Mussorgsky's "Khovanshchina ' at the Met

Russia's chief domestic product, it sometimes seems, is suffering. The Russians have had plenty of it. The total American mortality in all our wars is still less than a million. But the loss of Russian life between 1914 and 1945 alone— through foreign and civil war, famine, and the gulag— was between 50 and 60 million. That's equivalent to one-third of Russia's population in 1914.

The 17th Century wasn't a very happy time in Russia either; and if the loss of life was far less then, that was because the population was less than a tenth of its early 20th-Century level. Modest Mussorgsky chose this period as the setting of both Boris Gudonov and Khovanshchina, and if the latter is only his second best opera, that still makes it the second best Russian opera ever written.

Khovanshchina's relative lack of exposure outside Russia stems from several factors. It was left incomplete at Mussorgsky's death, and the rather awkward disposition of its major plot lines in the final scenes leaves a sense of abortive development and resolution.

A deeper issue is its lack of a dominant character, as in Boris; the protagonist is really Russia itself, whose agony is projected in the great waves of choral song that render this work unique in the annals of opera but leave it, ultimately, more spectacle than drama.

Taste for fatalism

It's not that Mussorgsky's psychological penetration is any less acute in Khovanshchina, but simply that his individual characters are swamped by circumstances beyond their control and seem doomed, whatever their efforts. In a work that lasts four hours long, such a plot requires a certain taste for fatalism.

The issue is compounded by the fact that Khovanshchina contains relatively few arias of the sort that Western operagoers relish. Mussorgsky projects his text and powerfully clothes it, but he rarely embellishes it. This approach makes for a strikingly modern kind of music drama, but it provides few vocal cushions.

In Boris, this text-centered musical language propels the tragic action forward. But in Khovanshchina, although its individual characters meet certainly tragic, not to say appalling, ends, we have a sense of being pulled toward a larger center of suffering that's beyond personal destiny and beyond redemption, too— at least in this life.

That's not a vision theater patrons wish to confront too often. It's the reason why we see more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than of King Lear.

Anarchic rebellion

The plot of Khovanshchina— loosely, The Khovansky Affair— is briefly told. The blustery Ivan Khovansky (bass Anatoli Kotscherga, in his Met debut) heads rather than leads the quasi-anarchic rebellion of his guard, the Streltsy, against the child co-tsars Ivan and Peter. He clashes with the Westernizing Prince Golitsyn (Vladimir Galouzine), who is the lover of the Regent Sophia but otherwise without a base of support.

In a subplot, Khovansky's dissolute son Andrei (Misha Didyk) jilts his loyal fiancée, Marfa (Olga Borodina), an adherent of the persecuted sect of Old Believers led by the charismatic priest Dosifei (Ildar Abdrazakov). Khovansky is assassinated after a bacchanal (rather tamely staged here); Golitsyn is sent into exile; and the Old Believers, Marfa included, immolate themselves in the opera's final scene.

Only the Streltsy, certainly the most culpable party, are spared at the last moment. But such arbitrariness, as Mussorgsky darkly suggests, is the essence of tsardom itself.

Unlike Boris, where the tsar dominates the stage, neither Ivan nor Peter (the future Peter the Great) appears; rather, it's the idea of tsardom itself— remote, unaccountable and absolute— that haunts the stage. The tsar is at once Russia's only hope and its certain doom. What then is Russia itself but a fatality?

Modernity vs. messiah

Tsarism was still absolute in Mussorgsky's time, although Western influence was growing pronounced, and change was in the wind. The figure of Golitsyn was a stand-in for contemporary modernizers, while Khovansky and the Old Believers represented different elements of 19th-Century conservatism.

The latter in particular (although long extinct as a movement) exemplified the persistent strain of Russian messianism that saw the land and its people as divinely chosen, and destined to testify by martyrdom. Such attitudes are by no means unknown today, and Mussorgsky, without endorsing them, felt that they embodied a truth about the Russian experience that could be conveyed theatrically in no other way.

Surely the music vouches for it. Khovanshchina is a lament for an entire people unique in the annals of opera; and for all its flaws and loose ends, it's uniquely moving.

The Met wisely left the singing and conducting chiefly in the hands of Russians (and former Russians), although the Met chorus was in very fine form. Among the principals, Olga Borodina's Marfa and Ildar Abdrazakov's Dosifei were particularly outstanding.

Vapid sets

The staging elements were rather less so, however. Ming Cho Lee's sets alternated between the vapid modernism— call it Constructivism Lite— that afflicts so many operatic productions, and doll's house interiors that, framed in darkness, straitjacketed their scenes to no particular effect. The stage direction had balletic precision, but little urgency or life.

In short, the Russian elements of the production were full and robust, but the American ones (the chorus aside) curiously stilted and bloodless. Perhaps history was the difference?

Five of the production's six scenes followed the orchestration done by Shostakovich in the 1950s, a time when Khovanshchina would have been particularly significant in Russia. Shostakovich scored the last scenes too, but conductor Kirill Petrenko chose to substitute a version by Stravinsky with a much more subdued ending. For Shostakovich, the Old Believers' voluntary martyrdom contained unmistakable accents of defiance; for the deeply Orthodox Stravinsky, quietism instead.

The Russians are still debating Khovanshchina; they probably always will. What's not in doubt is its profound humanity.

I have mentioned King Lear. It's pointless to compare the two works, or the two artists. But it suffices to mention them in the same sentence.