of the works . of those masters from whom they want to learn. I had known Boris almost by heart since my Conservatory days, but it was only when I orchestrated it that I sensed and experienced it as if it were my own work.
I suppose l can spend some time talking about the "Mussorgsky orchestra." We must assume that his orchestral "intentions" were correct but he simply couldn't realize them. He wanted a sensitive and flexible orchestra. As far as I can tell, he imagined something like a singing line around the vocal parts, the way subvoices surround the main melodic line in Russian folk song. But Mussorgsky lacked the technique for that. What a shame! Obviously, he had a purely orchestral imagination, and purely orchestral imagery , as well. The music strives for "new shores,'' as they say-musical dramaturgy, musical dynamics, language, imagery. But his orchestral technique drags him back to the old shores.
So, naturally, the Leningrad production of 1928 was a flop, and since then all attempts to stick to the composer's score have come to a shameful end. It's funny and it's sad that sometimes nowadays the basses with rather weak voices plump for the Mussorgsky score because they have to strain less. But the public isn't very concerned about that and therefore Boris Godunov is usually performed in either the Korsakov version or mine.
I kept thinking, Well, maybe I'll be able to do Mussorgsky a service, bringing his opera closer to the listener. Let them go and learn.
There's plenty to learn here. I kept thinking that the parallels were so obvious, they'd have to notice, they wouldn't be able to miss them.
Rimsky-Korsakov softened the point a bit, he muffled the eternal Russian problem of the upstart tsar versus the embittered people. Mussorgsky's concept is profoundly democratic. The people are the base of everything. The people are here and the rulers are there. The rule forced on the people is immoral and fundamentally anti-people. The best intentions of individuals don't count. That's Mussorgsky's position and I dare hope that it is also mine.
I was also caught up in Mussorgsky's certainty that the contradictions between the rulers and the oppressed people were insoluble, which meant that the people had to suffer cruelly without end, and become ever more embittered. The government, in its attempt to estab-231
lish itself, was decaying, putrefying. Chaos and state collapse lay ahead, as prophesied by the last two scenes of the opera. I expected it to happen in 1939.
I always felt that the ethical basis of Boris was my own. The author uncompromisingly decries the amorality of an anti-people government, which is inevitably criminal, even inexorably criminal. It is rotten from within and it is particularly revolting that it hides ui;ider the name of the people. I always hope that the average listener in the audience will be moved by Boris's words, "Not I . . . it's the people . . .
it's the will of the people." What familiar phraseology! The style of justifying villainy in Russia never changes, the stench of evil lingers.
There are the same evocations of "legality." Boris is hypocritically incensed: " . . . Questioning tsars, legal tsars, tsars who were appointed, elected by the people, and crowned by the great Patriarch!" I shudder every time I hear it. The stench of evil lingers.
Strangely enough (and this may be a professional quirk), I don't see all that in the Pushkin-I mean, theoretically, I can understand it, but I don't feel it as much, I just don't. Pushkin puts it all much more elegantly. So for me, the abstract art-music-is mote effective, even when it's a question of whether or not a man is a criminal. I was always very proud of music for that.
Music illuminates a person through and through, and it is also his last hope and final refuge. And even half-mad Stalin, a beast and a butcher, instinctively sensed that about music. That's why he feared and hated it. I've been told that he never missed a performance o( Boris at the Bolshoi. He understood absolutely nothing in music, contrary to firmly rooted opinion. Now I'm observing a renaissance of the Stalin legend. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that his "brilliant works" were written by someone else. He was like Hoffmann's sweet Klein Zaches, but a million times more vicious and dangerous.
What bothered Stalin in Boris? That the blood of the innocent will sooner or later rise from the soil. That's the ethical center of the opera.
It means that the ruler's crimes cannot be justified in the name of the people or hidden by the butcher's "legality." You will have to answer for your crimes someday.
However, Tsar Boris is much better than the "Leader of the Peoples." According to Pushkin and Mussorgsky, he worries about the 232
well-being of those peoples and he is not completely lacking in kindness and fairness. Just take the scene with the Yurodivy. And finally, unlike Stalin, he's a loving, tender father. And what about his guilty conscience? That's not so little, is it ? Of course, it's easy to feel guilty once you've committed evil. Sometimes that typically Russian trait sickens me. Our people are much too fond of making a . mess and then pounding their chests and smearing tears all over their faces. They howl and howl, but how can howling help? That's a slave mentality, a treacherous habit.
Still, you can sometimes believe a repentant man, and here we have a repentant ruler, a truly rare sight. Yet the people hate Boris, because he forced himself on them, because he besmirched himself with murder.
I remember that I was very bothered by one other thought at the time. It was clear to everyone that war was coming, sooner or later it was coming. And I thought that it would follow the plot of Boris Godunov. A chasm had developed between the government and the people, and let's not forget that it was the breach with the people that caused Boris's armies to lose in the battle with the Pretender, and it was also the cause of the subsequent state collapse.
The time of troubles was ahead. "Dark darkness, impenetrable!"
And "Sorrow, sorrow for Russia, weep, oh, weep, Russian people!
Hungry people!" cries the Yurodivy. In those days it sounded like news from the papers-not the official brazen lies that paraded on the front pages, but the news that we read between the lines.
My score of Boris has several not bad, in fact rather nice spots, I'm pleased with them. It's easier for me to judge my work here because I'm not really dealing with my own music. After all, it is Mussorgsky's music. I just did the coloring, so to speak. But as I've said, I sometimes got so carried away that I considered the music mine, particularly since it came from within, like something I composed.
There was no mechanical work in that score for me. That's the way it is for me in any instrumentation. There are no "insignificant details," no "inessential episodes" or neutral phenomena when it comes to sound. Take the big monastery bell in the scene in the monk's cell.
Mussorgsky (and Rimsky-Korsakov) used the gong. Rather elem�ntary, too simplistic, too flat. I felt that the bell was very important 233
