Musorgsky’s Creative Vision for Boris

After two aborted attempts at writing operas (Salammbô and The Marriage), in fall of 1868, Musorgsky embarked upon the project that he was determined to complete – so determined, in fact, that he finished Boris Godunov twice: once in 1869 and again, thoroughly re-conceived, in 1872.Footnote ⁸ For his original libretto, he turned to Pushkin’s eponymous historical drama in twenty-three scenes, published in 1831 but approved for staging only in 1866 and not yet staged at the time. Extracting ten scenes and creatively merging them into seven, Musorgsky completely reconfigured the original drama and redefined Boris. A synopsis, with the historical dates supplied for chronological clarity, is essential to understand the strangeness and austerity of Musorgsky’s Boris 1869 and my concerns with the production under review.Footnote ⁹

Musorgsky’s Boris is nothing like Pushkin’s, whose kaleidoscope of diverse themes, colourful characters and historiographic aims is largely missing. The composer-librettist’s is a tunnel vision. Fixating on Boris, Musorgsky depicts him in three different historical moments, settings, and psychological states: at the height of his power; the onset of the disintegration of his reign and of his own mental collapse; and at the time of his death. To hold these three disparate episodes together, Musorgsky creates a trajectory absent in Pushkin: Boris’s decision to have Tsarevich Dmitry murdered becomes the cause of his own demise. Boris falls victim to his guilt (the psychology of which fascinates Musorgsky), manifested most clearly perhaps by his hallucinations (which Musorgsky invents) and eventually death, his physical collapse a natural consequence of his psychological one.

There is an additional change from the literary original. Musorgsky’s interpretative reading of Pushkin is dependent on Nikolay Karamzin’s take on Boris. For the great historian of the Russian state, Boris’s personal crime led to Russia’s suffering – the theme that Musorgsky highlights by his rendition of Pimen and the Holy Fool, for both of whom Russia’s current and impending turmoil (famine, plagues, wars, etc.) is divine retribution for Boris’s personal crime.

Despite the trajectory of Boris’s guilt and the added arch of larger historical ramifications of Boris’s crime, a coherent piece of drama Boris 1869 is not. The whole is a chain of self-contained episodes, many separated by significant chronological gaps. There is minimal narrative and no dramatic action; if there is any conflict at all, it is internal to Boris and Boris alone. There is also no character development: Musorgsky’s characters are static. Pimen, with all his rage at Boris and in all his self-righteousness, is the same in scene 3 as he is in scene 7. The Russian folk are the same in scene 1 as they are in scene 6: cowed, ignorant, cynical, and fickle. Grigory Otrepiev never gets to become Dmitry the Pretender at all. Boris simply disintegrates, with Musorgsky capturing select moments on the continuum of his transformation.

Boris is a one-man show: the title character dominates, with everyone else (some dozen characters, most of them male) being fillers, Pimen excepting. Some scenes (such as the Inn Scene) are dramatically superfluous, for they do not furnish any long-range connections, even as they provide fascinating musical studies of the people – as collective and individual types – that populate them. Richard Taruskin is right when he declares Boris 1869 to be ‘aggressively antitheatrical’.Footnote ¹⁰

This Boris was never staged during the composer’s lifetime. Musorgsky submitted the opera’s score for review to the selection committee of the Imperial Theaters Directorate in St Petersburg, which duly rejected it for want of a female lead. Instead of supplying a scene or two that would appease the committee, Musorgsky embarked upon a wholesale revision, and, with that, re-conceptualization. Boris 1872 represents a change in aesthetic, historiography and genre. Although the new version absorbed much of the old music, it was also strikingly different: the composer dropped one scene entirely (St Basil’s), recomposed the opera’s central episode featuring Boris, subjected the other five scenes to trimming, composed an entire new act (the Polish, supplying the opera’s female lead), and added a massive mob scene (the Kromï) to close the work. As a piece of drama, the new work was richer and more theatrical; musically, it became more conventional and better-balanced – in short, Boris became a real opera. This version was produced in St. Petersburg in 1874, and remained in the repertoire for eight years before vanishing. Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov rescued the 1872 opera from obscurity by orchestrating (read: recomposing) it twice. Thanks to Sergey Diaghilev, Rimsky-Korsakov’s second variant became standard in the twentieth century. Musorgsky’s own versions have been available in critical editions for almost a century now,Footnote ¹¹ and over the past 50 years there has been a decided shift toward mounting the composer’s originals. Still, it is rare to hear Boris Godunov in one or the other of its authorial versions and not as some musical-dramatic composite conflating the two.

Undoing Musorgsky’s Avant-gardism

The 2016 Royal Opera production is that of Boris 1869, which is the first time that that particular score was heard at Covent Garden.Footnote ¹² Musically, at least, in this production one gets to experience Musorgsky’s original vision.Footnote ¹³ Frustratingly, the production is still a conflation, here perpetrated by the directorial conception of Richard Jones, which superimposes upon Musorgsky’s work elements from Pushkin’s drama (elements that Musorgsky’s excluded) and Musorgsky’s own 1872 version (Boris’s overt and debilitating guilt, and all the melodrama that it engenders that is largely absent from Boris 1869). Much of the conflation is accomplished by way of mime, creating a play within a play. The mime is so important that even the set design (by Miriam Buether) exists to accommodate it. The theatre presents a two-tiered stage: the main level, on which most of the opera’s action unfolds, and, above it, receded, the gallery reserved largely for the mime (though there are exceptions, as, for example, when Boris delivers his coronation monologue from that balcony).

