Versions of Boris

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Musorgsky vs. Musorgsky: The Versions of "Boris Godunov" (II)Author(s): Richard TaruskinSource: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1985), pp. 245-272Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746515.

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Musorgsky s Musorgskyh e Versions o f B o r i s odunov I I )

RICHARDTARUSKIN

Musorgsky finished the full score of the firstversion of Boris Godunov on 15 December1869, and by early springof the next year wasbusy with all the details involved with its sub-mission to the ImperialTheaters-copying thescore for the OperaCommittee, copyingthe li-bretto for the censor. All these matters werefully attended to by 13 July 1870, when StepanGedeonov, Director of the Imperial Theaters,told Musorgsky he would have to wait till thenext season for the decision. This came on 10February1871, and as all the world knows, itwas negative.The bearerof the badtidingswas Shestakova,Boris's "godmother," who as Glinka's sisterknew all the parties concerned with the deci-

sion and was informed of it in advance. (Mu-sorgsky did not receive official notification ofhis opera'srejectionuntil the eighteenth.)Shes-takova was quite surprisedby Musorgsky'sre-action to the news:I knew thatthis news wouldbeunpleasantorMu-sorgsky and did not want to tell him right away, sothen and there I wrote to him and to Stasov, askingthem to come and see me aroundnine in the evening.Returninghome, I found them waiting. I told themwhat I hadheard,andStasov with heated enthusiasmbegan talking over with him the new parts to be in-serted into the opera;Musorgsky began playingoversome themes, and the evening passedin a very livelyfashion.'Her surprise was even more explicitly corrobo-ratedby Rimsky-Korsakov:[Musorgsky]knows everything concerning Boris'sfate and reacted completely differently than onemight have expected, and therefore,completely dif-ferently than we all hadpredicted.2

PartI appeared n this journal VIII/2(Fall 1984),91-118.Notes for this articleappearon pp.270-72.19th-CenturyMusic VIII/3 Spring1985).@by the RegentsoftheUniversity fCalifornia.

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Musorgsky, in other words, was eager,not re-luctant, to revise his opera.When this fact is set alongside the lack ofcongruence between the requirements of theTheatricalDirectorateandthe actualrevisions,the rejection must lose its status as motivationfor the revision; nor can the changes in the op-era be regardedany longer as forced.They weremotivated deeply and from within, and there-fore deserve both understanding and respect.Open-minded examination of the scanty butnonetheless persuasive external evidence, onthe one hand,andof the actual revisedscore,onthe other, leads to the conclusion that the revi-sions were primarily motivated by consider-ations of historiographical ideology, dramatictone, andconsistency in the deploymentof leit-motives. Taken together, they amounted to acomplete rethinkingof the basis ofMusorgsky'soperaticesthetic and his operatic style.

Although these considerations (perhapsneedless to say) overlapped and intertwined,thoroughly "over-determining" the revisionprocess, we shall take them up one by one forclarity'ssake.Butfirst,like Musorgskyhimself,we will briefly disposeof the demandsof the Di-rectorateandconsiderthe extent to which theywere reflectedin the revision.IThe seven-member committee that rejectedBoris Godunov in 1871was not required o stateits reasons.The double-bassplayerFerrero,whoreported to the Directorate, simply informedthe head of repertoire,P. S. Fyodorov,that thevote had been six to one against the opera(theone white ball, it turned out, had been cast byNapravnik),and that was that. The only docu-ment to give even indirectevidenceof the Com-mittee's actual deliberations and reasoning isShestakova's memoir:

