End of the Line
The multifarious finales to Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina
If you get the Financial Times delivered to your doorstep, my review of a remarkable new orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina that premiered last week at the Helsinki Festival is in today’s print edition (it’s also online).
There was a lot I couldn’t say about the evening in the space of the review. This was the first time I truly appreciated the vocal color palette of the Act I scene between Old Believer Marfa, her unfaithful lover Andrey Khovansky, and the Protestant maiden Emma. The fathomless depths of Nadezhda Karyazina’s mezzo-soprano, the clarion hysteria of Natalia Tanasii’s soprano, and the agile lyric top notes (which masked a threat that runs like a low-grade fever) of tenor Tuomas Katajala combined to make a heady and illuminating blend of timbre. I had also never heard Khovanshchina in concert before, and having the orchestra onstage allows you to feel the full force of Mussorgsky’s sound. The first clash of dissonance in the Prelude is like a moment of sitting bolt-upright in bed, a moment that called to mind literary critic Caryl Emerson’s comment that lyricism in the opera “prevails only as long as the protagonists sleep or dream. Once they wake up, it is non-stop denunciations, violence, cynicism, self-interest and political intrigue.” (All of this is to say nothing of Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s performance as the Scrivener, which answered the unlikely but vital question: What if Richard Kind sang Russian grand opera?)
Calling this a wholly “new” orchestration is a bit of a misnomer (and figuring out who was responsible for what in the changes to this version involved an email chain with no fewer than four factions that, in and of itself, felt like a scene cut from Mussorgsky’s libretto). However, I’ve come to find that the way one chooses to end Khovanshchina says a lot about one’s interpretation of the work as a whole. After working on it for nearly a decade, Mussorgsky left the opera unfinished when he died a week after his 42nd birthday.
At the time of his death, Mussorgsky had completed his libretto as well as a piano score that, save for part of Act II and the work’s finale, was complete. Many composers subsequently attempted to deliver on the work’s promise, beginning with Rimsky-Korsakov, who remarked that “Once it's cleaned up a bit, Khovanshchina could be orchestrated. But good lord, what a subject!” Despite his genuine admiration for Mussorgsky as a friend and a creative visionary, Rimsky-Korsakov considered him to be a second-class composer and technically inept. He also didn’t seem to get what Mussorgsky had been after with the “people’s drama” he had been writing about the years of political instability that coincided with the coronation of Peter the Great. He was working without a map, trying to create something singular and new for opera audiences, as much a cross-examination of history and power as it was an operatic historical saga. Unlike Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina features no central, tragic figure on the throne (artists in 19th-century Russia were prohibited from depicting members of the reigning Romanov family onstage). He also didn’t try to shoehorn in a Verdian love story against the backdrop of history. Instead, characters with competing political agendas mainly talk past one another. Power shifts. People die. History, unstoppable, moves ahead. The chorus of Old Believers who close out the opera with a mass-self-immolation in protest of Peter the Great’s stringent religious reforms are just a handful representing the thousands of real-life schismatics who opted for the same fate during Peter’s reign.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s heavy hand cut much of this back and fashioned a grand spectacle of a finale that sits comfortably next to Pictures at an Exhibition’s “Great Gate of Kyiv.” He brought back the musical leitmotif for Peter the Great, suggesting the approach of his guards to the funeral pyre and the ultimate triumph of the Tsar’s modernity over the schismatic old belief. (Even “Old Believer” as a term is the result of a history written by the victors: they preferred to think of themselves as “True Believers.”) This finale is a spectacle, but it’s not Mussorgsky, who had a habit of ending some of his most important scenes and works on a quiet note of introspection — not unlike the final chords of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Perhaps it was this misalignment that led to his version of Khovanshchina premiering in 1886 with an amateur opera company in St. Petersburg, rather than the Mariinsky.