Musorgsky conceived his opera in seven scenes, but this production adds one more – call it scene 0 – and it is entirely mimed. A gloomy Boris is seated on a bench on the main stage in near darkness, presumably awaiting the news of Tsarevich Dmitry’s murder, while in the gallery the murder itself plays out in graphic detail: the audience sees the eight-year-old Dmitry, represented by an actor with an oversized doll-head mask on and wearing white clothes, playing with a giant spinning top; masked assassins in black creep in, slit Dmitry’s throat and, blood gushing, drag him off the stage. The news of Dmitry’s death is then whispered into Boris’s ear by the secretary of the Boyar Council, setting in motion Boris’s transformation into tsar over the course of the opera’s first two scenes – much of that transformation also mimed. The horror and torment visible on Boris’s face when he first learns of Dmitry’s murder becomes the visual for the entirety of the production: every time the audience encounters Boris, he physically channels his guilt, and with each appearance his suffering increases.

Becoming the production’s idée fixe, the scene of Dmitry’s murder replays four more times, performing two apparent functions: it suggests Boris’s imagining the scene and thus being haunted by it, and it supplies directorial commentary on the action. The audience rewatches the episode twice during the ‘Coronation’: at the outset, as the bells ring and Boris walks across the stage, in the upper gallery there is the murder reenactment, with Boris’s near collapse onstage indicating that he is already mad with guilt; the Coronation Scene closes with another reenactment, now against the final statement of the famous ‘Slava’ chorus. In scene 6, as the Holy Fool laments the impending catastrophic fate of Russia, Dmitry’s murder is replayed. Finally, Boris’s dying moments are accompanied by Dmitry’s death.

In a way, the production tries to balance out Musorgsky’s dramatic structure that is inherently lopsided. It imposes a dramatic frame upon the opera that is not there: the murder of Tsarevich Dmitry (on one end) and Boris’s demise brought upon by his guilt over the murder (on the other), spelling out cause and effect from the outset. The murder scene (which does not exist in either of Musorgsky’s operatic variants or the play upon which these are based) and Boris’s immediate response to it telegraph to the audience Boris’s intense guilt from the get-go, also anticipating the opera’s denouement.

Musorgsky’s own dramaturgy is different. The composer-librettist strategically withholds the theme of Dmitry’s murder. It is not until scene 3 that the audience first hears about Boris’s crime by way of Pimen’s alleged eyewitness account. This is the moment of revelation of Boris’s deed and the reason for Grigory’s decision to act. Moreover, the initial four scenes barely hint at Boris’s guilty conscience, and they offer little to foreshadow his decline. Only in scene 5 does Musorgsky first expose his listeners to Boris’s torments, the onset of which is sudden (the announcement that the pretender who calls himself Dmitry has appeared) and Boris’s deterioration swift (Boris begins to hallucinate). From there, Boris’s mental collapse accelerates.

With this production’s front-loading, Musorgsky’s crescendo of Boris’s disintegration is lost, Musorgsky’s psychological snapshots diluted. If Boris is troubled already at the beginning, then his later reactions and decline lose their effect. Moreover, the mime of the scene of murder at the outset renders Pimen’s extensive narration of the same event redundant. Finally, scene 0 expands the chronology: Musorgsky’s work covers the years 1598–1605, from Boris’s rise as tsar to his death; the staging first pushes the timeline as far back as 1591 when Tsarevich Dmitry died and then immediately fast forwards to 1598 when Boris became tsar, tying together both the two events and Boris’s deed and guilt.

Wherefrom does the opening mime, with Boris’s immediate horrified reaction, derive? Likely from the first scene of Pushkin’s play, in which two princes gossip about Boris’s refusal to accept the crown. During the conversation, Prince Shuisky recounts Dmitry’s death and blames Boris, from which Prince Vorotïnsky infers that the murder must surely haunt him: ‘A ghastly crime! And now it seems to me,/Remorse disturbs the executioner:/The blood of infant innocence it is,/It surely is, that keeps him from the throne’.Footnote ¹⁴ This seems to be the source for the mime in this production’s scene 0, which distils the entire conversation to the murder itself and Boris’s guilt. If my hypothesis is correct, then the replays of Dmitry’s murder also might have some connection to Pushkin, who suffuses his play with accounts of Dmitry’s death and its implications – there are five such accounts in the play and five murder scene replays in the current production. In Pushkin, however, the stories of Dmitry’s death are almost always presented by the play’s characters as ever-mutating speculation, reflecting Pushkin’s fascination with rumour and slander as engines of history.Footnote ¹⁵ No such nuance is found in this staging, which replays the identical scene ad nauseam.

That the production tries to bring Musorgsky’s opera back to its literary source is suggested further by other mimed episodes. Thus, in scene 5, when the audience meets the tsar’s children, Boris is shown consulting a soothsayer – a detail taken from the play. Similarly, the extensive presence of Prince Shuisky in the production, which he haunts visually, is also rooted in the Pushkin play.

There is other mime, some unconnected to Pushkin, apparently functioning to explicate or to link. In the ‘Inn on the Lithuanian Border’ scene, the gallery cinematically depicts a scene of border crossing: a bunch of people waving their modern-day Russian passports at the border guards. In the St Basel Scene, a portrait of the Pretender is hung in the gallery, with the actors miming the anathema service on Grigory Otrepiev (the Pretender), about which the chorus subsequently sings. To this viewer, these and other such episodes are excessive because they are banal. At least in these two instances what is being acted out in the gallery is suggested by the scenes themselves. But some of the mime is outright nonsensical. Take one example: in the final scene, during the orchestral postlude to Boris’s death, the audience watches Grigory Otrepiev/Dmitry the Pretender, knife in hand, headed toward the new Tsar Feodor (Boris’s son). This scene has no operatic, literary or historical foundation; its presence here is another attempt on the part of the director to balance out Musorgsky’s unruly vision. In Boris 1869, Grigory Otrepiev disappears from the opera at the conclusion of scene 4, never to return; in the production, the mime near the opera’s end connects and rounds out the murders (Dmitry’s in scene 0, Feodor’s in the opera’s coda) and keeps Grigory/Dmitry actively in the story.

