pushkin's play - about the 16th-century tyrannical czar Boris Godunov, and Dimitri, a pretender to the throne - "is very seditious," said Caryl Emerson, chairwoman of Princeton's Slavic languages and literature department, who is overseeing the project with Mr. Morrison. This production, which is using a new English translation by Antony Wood, is the first in which all 25 scenes that Pushkin wrote are being performed together, Ms. Emerson said. "It combines three geniuses of Russian culture," she said. "Pushkin, Prokofiev and Meyerhold, the poet, the composer and the stage director." Modest Mussorgsky used Pushkin's play as a source for his fabulously successful opera "Boris Godunov." But Prokofiev and Meyerhold were contemptuous of what they considered that work's thick, syrupy, optimistic and romantic score. Meyerhold, for example, envisioned the final scene with a choral sound for the crowd that was "dark, agitated, menacing, like the roar of the sea." He wrote, "One should feel a gathering of forces, the restraining of an internal rage." Mussorgsky's was a 19th-century sound, Mr. Morrison said, "Prokofiev was the first to get at the 20th-century sound." Meyerhold gave Prokofiev detailed instructions about the kind of orchestral and choral music he wanted and which scenes it would go in. Those notes, along with Prokofiev's manuscript, descriptions of the work in various memoirs and Meyerhold's rehearsal transcripts, guided this production. "This is an original creation based on some of his ideas," Tim Vasen, the production's director, said, referring to Meyerhold. "It's an amazing collaboration with someone who's not in the room." Since Meyerhold often worked with architects, Mr. Morrison asked Princeton's Architecture School to design the set. Graduate students came up with rows of floor-to-ceiling bungee cords made out of stretchy surgical tubing (3,750 feet in all) set along grooves that run across the stage. The cords can be arranged to suggest trees in a forest, pulled and snapped like bows and arrows during a battle scene or wrapped around a character's body to evoke emotions like anger or frustration. The set is remarkably flexible, though it did prevent the choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, from using pointe steps, because the dancers' toe shoes kept getting stuck in the grooves. For a scene set at a Polish ball, Meyerhold wrote that he wanted a "full orchestra in a social setting performing three numbers, 'Reverie,' 'Polonaise,' and 'Mazurka,' " which Prokofiev composed. Mr. Vasen has placed some of the musicians and the conductor, Michael Pratt, onstage. Wearing 18th-century-style wigs that look like neon-colored cotton candy, the musicians are stacked on levels behind a giant red window frame, like an extended "Hollywood Squares" set. Although he originally worked with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold came to disdain the naturalistic method of acting, preferring much more stylized, physical movement that he developed into a system called Biomechanics. He drew on a wide range of influences, from Kabuki to Frederick Taylor's time-motion studies, to create theater that would dissolve the wall between actor and audience. An enthusiastic revolutionary, Meyerhold initially found his "people's theater" embraced by the Bolsheviks. But by the 1930s, Socialist Realism had become the approved revolutionary aesthetic, and Meyerhold's avant-garde, cinematic style was considered subversive. Mr. Vasen, with advice from Mr. Morrison and Ms. Emerson, has incorporated these ideas into the play. Marina, the Polish princess with whom Dimitri falls in love, stands rigid, arms at her sides, wrists bent at 90-degree angles like a mannequin while her suitor professes his undying love. To accompany her command to "Reveal your heart to me," Prokofiev wrote an "Amoroso" that was inspired by the cheap, trashy soundtracks of 1930s Hollywood melodramas. During the battle scenes, Mr. Vasen uses one of Meyerhold's physical warm-up exercises - a rhythmic, mechanized toe-to-heel step - for the soldiers' march. Prokofiev composed what Mr. Morrison calls a "musical cartoon," using carnival rhythms and the fife and drum. During Sunday night's rehearsal, the line of soldiers, wearing helmets like the Tin Man's in "The Wizard of Oz," clumped toward the edge of the stage, and then pivoted. One went a couple of inches too far and accidentally fell off the stage before quickly scrambling back up. After the scene, Mr. Morrison shouted up to a few musicians perched on a balcony to slow down the tempo. Harlow Robinson, who wrote a biography of Prokofiev and is a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said of the Princeton production that it was "certainly significant to be hearing and seeing it all together." The original aborted production "promised to be very brilliant." A Russian television crew from the state-run Channel 1 was scheduled to film Tuesday night's dress rehearsal and explain to viewers how it is that this essentially Russian work is being first performed in New Jersey. In Russia, Pushkin is more often read than performed, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, which ended state subsidies and introduced artistic freedom. From Mr. Morrison and Ms. Emerson's perspective, only a university with resources like Princeton's could afford such an undertaking. The 15 actors (who play 70 parts), 10 dancers, 24 choral singers and 35 musicians are all undergraduates. "The entire campus became a kind of creative workshop, an atelier," Mr. Morrison said. Many are taking part in the play as part of an academic course. On Thursday, a three-day symposium begins with Russian and other scholars, and there is an exhibition of materials from the period at the Firestone Library on campus here. Putting on the four performances is costing an estimated $140,000, Mr. Morrison said. The performances are sold out, but he said there was a chance some seats would become available before curtain time. There are also free tickets to Wednesday night's dress rehearsal that may become available 20 minutes before the 8 p.m. start. For Mr. Morrison, "one of the great tragedies of musical history is what happened to Prokofiev's art." Only half of what Prokofiev composed is known; the rest was unpublished, altered or lost, he said. Though Prokofiev's music for "Boris" has been recorded, Mr. Morrison said, "the music doesn't make sense without the words." Now, after seeing this production, he said he felt as if the "words don't make sense without the music." Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company Steve Schwartz *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html