Devotees even a few years younger than I approaching these broadcasts for the first time will be baffled to find them sung in Italian.That had not been so when Boris first penetrated the West (Paris, 1908, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s re-touching of his 1896 orchestration). And what an occasion that has to have been: Diaghilev as producer, with a direction/design team that blended the idealisms of the Mamontov Private Opera and the Moscow Art Theatre, and with Chaliapin, Kastorsky, Smirnov, Yermolenko-Yuzhina, et al. holding forth! (And if you don’t know these artists’ voices, get thee to the listening station of thy choice.) Linguistically speaking, though, that was a one-off. When the opera began making its way in Western houses, it encountered their cultures, along with the fact that not only Boris, but the entire Russian repertoire, was terra incognita. The time and expense entailed in instructing a large cast and heavily involved chorus in what was otherwise an unused operatic language was deemed prohibitive. And so when the Met took up Boris, in the borrowed Diaghilev production, it was in Italian, under the baton of its principal conductor, Arturo Toscanini, and with the superb Polish basso Adamo Didur in the titular part. Upon Chaliapin’s accession to the role (1921), he sang in Russian while everyone else continued in Italian (as was the case in the Covent Garden performances of 1926 under another Italian, Vincenzo Bellezza), ^(I)and so matters remained until the all-Italian revival with Pinza, under Ettore Panizza.

Boris neophytes may also have here their first brushes with Rimsky’s orchestration, though broadcasts of the ’30s and ’40s are hardly the best circumstances for that. (Try the Karajan/Salzburg recording, I suppose, for the painterly glories of it, remaining aware that Karajan’s personal stamp on it is strong.) I’ll wait for the live encounter with ’69 to draw any detailed comparisons, but will observe that for me, the biggest difference between Rimsky and the performances of unembellished Mussorgsky I’ve heard is less in the enrichments and occasional prettifications of the Rimsky as in its sheer presence in our auditoriums, which has been markedly greater on the rare occasions of its use in New York by visiting Russian companies. Finally, a dramaturgical choice to note here is the placement of the Kromy Forest “Revolutionary” scene, whose addition, along with that of the Polish act, did so much to “open out” the opera in the direction of an historical epic closer to Pushkin’s ambitions, with the study of its protagonist’s rise and fall enclosed within it. If that’s the vision, then Kromy must come last, not only for the satisfying symmetry achieved by the work’s opening and closing with The People, but for the final statement of the sweep of history that is determined by manipulations far above The People’s comprehension, and which carries away individual fates, noble and common alike, on its tide of shifting allegiances. But since Mussorgsky in his revision tried to simultaneously “open out” but retain the focus on Boris, and since Chaliapin’s charisma went so far in establishing the title role as the opera’s raison d’être, the performance tradition came to place Kromy in penultimate position, with Boris’ Farewell and Death at the end. And that is what we have on these transmissions.