The production’s replays of the Dmitry murder, the ever-tormented Boris roaming the stage, Shuisky’s omnipresence, and the reappearance of Grigory supply cohesion that Musorgsky’s original does not have. Even the director’s decision to perform the seven scenes of the work in one contiguous span, ignoring Musorgsky’s grouping, is likely driven by the desire to connect. Whereas Musorgsky embraces fragmentation and discontinuity, this directorial conception imposes narrativity. Put another way, with its interventionist efforts, the production adds the glue, conventionalizing the dramatic-musical work that is unconventional by design.

The relentless mime also overwhelms the work with melodrama, a quality Musorgsky’s 1869 version largely avoids but which is abundant in Boris 1872. In this production, the depiction of a guilt-tormented, deranged Boris appears to draw directly from the heightened theatricality of the latter opera.

If a more deranged Boris is desired, or if one wants an opera that absorbs more of the Pushkin original, or if one craves the melodrama, why not simply stage the 1872 version? What is the purpose of reviving Boris 1869, with all the fidelity to its music and none to its highly experimental dramaturgy?Footnote ¹⁶ By undermining Musorgsky’s original conception, this production fails to make a compelling case for the 1869 version. If one chooses to stage Boris 1869, the least one can do is honour its glorious eccentricities. However, this directorial interpretation eclipses the composer’s vision, significantly diminishing the work’s unsettling power. When familiar operas, like Verdi’s Rigoletto, are subjected to directorial reinterpretation, the clash of artistic visions can be invigorating and even revelatory. But Boris 1869 is neither canonic nor widely known. Staging it carries an additional ethical responsibility: to communicate the composer’s vision and message.

The Production’s Staging, Costuming, and Music as Performed

While I reject the director’s general approach to Boris 1869, my feelings about the production as a whole are more mixed. For instance, I like the semi-minimalist, two-tiered stage set, which remains largely unchanged, serving multiple purposes. The lower tier (main stage) is frequently dark and presents a large room, its walls panelled with bells in relief. When needed, the wallpaper is plastered over with countless identical portraits of Boris (as in the Inn Scene and the final scene in the Kremlin). The gallery is gilded and is usually brightly lit, its vaulted ceiling reminiscent of Russian traditional architecture. What changes on the main level are the props, most of them movable: the massive easel that glides in and slides out in the Cell Scene; the long bar table in the Inn Scene; the enormous map of Russia and surrounding territories in the Terem Scene. Some props appear in several scenes for symbolical reasons, including the giant spinning top first encountered in scene 0. In scene 5, for instance, it represents the murdered child Dmitry in Boris’s hallucination.

Like the props, the costuming (designed by Nicky Gillibrand) offers a mélange of styles, ranging across more than four hundred years, from the time of the historical Tsar Boris (as in Boris’s robes during the coronation) to recent-modern (1980s athletic garments or everyday household robes) to contemporary (the border police in scene 4 is dressed in something akin to the uniforms of Russia’s omonovtsï or riot police). For the mass scenes, which are the most mixed in terms of fashions, one thing is ubiquitous and, alas, clichéd – the padded jackets. And at least some of the aesthetic is outright imagined (consider, for instance, the colourful parody of the Russian church robes and headdresses in the Coronation Scene). If the costuming choices, like some other elements in the production, are meant to suggest the invariance or cyclicality of Russian history and historical experiences, they largely succeed. One just wishes for a bit more veracity and less distortion, if for no reason other than to minimize the typical exotica that still dominates representations of Russia. Regardless, the stage set and the costumes do convey the place. Imagined or not, it is Russia alright. But when it comes to the time, it is as if one is watching all periods from the last 425 years of Russian history unfold at once. The production’s sense of concrete place yet historical timelessness aligns well with Musorgsky’s music, which is also explicit about the setting but not the time of its action.

Earlier, I noted the superior quality of orchestra’s playing under the baton of maestro Pappano. Still, I crave more nuance from the podium in the area of tempos, especially in the solo scenes. With his emphasis on realistic declamation, in these scenes Musorgsky is in no hurry to get the text out of the way – the pacing is slow by intent (which contributes to the monotony of some of the monologues). Pappano’s musical realization compounds the challenge, for, as conducted, the scenes outright drag in spots. This is as true for Boris’s monologues in scenes 2 and 5 as it is for the entirety of Pimen’s monologue and conversation with Grigory in scene 3.

Because Boris dominates the opera, the casting of the role determines the success of the whole, and here the whole fails. The choice of Bryn Terfel as Boris seems strange. His bass-baritone is too light for this role – there is not enough resonance. Musically, Terfel’s performance is solid but dull. Boris’s first monologue is sung with all the thrill of reciting a shopping list: there is no emotional depth. Similarly, Boris’s central, and the work’s most dramatic, soliloquy is monotonous. A key component of the realistic declamation in Musorgsky is dynamic nuance. Such nuance is not among the strengths of this production in general, and it is almost entirely lacking in Terfel’s rendition. Everything is too loud. Watching Terfel as Boris is also painful. He goes through the opera miming Boris’s supposed suffering with all the realism of early silent cinema – it is grossly overdone. To be sure, Terfel has his strong moments. His exchange with Prince Shuisky, when Boris learns of Dmitry the Pretender, is effective, and he is touching, because vulnerable, in his farewell to Feodor, during which one also learns that Terfel can sing sotto voce and is even capable of producing sounds below the mezzo-forte level.