For a 1913 production in Paris directed by Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Ravel teamed up to revise Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, with Stravinsky restoring the original ending to more closely match Mussorgsky’s vision based on original sketches. However, Diaghilev’s Dosifei, Feodor Chaliapin, perhaps embracing his role as a schismatic, refused to sing anything that tampered with Rimsky-Korsakov’s vision. The next major attempt to align more closely with Modest Petrovich came in 1931, with Soviet musicologist Pavel Lamm and composer Boris Asafyev, who published a vocal score based on Mussorgsky’s original manuscripts. (Asafyev’s full orchestration became a matter of contention in the ever-shifting world of cultural politics in the USSR that is its own saga that even led to his writing, out of frustration, to Lamm: “What the hell have I done??” Which: relatable.)
Finally, Shostakovich based his 1958 orchestration of Khovanshchina largely on the Lamm/Asafyev vocal score, which strays from both Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Stravinsky’s endings, meeting somewhere in the middle. There’s still the hushed quality of the Old Believers’ hymn as they commit collective self-immolation, but Shostakovich works in some of the brass and bombast of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version. Rather than recycling Mussorgsky’s Peter the Great leitmotif, however, he calls to mind the opening of the opera, in that bolt-upright transition from dreams to waking life. The only constant is history, irrespective of its players, and those with the most power tend to maintain that power even as the tide turns.
For a 1989 production in Vienna, Claudio Abbado stuck with the faithfulness of Shostakovich’s orchestration on the whole, but created a hybrid by swapping Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s ending out for the previously-unheard Stravinsky ending. The overall effect excuses the seams in stitching these two disparate versions together. While both Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich’s endings acknowledge the presence of Peter the Great in music, if not in person, Stravinsky’s finale eradicates what Emerson calls “Petrine time” entirely, ceding the territory of the opera fully to Believer time.
“Peter’s brass band is something that we, who share Peter’s cosmos and legacy, can understand. But try to imagine the effects of no Petrine time onstage at all,” she writes. “The audience in the auditorium is watching the End of Time from the outside; the ones onstage have found the Russia they were seeking, whereas we have lost her. And thus is realized the utter victory of the Old Believer cause — not, as Rimsky would have it… its defeat. We are the ones walled out and left behind.”
This is the devastating effect of Abbado’s live recording from Vienna for Deutsche Grammophon, and it’s unsurprising he would side with the Old Believers and their radical protest against a tyrant. Like his friend and contemporary Maurizio Pollini, Abbado was born into Mussolini’s Italy (his own mother, who helped antifascist partisans, was arrested for sheltering a Jewish child) and came of age during the politically turbulent Years of Lead. I have to imagine he would have appreciated Gerard McBurney and sound designer Tuomas Norvio’s variation on this finale, which finds a way to make the audience participants rather than observers, allowing us to inhabit Believer Time, if only for a few minutes.
It’s interesting that, among the other recordings of Khovanshchina, perhaps the other best-known iteration is from Valery Gergiev (part of the series he did with the Mariinsky, back when it was still called the Kirov, for Philips), which also relies on the Shostakovich orchestration and finale. The musicological merits of Shostakovich’s version aside, one would think the lit fuse of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration (particularly the finale), combined with its implied sympathies for Peter the Great as a victor rather than, in the Old Believers’ eyes, the devil incarnate, would be tailor-made for Gergiev’s musical and political sensibilities.
This is explained best, perhaps, by the recording’s date: 1991. In a year of power shifts not unlike those documented in Mussorgsky’s slice of 17th-century history, the only constant was that history and power would continue, even if their directions at the time were unclear. This was also a critical time for Gergiev who, also in 1991, made his western European opera debut with the Bayerische Staatsoper (conducting, aptly, Boris Godunov) as well as his American debut with the San Francisco Opera. On the brink of both international stardom and the end of history, the Shostakovich finale fits Gergiev, an opportunist more than an ideologue, even better. You can almost hear him marking time — neither Petrine nor Believer but a secret, third time — in this finale. The immolation is incidental in this case. He’s just waiting to see which way the cards will fall.