Gain Khovanchtchina, Drame Musical Populaire En Cinq Actes: Khovanstchina (the Princes Khovansky), A National Music Drama In 5 Acts (Classic Reprint) Portrayed By Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Represented In E-Text
WHO BELIEVE THE FUTURE IS IN THE POPULIST STREET HAVE IT ALL WRONG
Mussorgsky did not have the chance of having this opera of his performed during his life, but we will probably never know what it could have been if it had not been “finished” or “modified” by so many other composers over one century after the death of the composer in.
The subject is pure dynamite because it considers the messy situation in Russia and Moscow in a period known as the Streltsy uprisings of, Power was divided between several factions, the Khovansky family that controlled the fearful Streltsy military police in Moscow that had a record of criminal cleansing of any opposition.
The next faction was a religious movement that called for the closing up of the country and then going back to very fundamentalist orthodox Christianity, There was also among the ruling circles of Russia some members of the Tsar family who were for the opening of Russia and reform, The opera is exactly at this very moment when in Moscow the factions are confronting one another and the army of the future Tsar Peter the Great is approaching the city and will take it, which will mean centralization, regularization, and reform, nothing abolishing feudalism and serfdom, but reform nevertheless that might bring in some ideas from Europe, particularly those circles in France, England and Germany that were trying to imagine a state of law and a democratic political system based on the three independent powers of the state, what will be known later on as the Enlightenment.
The libretto takes a stance that is clearly dictated by the situation in Russia when the opera was composed, The situation, after the abolition of serfdom inby Alexander II, brought a lot of hope for further reforms that will never materialize, The stance in the opera in favor of reforms, though seen as meaning the increasing influence of the Germans, might have been difficult to put on the stage.
It would be interesting to compare the original libretto and the libretto performed for the first time in, five years after the Composers death, But reform is not really the main stake in the opera, The main stake is in fact double,
On one hand the violent and bloody repression of any opposition in Moscow due to the domination of the Khovansky family and the powerlessness of the main leader in Moscow, Golitsyn.
The repression is performed by the Streltsy that is depicted as a band of drunkards who when drunk can kill anyone in sight,
On the other hand, the stake is to get rid of, to push back the strong fundamentalist orthodox movement that is more reactionary than conservative.
They want to go back to what religion and its power were a century ago, They are the Old Believers and have their leader, Dosifey, But what is good on their side is that they will prefer dying in flames than bowing down in front of the new reformist Tsar, And that is the surprising end of this opera, The Streltsy goes out against Peters army and is defeated off stage, Then when Peters army arrives on stage, they find all the Old Believers burning on a pyre lit by the only woman in the band, Marfa who is a mixture of a witch, a seer, a fortuneteller, in fact, nothing but a fake person or an impostor.
It reveals the level of gullibility these Moscow leaders exhibited, as well as the Old Believers,
The most surprising side of the libretto is the position of women, On stage we get two main women, Emma, a German Lutheran that is practically raped on stage by one Khovansky, and the other Marfa, the fortune teller who defends Emma, but is it successful, though Marfa, later on, is sent away from the palace by Andrey Khovansky with his servants ordered to follow her and get rid of her.
She escapes, saved by Peters soldiers, But the Streltsky police or army is doubled up in act three with the band of their wives who protest they are abandoned, They will be the only happy ones because their husbands who are ready to accept a mass execution from Peters soldiers are in fact pardoned and sent home by Streshnev, the leader of Peters army.
He is a Boyar and these Boyars have been hinted at all along in the opera, They are the old aristocracy of Russia and have joined their fight with Peter, the future Peter the Great,
There is something quite modern in this opera, It is the fact that when two or three factions are fighting together, against one another, in multiple and evanescent alliances among them, it is always an outsider who will come and clean up the plate, that is to say, take over the political situation.
This is very Shakespearian if you think of Macbeth or Hamlet, The final winner is the outsider, The other modern element is that it is an undemocratic situation characterized by some authoritarianism and the attempt by some to destabilize those in power by street agitation and demonstrations that can both turn violent or simply criminal that is the real political danger in our modern supposedly democratic societies that can turn undemocratic in no time at all.
Even if there is a savior somewhere in the wings, his intervention is not a democratic solution, even if that savior improved the situation at stake.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Excerpt from Khovanchtchina, Drame Musical Populaire en Cinq Actes: Khovanstchina The Princes Khovansky, A National Music Drama InActs
Proprit des diteurs pour tous pays.
W. Bessel et c, St. Ptersbourg et Moscou. Tous droits d'excution rservs Br lpg Copyright una/, by w, Besse!Gravure et Impression de Breitkopf Hrtel Leipzig,
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books, Find more at www. forgottenbooks. com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work, Forgotten Books uses stateoftheart technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy, In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our
edition, We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky sitelink Модест Петрович Мусоргский,March O, S.MarchMarch O. S.Marchwas a Russian composer, one of the group known as The Five, He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period, He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music, Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other national themes, Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, For many years Mussorgskys works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers, Many of his most important compos Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky sitelink Модест Петрович Мусоргский,March O, S.MarchMarch O. S.Marchwas a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five", He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period, He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music, Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other national themes, Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers, Many of his most important compositions have posthumously come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available.
The spelling and pronunciation of the composer's name has caused some confusion, The family name derives from ath orth century ancestor, Roman Vasilyevich Monastyryov, who appears in the Velvet Book, theth century genealogy of Russian boyars.
Roman Vasilyevich bore the nickname "Musorga", and was the grandfather of the first Mussorgsky, The composer could trace his lineage to Rurik, the legendaryth century founder of the Russian state, In Mussorgsky family documents the spelling of the name varies: "Musarskiy", "Muserskiy", "Muserskoy", "Musirskoy", "Musorskiy", and "Musurskiy", The baptismal record gives the composer's name as "Muserskiy", In early up toletters to Mily Balakirev, the composer signed his name "Musorskiy" Мусoрскій,The "g" made its first appearance in a letter to Balakirev in,Mussorgsky used this new spelling Мусoргскій, Musorgskiy to the end of his life, but occasionally reverted to the earlier "Musorskiy",The addition of the "g" to the name was likely initiated by the composer's elder brother Filaret to obscure the resemblance of the name's root to an unsavory Russian word мусoр músor n.
m. debris, rubbish, refuseMussorgsky apparently did not take the new spelling seriously, and played on the "rubbish" connection in letters to Vladimir Stasov and to Stasov's family, routinely signing his name Musoryanin, roughly "garbage dweller" compare dvoryanin: "nobleman".
The first syllable of the name originally received the stress i, e. , MÚS ər skiy, and does so to this day in Russia and in the composer's home district, The mutability of the second syllable vowel in the versions of the name mentioned above gives evidence that this syllable did not receive the stress, The addition of the "g" and the accompanying shift in stress to the second syllable, sometimes described as a Polish variant, was supported by Filaret Mussorgsky's descendants until his line ended in theth century.
Their example was followed by many influential Russians, such as Fyodor Shalyapin, Nikolay Golovanov, and Tikhon Khrennikov, who, perhaps dismayed that the great composer's name was "reminiscent of garbage", supported the erroneous second syllable stress that has also become entrenched in the West.
The Western convention of doubling the first "s", which is not observed in scholarly literature e, g. , The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, likely arose because in many Western European languages a single intervocalic /s/ often becomes voiced to /z/ as in "music", unlike in Slavic languages where it remains unvoiced.
Doubling the consonant thus reinforces its voiceless sibilant /s/ sound, sitelink.