Vocally, Ain Anger makes for a more convincing and impressive Pimen than Terfel does Boris. Although he is pitchy in the Cell Scene, when Pimen returns to haunt Boris in the opera’s last scene, Anger steals the show. David Butt Philip’s bright tenor is ideal for the role of Grigory Otrepiev. Sadly, there is very little of him in this opera, and one is left craving to hear Butt Philip in Boris 1872, in which his character is fully formed. I also liked the singing and acting of Kostas Smoriginas. As Shchelkalov, the Secretary of the Council of Boyars, in the first scene he announces Boris’s decision to refuse the crown in an arioso, which is delivered with gusto, and his reading of Boris’s decree in the opera’s final scene is likewise good.

Several members of the cast are better actors than singers. John Graham-Hall, as Prince Shuisky, brings into this production a great creepiness factor, but vocally he does not own the role – the voice is weak, with a bit of bleating, topped with poor diction. Similarly, John Tomlinson (Varlaam) showcases impressive comical acting, but his strained upper register ruins the famous song, ‘Thus it was in the city of Kazan’ (Kak vo gorode bïlo vo Kazani’). And in his second song, he barely approximates the actual pitches. Equally underwhelming vocally is Rebecca de Pont Davies (the innkeeper), whose singing borders on screeching.

In addition to the role of the innkeeper, there are only two ‘significant’ solo treble roles – between them, the three sing the combined total of about ten minutes of music, which is one of the distinctive features of the 1869 score. Vlada Borovko (Xenia) has a lush soprano, and one wishes that she had more singing to do. Boris’s son is sung by a boy mezzo-soprano (Ben Knight), whose singing and acting effectively capture the innocence of Feodor.

Depicting the Common Folk

Whatever my reservations about this production, the crowd scenes (nos. 1 and 6), portraying the Russian common folk and prominently featuring the excellent Royal Opera Chorus (Renato Balsadonna directing), are very well done musically and dramaturgically. The production is particularly successful in two regards: by exaggerating the gestures, it exposes the duplicity and falseness of the crowd; the tiered division of the set, along with the corresponding contrasting colours, lighting and costumes, expresses that Boris with his elites and the common people exist wholly apart.

Musorgsky based the people scenes on Pushkin, whose view of the common people is pessimistic. The poet depicts the folk as forever oppressed and servile, always easily manipulated (whether by knout, due to their ignorance, or by choice), passive, and inconstant in their allegiance. Worst still, they have no historical agency. The composer amplifies this grim vision to crushing proportions musically. Take the first half of scene 1. The scene opens with a dark orchestral prelude, as the people gather in the courtyard of the Novodevichiy Monastery. The prelude is a set of so-called ‘Glinka variations’ on an imitation folk melody (a protyazhnaya or drawn-out song), with the melody restated several times by different instruments, in different contrapuntal combinations, harmonizations and orchestral garb. Musorgsky uses these variations to represent the Russian common folk. As people continue to gather, an abrasive ostinato (which subsequently becomes motivic, likely representing oppression) is heard in the orchestra, accompanying the policeman’s order: the people are forced to get down on their knees and wail, hands raised in fake supplication in the production, begging Boris to have mercy and accept the throne.

This chorus is a set piece in ternary form. The lyrical A section (alternating monophonic and part singing, the latter a wonderful harmonization in an invented Russian style), in which the crowd wails, gives way to emotionally neutral choral recitative of the B, during which one realizes that the people do not know or care what they are wailing about. The juxtaposition of the incredible conviction with which the people beg Boris and the utter lack of authenticity behind their sentiment is shocking. The full effect of this devastating depiction of false earnestness overwhelms as one hears the choral A section return, now transposed a half step higher from the original key, which, with the coda’s rising sequence added, magnifies the begging. Something similar happens in the St Basil Scene, in which the audience sees a duplicitous crowd that curses Boris and wishes death to him and his progeny. Yet, when he appears, they beg him for bread with heart-rending intensity. A prophet of doom or not, Musorgsky was certainly a perceptive observer of Russia’s historical reality, particularly regarding the relationship between the common people and the powerful elites, which he highlights musically and which this staging reinforces.

In Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin the presence of the Russian folk – in the guise of three peasant choruses – is minimal and rather decorative (and in the Onegin production under review, the director pays little attention to the folk). Still, watching the people episodes from the two operas side by side as historical commentaries (in Tchaikovsky’s case likely unintentional), one realizes that the happy, musically idealized peasants in Onegin are hardly different from their miserable counterpart in Boris – in both cases, they serve their masters. In Onegin, the peasants either entertain their superiors or provide a sonically coloristic, yet contrasting, backdrop to the actions of the elites. There, too, is a terrifying absence of agency. Significantly, Tchaikovsky relies on the same models for representation of the folk as Musorgsky, which is as true for the mass scenes (the choruses) as it is for the solo music of the folkish characters. Just like the music of Varlaam’s songs in Boris owes much to Glinka’s variation methods, so does the music of the nanny (the only individualized peasant character) in Onegin, which underscores that in Boris and Onegin one witnesses the Russian operatic tradition in the process of becoming. As Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky internalize Glinka’s musical devices, musical ‘Russianness’ associated with the narod in opera is conventionalized.

