Boris Godunov (opera) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

César Cui (1835–1918) Mily Balakirev (1837–1910) Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)

Russian opera of the early 1870s was dominated by Western European works—mainly Italian. The domestic product was regarded with skepticism and sometimes hostility. The playwright Tikhonov wrote in 1898:

"In those days, splendid performances of Russian operas were given, but the attendance was generally poor. ...to attend the Russian opera was not fashionable. At the first performance of The Maid of Pskov there was a good deal of protest. An energetic campaign was being waged against the 'music of the future'–that is, that of the 'mighty handful'."

As the most daring and innovative member of the Mighty Handful, Mussorgsky frequently became the target of conservative critics and rival composers, and was often derided for his supposedly clumsy and crude musical idiom. After the premiere of Boris Godunov, influential critic Herman Laroche wrote:

"The general decorativeness and crudity of Mr. Mussorgsky's style, his passion for the brass and percussion instruments, may be considered to have been borrowed from Serov. But never did the crudest works of the model reach the naive coarseness we note in his imitator."

Reviews of the premiere performance of Boris Godunov were for the most part hostile. Some critics dismissed the work as "chaotic" and "a cacophony". Even his friends Mily Balakirev and César Cui, leading members of the Mighty Handful, minimized his accomplishment. Unable to overlook Mussorgsky's "trespasses against the conventional musical grammar of the time", they failed to recognize the giant step forward in musical and dramatic expression that Boris Godunov represented. Cui betrayed Mussorgsky in a notoriously scathing review of the premiere performance:

"Mr. Mussorgsky is endowed with great and original talent, but Boris is an immature work, superb in parts, feeble in others. Its main defects are in the disjointed recitatives and the disarray of the musical ideas.... These defects are not due to a lack of creative power.... The real trouble is his immaturity, his incapacity for severe self-criticism, his self-satisfaction, and his hasty methods of composition..."

Although he found much to admire, particularly the Inn Scene and the Song of the Parrot, he reproved the composer for a poorly constructed libretto, finding the opera to exhibit a lack of cohesion between scenes. He claimed that Mussorgsky was so deficient in the ability to write instrumental music that he dispensed with composing a prelude, and that he had "borrowed the cheap method of characterization by leitmotives from Wagner."

Other composers were even more censorious. Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote in a letter to his brother Modest:

"I have studied Boris Godunov and The Demon thoroughly. Mussorgsky's music I send to the devil; it is the most vulgar and vile parody on music..."

Of the critics who evaluated the new opera, only the 19-year-old critic Vladimir Baskin defended Mussorgsky's skill as a composer. Writing under the pen name "Foma Pizzicato", Baskin wrote,

"Dramatization in vocal music could go no farther. Mussorgsky has proved himself to be a philosopher-musician, capable of expressing with rare truth the mind and soul of his characters. He also has a thorough understanding of musical resources. He is a master of the orchestra; his working-out is fluent, his vocal and chorus parts are beautifully written."

Although Boris Godunov is usually praised for its originality, dramatic choruses, sharply delineated characters, and for the powerful psychological portrayal of Tsar Boris, it has received an inordinate amount of criticism for technical shortcomings: weak or faulty harmony, part-writing, and orchestration. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov said:

"I both adore and abhor Boris Godunov. I adore it for its originality, power, boldness, distinctiveness, and beauty; I abhor it for its lack of polish, the roughness of its harmonies, and, in some places, the sheer awkwardness of the music."

The perception that Boris needed correction due to Mussorgsky's poverty of technique prompted Rimsky-Korsakov to revise it after his death. His edition supplanted the composer's Revised Version of 1872 in Russia, and launched the work abroad, remaining the preferred edition for some 75 years (see Versions by Other Hands in this article for more details). For decades, critics and scholars pressing for the performance of Mussorgsky's own versions fought an often losing battle against the conservatism of conductors and singers, who, raised on the plush Rimsky-Korsakov edition, found it impossible to adapt to Mussorgsky's comparatively unrefined and bleak original scores.

Recently, however, a new appreciation for the rugged individuality of Mussorgsky's style has resulted in increasing performances and recording of his original versions. Musicologist Gerald Abraham wrote:

"...in the perspective of a hundred years we can see that Musorgsky's score did not really need 'correction' and reorchestration, that in fact the untouched Boris is finer than the revised Boris."

For many, Boris Godunov is the greatest of all Russian operas because of its originality, drama, and characterization, regardless of any cosmetic imperfections it may possess.