Chaliapin’s instinct that in Mussorgsky’s writing he had found something new for the path of Russian opera and for the realization of his own artistic self was correct. He had come across the role that, more than any other, called for the advent of the “artist-psychologist.” Both in its verbal text and its musical setting, it demands not only the usual operatic kind of heightened expression that must be “motivated,” but a continuous progression of inner emotional life that must be maintained tenaciously from start to finish. Chaliapin saw the entire first section of Boris’ opening Coronation Scene solo (“Skorbit dusha“—”My soul is heavy”) as a prayer sung entirely to himself, almost as in a trance from which he snaps to for the proclamation of festivities. This striking and by no means obvious idea (as opposed to that of these prayerful lines being the public utterance of a politician pleading virtuous humility with his subjects) is not terribly clear to us on Chaliapin’s recordings of the scene, and was probably accomplished as much by physical attitude as by the singing. He was after all an opera singer who had to establish the voice on first appearance. However conveyed, it sets for both performer and audience the quality of interiority that pervades the whole role.
And I cannot think of another major operatic character for whom this interiority, this sense of private torture, is quite so crucial. Otello has a single great monologue and a couple of fra sè passages in ensemble that express it, but otherwise acts it out in confrontations. The Walküre Wotan has a long, wrenching solo of similar emotional import that is often called his “monologue,” but in fact is not—it is confessed to his daughter, as is his Farewell, albeit she’s asleep at the time. Both those characters are shown in triumph at the outset, and both have decisive opportunities for action, however badly they turn out. Boris, though first shown in an ostensibly triumphant moment, is already weighed down. He sings of his agony only to himself, and has no effective action open to him. The burden of office is heavy enough; the weight of sinful guilt is intolerable.(I)
Footnotes
| ↑I | We must keep in mind the powerful admixture of Orthodox belief in Boris’ psychology. Ian Grey (see bibliographical note below), who absolves the historical Boris of the boy Dmitri’s death and presents a picture of the Tsar that is positive in many respects, tells us that at the rumor-fed, famine-plagued, rebellious time of the False Dmitri’s rise, “Apparently Boris himself began to wonder if the Tsarevich had really died at Uglich,” and later that he “apparently believed in the possibility that by witchcraft or through the intervention of God, Dmitri might have been resurrected.” For the stage Boris, who is guilty of ordering Dmitri’s murder, this must seem a certainty. Chaliapin, though not a committed believer himself, surely understood the emotional grip of belief, and the communicant’s terror of the wages of mortal sin. Recall that his own childhood refuge was in the cathedral choir, and contemplate his deeply felt recordings of extracts from the Orthodox liturgy. |
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