Transmitting Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin

The staging of Eugene Onegin on the Opus Arte DVD is different from that of Boris. It is economical, very sparse (the set is minimalist, especially in the private scenes), non-intrusive, with little visual or gestural excess – precisely the things that Tchaikovsky himself apparently envisioned.Footnote ¹⁷ The directorial conception is that of Graham Vick, with design by Richard Hudson. One might call the production ‘period’, because the costuming is period-appropriate and the gestures of the main characters sufficiently accurate, in the public scenes preserving some of the coded formality of the social interactions characteristic of the era depicted. The costuming and mannerisms suggest that the action takes place sometime circa 1820, here following Pushkin’s novel rather than Tchaikovsky’s score, more on which shortly.

The staging is colourless, and I mean that literally: everything is intentionally toned down, with neutral colours everywhere, beige dominating. It is a striking effect, though its symbolism is hard to interpret. The production does gain some colour as it unfolds, as in the costumes in the party scene in Act II or in the darker hues in Act III (grey, blue, and black for Onegin and Tatyana; with greyish backdrop in the final scene), but the colours remain muted.

Whereas the Boris production supersaturates Musorgsky’s conception by way of added elements, the Onegin production strips away perceived excess from Tchaikovsky’s original. The director seems to recognize and trust Tchaikovsky’s masterful musical narration – when Tchaikovsky vividly ‘scene-paints’, the director refrains from interference (though he does liquidate some elements in the composer’s stage directions). However, when Tchaikovsky withdraws from direct narration, the director takes over, animating the scene and leaving his own distinctive narrative imprint on the opera. There are, then, two narrators in this production – the composer and the director, and each, in his own way, responds to Pushkin.

In Pushkin’s great novel-in-verse, on which Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is based, the main character is the narrator – loquacious, brilliant, ironic, and omniscient; his running commentary to the novel’s thin happenings is the substance of the work.Footnote ¹⁸ These limitations Tchaikovsky understood full well, hence his initial reluctance to tackle the novel musically. But once taken by the idea (not least because of the parallels between the story and his biographical circumstances at the time that led to his evanescent marriage), Tchaikovsky decided to ‘set to music everything in Onegin that demands music’.Footnote ¹⁹ And that meant extracting anything that could hold together as dramatic scenes and then donning on the hat of the musical narrator who constantly comments on situations and characters and makes long-range connections between them – connections not always found in Pushkin.

The plot of Tchaikovsky’s Onegin is thin and discontinuous, with time compression extreme and dramatic action minimal. Tatyana, a provincial noblewoman in her late teens, falls in love with Eugene Onegin, a city dandy in his early twenties who just inherited a country estate. All other characters are part of the backcloth: Tatyana’s mother Madame Larina, sister Olga, nanny Filippyevna, and even the dramatically significant Lensky – a young sentimental poet in love with Olga. Tatyana writes Onegin an impassioned letter, in response to which he curtly rebuffs her. A few months later, in the midst of a party for Tatyana’s name day, Lensky challenges his friend Onegin to a duel, because Onegin dared to dance and flirt with Olga. Onegin kills Lensky. Several years elapse, and Onegin, who in the interim was given to aimless wandering, finds himself at a grand ball in St Petersburg, at which he encounters Tatyana, now wife of Prince Gremin. Onegin is smitten. During Onegin’s only visit that follows, Tatyana hears and questions his declarations of love, admits her own love for him, but proclaims that she will remain faithful to her husband.

Tchaikovsky constructs the opera’s three acts alike. Each opens with a ‘people’ scene, featuring multiple characters and chorus in various combinations, and with dance prevalent: the main characters and the peasants in Act I, a large crowd of provincial gentry gathered for Tatyana’s name day in Act II, and a grand ball in St Petersburg in Act III. In the latter half of each act, the main characters retreat into their highly emotional private worlds: in Act I, scene 2, Tatyana, in her bedroom, is chatting with her nanny and then, alone, writes her letter to Onegin; in Act I, scene 3, Onegin reprimands Tatyana in the estate garden; in Act II, scene 2, as he awaits Onegin, Lensky reflects on love and death, and, when Onegin arrives, the two contemplate (apart) whether they should halt the duel before it is too late; Act III closes with another private interaction between Tatyana and Onegin. Each act is dominated by one character: Tatyana in Act I, Lensky in Act II, and Onegin in Act III. And each act ends with its respective tragedy – Tatyana is rejected, Lensky is killed, Onegin is rejected.

The dualism of public and private worlds is supported by three distinct stylistic-generic approaches. The music of the peasants (Act I), of the provincial gentry (Acts I and II), and of the St Petersburg high society (Act III) is highly stylized and is near-contemporaneous with the action of the story. Whereas Pushkin’s Onegin, and this production’s, is set around 1820, Tchaikovsky’s musical choices for these scenes situate his Onegin in the 1830s – relying on the stylistic package of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836) both for the quotidian dance genres and the music of the peasants.

But if Tchaikovsky depicts the society of the 1830s, the main characters who populate that society are the people of the 1860s and 1870s – in private, they feel, emote, and behave the way the characters do in the realist novels contemporaneous with the composer.Footnote ²⁰ The music of individual characters is distinctive, personalized, and stylistically contemporary with Tchaikovsky’s time. Although the intonational make-up of Tatyana’s and Lensky’s music borrows from the topical lexicon of the 1830s domestic music (specifically, the romans – Russian art song), their individual music is not of that time. This is especially true for Tatyana’s Letter Scene – her emotional outpouring.Footnote ²¹ Chromaticism, tonal complexity, motivic saturation, vocal virtuosity, the lyrical dominance of the orchestra, and so much else position this grandest of arias in Onegin beyond the reach of the emotionally limited genre of domestic song.

