A couple of preliminary notes: 1) We have experienced another delay in the Third Printing of Opera as Opera. Shipping is now projected for the last week in July, and we have learned to not consider such projections firm. However, our distributor will continue to receive any pre-orders, and have proven very efficient with fulfillment. Just click on “Opera as Opera” on the home page.
2) We are continuing with the series of podcast videos I’ve been doing at the invitation of Bel Canto Bootcamp, in each episode of which I read one of the brief essayettes on aspects of our artform from Part One of Opera as Opera, and respond to questions along the way. Number Six, called Creation and Interpretation and featuring excellent questions about the inner dialogue and craft choices involved in that topic, is probably up by the time you read this. So:
Among the offerings scheduled for the hoped-for coming season of the Metropolitan, one of the more interesting in prospect is the presentation, for the first time in the history of the house, of the “original” (1869) version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. My use of quotes is only to acknowledge the legacy of dispute over editions of this indispensable opera and the many claims of “original,” “virtually original,” “closer to original,” etc.—as numerous and as insubstantial as those for the authentic pizza of Ray or Patsy—that have followed it ever since the true original buffaloed the directorship of the Imperial Theatres of St. Petersburg, who demanded revision and expansion as the price of production there. But the Met’s 2021 presentation does promise to be of the original, seven scenes only, without any of the rewriting within the scenes undertaken for the first revision, and with Mussorgsky’s orchestration left to fend for itself.(I) The physical production will not be new, simply selecting the relevant scenes of the previous one, whose staging Stephen Wadsworth was obliged to rescue when an agreement with the onetime enfant terrible Peter Stein fell apart. René Pape will sing Boris, as at the last revival, and Sebastian Weigle will conduct. The Met has also stated that its ur-Boris will be performed without intermission, which may concentrate our attention, but which also furthers the company’s ever-advancing No-Coming-Up-For-Air campaign.
I cannot tell you anything about the effect of an unamended 1869 performance, since I have never seen one. Probably our best crack at that locally was not at the Met at any point, but at the New York City Opera. The NYCO did produce a Boris in the 1960s, with a more-than-presentable cast headed by the formidable Norman Treigle. With a company that operated more as a singingacting ensemble and in at least a somewhat smaller venue than either Met, the odds on the success of 1869 (more reliant on its protagonist than any of the revisions) would, I think, have been shorter there than at the Met. But, striving to be always open to surprises, I shall consider the merits of the new effort when the time comes. What I do find intriguing meanwhile is a rearward glance at how Boris fared in its early guise at the Met, so different in all its assumptions from the awaited one. And those embers have been given a fresh stir by the recent (2019) restoration of the Met broadcast of Feb.13,1943, the second of only four performances in which Alexander Kipnis wrested the role of the Tsar from its presumptive possessor, Ezio Pinza. It was for Pinza that Boris had been revived late in the 1938-39 season, a decade after the last Chaliapin performances, and since the cast of that production remained remarkably stable over the next four years, it’s worth setting the table for Kipnis with a listen to Pinza, whose first of three broadcasts (Dec. 9, 1939) has circulated on Naxos CDs for over twenty years now.
Footnotes
| ↑I | Though the Boris synopsis in place on the Met’s site still comprises all the scenes of the 1872 revision. |
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