There was a luncheon at [Maryinsky prima donna]JuliaPlatonova'son the occasion of herb6nefice.Shecame to invite me, and added hat on thatverydayinthe morning the fate of Musorgsky's operawould bedecided, and that Napravnik and [chief rigisseur]Kondratiev would be coming to her house after-wards.Iwent, and with great mpatience awaited thearrivalof these personages.Understandably, greetedthem with the words, "Is Boris accepted?" "No,"they answered me, "it's impossible. How can therebe an opera without the feminine element? Mu-

sorgsky has great talent beyond doubt. Let him addone more scene. Then Boriswill beproduced 1"3Before proceeding further, we may note par-enthetically that the Directorate requiredonescene, while Stasov andMusorgsky,as noted inthe other extractfrom the same memoir given

above, immediately begandiscussing the "newparts to be added"-plural, not singular.Theseplans, evidently, had been made beforethe re-jection. To this we shall return.Now there is no evidence that the Commit-tee ever asked for more than a prima donna roleand a single scene to contain it. The three otherreports of the rejection that have often beencited in the scholarly literature were fancifulkuchkist embroiderieswithout any documen-tary authority. The best-known account isRimsky-Korsakov's, from his Chronicle of MyMusical Life, written in 1905-06 and first pub-lished in 1909:The freshness and originality of the music non-plussed the honorable members of the committee,who reproved he composer,among otherthings, forthe absence of a reasonably important female role.... Much of the fault-findingwas simply ridiculous.Thus the double-basses divisi playing chromaticthirds in the accompaniment of Varlaam's ongwereentirely too much forFerrero, he double-bassplayer,who could not forgivethe composerthis device. Mu-sorgsky, hurt and offended,withdrew his score, butlaterthoughtthe matterover anddecided o makeradicalchangesandadditions.4Comparisonof the last sentence in this extractwith Rimsky's own letter to his sister-in-lawsome thirty-odd years closer to the event, asgiven above, will show how far this account isto be trusted. To that we may add that the dou-ble-bass passage, cited as exemplary of the"freshness and originality" that occasioned therejection, actually survived the revision.Stasov, who, as we have seen, approvedtherejection for the pretext it afforded orrevision,distorted the reasons for it in the account hegave in his necrology of 1881, mentioning onlythe "plethora of choruses and ensembles andthe too-conspicuous lack of scenes for individ-ual characters."5 But again, the "offense" (atleast vis-h-vis the chorus; the rest of the passageis obscure) not only survived the revision, butwas actually exacerbated by it.The remaining kuchkist witness was C6sar

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Cui. On 9 March1871he publisheda small noteappendedto his regularcolumn in the Sanktpe-terburgskie vedomosti, in which the French-Lithuanian composer-critic lamented the fateof Russian composers, and made much of thefact that out of seven members of the "vaude-ville committee," as he called it, only one-theballet conductor Alexei Papkov-was ethni-cally a Russian.6 Further raillery against the"vaudeville committee," found place in Cui'sreview of the three scenes that were performed,despite their ruling, at Kondratiev'sbindfice inFebruary 1873. "The Committee boiled overwith righteous indignation againstthe music ofthis opera," fumed Cui, the master propagan-dist, who then proceeded subtly and deliber-ately to confuse the Committee with the criti-cal press, and Boris with the "New RussianSchool" in general:The newtendencys rebuked or ts allegeddestruc-tive aspirations.... WhathasMusorgsky estroyed,who createdhegrandestfallexisting omicscenes,boilingwith life and nimitable ruth, n his "Inn"?The old exists as before,only somethingnew hasbeenadded oit. .... Buthoweasy t wouldbetosup-port Russian opera at a remarkablyhigh level ...Whatwill becomeof it in reality,however,sknownonlytoAllah-and theTheatersDirectorate.7Thus was bornthe durablelegend of a Borisre-buked and rejectedfor its modernism when allthat was asked,accordingto reliabletestimony,was aprimadonna role.