Like Musorgsky’s music in Boris, Tchaikovsky’s in Onegin commits to a place (Russia), but Tchaikovsky also encodes the time, with the composer’s choices delimiting the historical frame: the action cannot take place before around 1830 or after 1878. Falling toward the middle of this range is the ensemble music in Onegin. In transferring select segments of the novel into a new medium, Tchaikovsky had to imagine and musically construct several scenes featuring at once two or more characters in moments of dramatic encounter. In such instances his recourse is to lyrical movement types associated with duets and larger ensembles of mid-nineteenth-century Italian opera. Tchaikovsky had a flair for Italian operatic conventions (those very conventions that Musorgsky so categorically rejected). For example, the pezzo concertato movement – the slow quartet between Lensky, Onegin, Tatyana, and Olga upon their initial meeting – in the opera’s opening scene is paradigmatic in terms of its dramatic freeze, pseudo-canon in the voices, and pizzicatos in the orchestra, as the characters pause to reflect: Onegin and Lensky take in the girls, Olga contemplates what Onegin’s visit will mean and all the gossip that it will generate, and Tatyana meditates on the realization of her dreams in Onegin. In Act II, Tchaikovsky (and his co-librettist Konstantin Shilovsky) follows the growing tension between Lensky and Onegin as Pushkin depicts it, but then moves away from the literary source to construct an explosive public conflict and, with that, a major operatic climax entirely contingent on Italian ensemble conventions for its dramatic effect.

In the production under review, the director adopts distinct interpretative approaches to Onegin’s public and private scenes. For the three ‘people’ scenes, the directorial conception evolves from the relative realism of the first in Act I, to the exaggerated realism of the provincial gathering for Tatyana’s name day in Act II, and finally to the outright grotesqueness of St Petersburg’s society at the grand ball in Act III. Correspondingly, the director increasingly takes over the storytelling from the composer.

In the production’s opening scene, the audience sees a picnic table at which the nanny sits, next to her in a chair is Larina; in the background there is a wheat field, represented by a single row of wheat. The two women appear to prepare apricots for jamming. There is no house (from which Tatyana and Olga sing); nor does the audience get any sense of the garden in which the action takes place – the director jettisons these apparently non-essential elements of Tchaikovsky’s stage directions. But all the characters who populate this minimalist space over some twenty-five minutes are realistic. The unobtrusive directorial vision of the scene defers to, and allows the listener-viewer to focus on, Tchaikovsky’s remarkable musical ‘scene painting’, which situates the action historically (somewhere near 1830), provides a sense of the location (Russian provinces), supplies ambiance (a gentry estate with serfs), introduces all main characters and, as the composer ladles layer upon layer of meaning, defines them musically – by the end of the scene audiences know all: who is who, when and where the action is taking place and even in what season. Much of this is accomplished by Tchaikovsky’s play with styles and genres.

As this famous scene opens, offstage Tatyana and Olga sing a diegetic romans-duet with harp accompaniment in the style of domestic music of circa 1830, prompted by which, and then against which, Madame Larina and Filippyevna chatter in their own declamatory duet, reminiscing on the times past. This ‘quartet’ over, a duettino for the latter two characters follows. Canonic in conception, the duet celebrates all the wonders that habit brings to life and, by way of its archaic style, defines the older characters generationally. A chorus of peasants is heard: an intoner sings a ‘folk’ melody (an imitation of a protyazhnaya), others join-in a cappella, and then rapidly-moving counterpoint – a feature of Glinka variations – is supplied by the orchestra. The peasants first sing of their own volition about the fatigue following a hard day of harvesting, then entertain their mistress, who requests a cheerful choral dance song. Picking up the tune of the latter song, Olga sings the same music, followed by a separate arioso that characterizes her as carefree and simple. Olga’s singing is prompted by Tatyana, who comments that she loves to daydream when she hears folk music. Tatyana’s highly chromatic and sequential ‘dreamy’ motive contrasts sharply with the music of Olga and all the music heard thus far in the scene.

Interrupting this idyllic setting, a brief commotion results from the sudden arrival of Lensky and Onegin, at which point Tchaikovsky imagines what might have happened. Whereas in the novel Lensky and Onegin’s first visit to the Larins – like all major social interactions – is not narrated, in the opera it forms a significant dramatic chunk: it introduces audiences to Lensky and to his relationship with Olga, exposes audiences to Onegin, and gives them a chance to see Tatyana fall in love. Archaic formalities of greetings completed (stylized music invoking the late eighteenth century), the four characters just mentioned observe each other. Their Italianate quartet is followed by a lyrical scena of interactive mini duets for Lensky and Olga and then Onegin and Tatyana, which leads to Lensky’s arioso about his love for Olga. In the concluding section of the first scene, it is the nanny who recognizes the sparks of Tatyana’s love.

Tchaikovsky’s first scene of Act II is very different. Until the conflict between Onegin and Lensky blows up in the middle of the scene, there is very little dramatic action or musical narration – the composer depicts a provincial party by relying on stylized music. And so the director intervenes by infusing the scene with representation and commentary. During the prelude (a miniature symphonic poem woven from Tatyana’s motives subjected to transformation), Tatyana sits on the floor in the dark while the party for her name day gathers behind closed doors. The prelude over, the people burst through the two doors for the waltz (with chorus), with the audience getting the view of the back rooms as characters move in and out. The waltz is followed by Monsieur Triquet’s archaic couplets celebrating Tatyana (stylistically these belong in the world of opéra comique circa 1800), which give way to a mazurka – both dances in the scene are specified by Pushkin, which Tchaikovsky happily supplied. Overall, the director constructs a very busy scene with an enormous number of people eating, talking, drinking, running, playing and dancing, which captures nicely Pushkin’s description of the chaos of a provincial party populated by very colourful characters (in the production, children, soldiers, village priest, maids and maidens, local nobility of great variety and the opera’s main characters), and of the crowd spilling out to play cards and, of course, dance. All of this aligns well also with Tchaikovsky’s stage directions and music.

Like the opening of the second act (until the escalation episode), that of the third – the grand ball in St. Petersburg – is dramatically static, which the director again animates, this time by infusing the scene with elements of the grotesque. The approach is interesting but the result is disappointing. The opening number is the famous polonaise, traditionally staged as a ballet sequence. Not so in this production, in which each of the dance’s three main sections (A–BCB–A) realizes a distinct dramaturgic conception. With no scenery as such, moving curtains are used to reveal different portions of the stage and different groups of people. As staged, the initial A section features a pas de deux, which is not a polonaise at all, and showcases the production’s propensity for bad ballet (in Act II the quality of dancing was commensurate with the provincial party depicted, which was appropriate). The B and C sections of the polonaise offer a pantomime: a bunch of self-enamoured, barely-dancing dandies are either trying to make love to themselves or are tempting the non-dancing ladies, who are shown swooning over them. Perhaps some social ritual is being enacted, but in this apparent commentary on the St Petersburg high society neither the action nor the message is clear. The return of the A section reveals the entire stage for the first time and a significantly larger crowd; whether what that crowd does can be called dance is up for debate.

The same grotesqueness infects the subsequent episodes of the scene. Near the end of the polonaise,Footnote ²² Onegin appears on the stage. He is much aged (he looks at least forty), although only three or so years have elapsed since the duel, and, as he himself says, he is now twenty-six years old. In his recitative soliloquy he narrates what has transpired in his life since the death of Lensky. Against this awkward narrative, for Tchaikovsky never makes it clear whom Onegin is addressing, the audience watches a series of frozen scenes, featuring those present at the ball eavesdropping on Onegin’s thoughts. A bit later, Prince Gremin tells Onegin of his love for Tatyana. The director chooses the aria’s middle section for a tableau vivant in the background, presumably illustrating Gremin’s text criticizing the boredom and tediousness of the high society, from which Tatyana rescued him. This frozen scene could have been taken straight out from the famous 1926 production by Vsevolod Meyerhold of Gogol’s The Inspector General, except that in the context of Onegin the scene feels absurd. Certainly, a bit of creative mischief can be enlightening, but when pushed too far it becomes a mannerism.

The directorial approach to the opera’s private scenes, the ones that focus on individual characters, is more hands-off, allowing the music to do the expressing. These are the most minimalist scenes when it comes to the scenery. In Act I, scene 2, Tatyana’s room is barely, if realistically, furnished. Lensky’s big pre-duel aria in Act II is set inside a barn (or probably a mill, referenced in the novel), symbolized by barn doors and a stack of hay. The opera’s rhyming scenes – Onegin’s sermon to Tatyana in response to her letter (Act I, scene 3) and Tatyana’s rejection of Onegin (the opera’s finale) – are staged almost identically: two chairs, facing in opposite directions, in a large empty space; only the backdrop changes. The mirroring of the two scenes by way of staging captures neatly not only the parallel situations, but also their musical relationship, with the motives from the earlier scene recurring in the later one.

Less effective is the guarded gestural and vocal emotionality in the private scenes. In Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, as in Musorgsky’s Boris, most of the conflict is internal to the main characters. Unsurprisingly, soliloquies lie at the heart of both works (even the grand duet that closes Onegin is largely a chain of ariosos for Tatyana and Onegin). Crafting distinct musical-psychological portraits (Musorgsky captures Boris, while Tchaikovsky delves into Tatyana’s psyche), both composers imbue their characters with powerful emotions that are either absent or significantly understated in the literary originals. As already noted, in the Boris production the musical emotionality of its title character is heightened by overacting. In the Onegin production, the main characters emote with what appears to be forced restraint. Whether this choice is the director’s attempt to align them more closely with Pushkin’s original is unclear.

In Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, Tatyana is the protagonist. In the words of Caryl Emerson, the composer ‘had chosen as his central theme Tatiana’s lyric suffering, her desire, then her ultimate self-discipline’.Footnote ²³ Her music dominates the score, providing the bulk of its motivic content and tonal symbolism to say nothing of its emotional charge. Like Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky was not interested in character development. He depicts Tatyana in select moments. Although she changes, audiences know nothing of Tatyana’s evolution from lovestruck teenager in Act I to dignified noblewoman in Act III. Musically, then, there are two different Tatyanas in Onegin, and this production’s Elena Prokina is convincing as both, capturing the character’s dreaminess, introspection, vulnerability, naiveté and passion in the early scenes and self-possession of the married, noble lady in the last two. Prokina’s voice is not large, but it is strong and well controlled. Her highest notes (from A flat and up) are rough-sounding and, when sung loudly, are also slightly flat; however, when she sings softly, the sound is truly beautiful, and her gradual decrescendos are exquisite. Although the Letter Scene is excellent overall, Prokina sounds like she is holding back, so much so that one is left wishing for more vocal melodrama. One suspects that the director is behind this approach of holding back in the earlier scenes and then letting go fully in the end. That this is indeed part of the artistic vision is evinced by the definite transformation between how Prokina sings in the Letter Scene and in the opera’s third act. In the latter, her sound is richer and more mature (which, unfortunately, does not mean that it is better, as she strains a bit in the final duet).

Seeing too much of himself (a self-centred bachelor) in Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s feelings toward his title character were negative, and he depicts Onegin in a supporting role. As he wreaks havoc on their lives, Onegin helps to define Tatyana and Lensky. Even so, Onegin is no villain, cruel though the composer-librettist viewed him to be. Lensky’s death, for which Onegin is responsible, is shown as a real tragedy, which devastates Onegin. Compared to Tatyana and Lensky, both of whom emote profusely, Onegin’s emotions are kept in check by the composer until the third act. Audiences are not privy to his feelings because none is conveyed musically – this emotional detachment is most evident in his ‘sermon’ aria in which Onegin rejects Tatyana (though stressing his own incompatibility with marriage, rather than finding any fault with her feelings, despite his criticism over their unguarded expression). Only when Onegin falls in love does the intensity of his passion become obvious, even if the permanence of the sentiment remains in doubt.

Wojciech Drabowitz makes for a dashing Onegin, who, from slight distance, passes for the right age. In the first two acts, the singing is beautiful, but one wishes for a bit more ring from his light baritone. This production’s Onegin departs from the usual foppish, stiff, nonchalant haughtiness; he is charming and relatively friendly, and he often radiates smiles and warmth, at least in Act I and parts of Act II. These insightful directorial choices enhance Tchaikovsky’s portrayal by adding more texture to the character. Unfortunately, the directorial depiction of Onegin in the opera’s second half falters, beginning with the duel scene, which is oddly envisioned. The duel takes place offstage, leaving the audience without a glimpse of Lensky’s death – the only confirmation is his second’s reply to Onegin’s question whether Lensky is killed. Onegin’s horror at his deed, conveyed in the novel and Tchaikovsky’s directions, is entirely absent in this production. Here, Onegin calmly walks back into the barn and toward the audience without much expression of any kind, let alone remorse. Whatever the intended meaning of this emotional restraint, it comes across as the director’s uncertainty about Onegin’s character at this critical moment – the confusion that is carried into the third act, in which Drabowitz also struggles dramatically.

Of the two main male characters, Tchaikovsky’s sympathies were decidedly with Lensky, whom he humanizes. Endowing Lensky with real feelings and dramatic substance through his music, the composer extricates Lensky from the narrator’s irony that haunts the character in the novel, in which the sentimental poet never transcends the status of a romantic cliché. The numerous musical connections between him and Tatyana, created in part by means of motive and key, suggest that Lensky and Tatyana are kindred spirits. For both, Tchaikovsky’s emphasis is on sentiment, highlighting similarities of their poetic natures and the shared tragedy of unrealized dreams.

Still, Lensky does not become a major character in the process, for he never rises to the emotional level of Tatyana (his solo music – unlike hers – is marked by elegiacal conventionality) nor to the dramatic importance of Onegin (but whom he certainly surpasses in lyrical utterance). In the opera, Lensky is a foil for Tatyana. In realizing Tatyana, Tchaikovsky stays very close to Pushkin’s novel. To be sure, his Tatyana is different because her emotions are amplified musically – the audience feels what she feels. But in terms of her sung text, Tatyana is largely unchanged. Tchaikovsky’s interventionist commentary on Tatyana is oblique: to comment on her, he needs Lensky’s romantic disposition, his passion, overreactions, wrong decisions, unrealized love, failed dreams, and ultimately death at the hands of Onegin. In the opera, without Lensky’s portrait, Tatyana’s would be incomplete.

This production brings out Lensky’s defining features really well, despite the fact that Martin Thompson as Lensky is uneven vocally (though his acting is outstanding). He is rather bland in Act I, excellent in the confrontation of the first scene of Act II (histrionics and all) and is just good enough in Lensky’s famous aria before the fateful duel. In this last, eschewing the performance tradition, Thompson does not indulge in perpetual tempo rubato, nor does he ignore Tchaikovsky’s dynamics, which is refreshing. Unlike Prokina and others in the production, he does not hold back vocally, and the audiences get the necessary volume and ring of his bright tenor voice.

As an ensemble, the entire cast of this Onegin is strong, but individually less so. It is typical for the vocalists who sing Larina and Filippyevna to be well past their vocal prime, the tradition that seems to be perpetuated here. Yvonne Minton (Madame Larina) is barely tolerable in terms of her intonation. Ludmilla Filatova (Filippyevna, the nanny) is almost on pitch, and her scenes with Tatyana are memorable. Struggling in spots in the beginning of the opera, Louise Winter (Olga) became better as she warmed up. As Monsieur Triquet, John Fryatt is very good – possibly too good, as he does not come across at all as ridiculous as Pushkin and Tchaikovsky intended him to be. Finally, singing the most dramatically gratuitous, action-stopping aria in any opera, Frode Olsen renders a perfectly respectable, if unexciting, performance as Prince Gremin.

The Russian diction of most singers (except the three singing Tatyana, Filippyevna, and Onegin, who are native speakers of Slavic languages) is difficult on the ear. At times, the poor diction distorts the music itself. Juxtaposing the two recordings under review reveals how much hard diction work was done by the soloists in the Boris production, marking a noteworthy trend. Recent decades have seen considerable progress in staging Russian-language operas in the West. Among other things, there is a newfound respect for the language. One can now hope that DVD companies will follow suit by investing more care in subtitles. I will conclude this review on a practical note: neither staging is groundbreaking, yet each has something to offer, especially for those who frequently use video recordings in the classroom, particularly to explore the intersection of music, text, and stage interpretation. Taken in bits and pieces, there is much on these DVDs to enjoy, analyse and debate.