This was suppliedin shortorderbythe PolishAct, on which Musorgsky embarkedimmedi-ately after the rejection came down. By 5 April1871 he was able to play the completed scene ofMarina andRangonito an assemblageat Shesta-kova's.8A couple of days later, at the Purgold's,Musorgsky became inspiredandcomposedMa-rina's ariathen andthere:Inthe courseof theeveninghewenttothepiano ev-eraltimes, playedoversomefragments, ndbeforehis friends [including the Stasov brothersandRimsky-Korsakov]heregradually rosethe wholemonologue [sic] .... Musorgsky had the knack ofcomposing "in company."'9According to the date on the autograph vocalscore, the scene in Marina's boudoir was com-pleted on 10 April 1871. Now Musorgsky haddone all that the Imperial Theater Directorate

had asked of him. But logic demanded that Ma-rinabe brought nto contact with the Pretender,so Musorgsky revived the abandonedFountainScene. A letter of 18April to Stasov shows himat work on the confrontation between DmitryandRangoniin that scene.'Many have cited Marina's conventional ariaandthe rhetoricallyinflated love duetat the endof the Fountain Scene, with their un-Pushki-nian texts, as evidence of Musorgsky's semi-cynical capitulation to the Committee, and asthereforeunworthy of the rest of the opera(andunworthy, too, of further comment). But thePolish Act cannot be written off so easily. Notonly does the enthusiasm evident in Mu-sorgsky's letter to Stasov contradict such aview: so does his subsequent behavior. Aftersupplying the requested Polish Act, he did notresubmit the operato the Directorate,confident(as per Shestakova's assurances)of its accept-ance. Far rom it. ByAugust, he was happilyde-Pushkinizing the text of the Terem Scene, and"perpetratingan arioso" for the title character,to paraphraseanother well-known letter to Sta-sov." The Polish Act was just the beginning.Itset the tone forthe whole revision andcan serveas aparadigmofMusorgsky'snew manner and ayardstick by which to measure the stylistic dis-tance between the two Borises.The most fundamental difference betweenthe Polish Act and the 1869Borisis the factthatit is no longer an opera dialogue--and a morefundamental difference there could not be,since the opera dialogue ideal had been thedefiningessence of the Dargomyzhskianreformin the late 1860s. Inpartthe changearose out ofpractical necessity, since Pushkin had givenMarina no extended, self-characterizingspeeches, and as we have seen, had deliberatelyavoided a love scene at the fountain. If Mu-sorgsky had insisted upon modelling his PolishAct on Pushkin's text as closely as he had therest of the opera, he could not have compliedwith the OperaCommittee's one demand.But in matters farbeyond what directly con-cerned Marina, Musorgsky threw to the windsthe ideals to which he had hitherto adhered sozealously. He wrote his own text for the PolishAct, freely paraphrasing Pushkin even when itwas possible to quote him directly (e.g., in thePretender's opening monologue at the foun-tain), and more often fabricating not only lines,

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but whole situations and even charactersout ofwhole cloth. Cui, who was Dargomyzhsky'spresschampionpar excellence, was predictablydisappointed. At the Kondratievbindfice, thethree scenes selected for advance exposurewere, as it happened,the Inn Sceneand the Pol-ish Act, the very paradigmsof Musorgsky'soldand new approaches,andCui in his review em-phasized the stylistic gulf that separated hem.His paeanin praiseof the Inn Scenewas a sum-mation of the ideals and criteriaof realist "dia-logue opera,"touching all the kuchkist bases--truth of declamation, national character,andthe intensification by musical means of theforms and values of the spokentheater.When itcame to the Polish scenes, Cui's first observa-tion was the somewhat rueful one that here"Musorgsky departedfrom Pushkin. .... Boththese scenes are done completely differently."And though Cui was quick to offer excuses--"in Pushkin these scenes are too rational,poorly suited to music, and in the first of themthereis anew character,Ruzia,who would haveincreasedstill further the opera'srosterandtheobstacles to its production"-they are half-hearted and none too logical (if Ruzia was detrop,what of Rangoni?).His disapprovalshowsthroughonce he gets down to cases:Inits conceptionhis actis, compared ith theInn,weaker and cruder..... The music of this act pos-sesses great merits, but it is not so impeccablethroughoutsin the Inn. tscharacters different: egetachorus,weget yricaloutbursts,nconsequenceofwhichmelodiesarerounder ndundergo certainamountof development. Thedramatic onfronta-tions]-Marina with the Jesuitand the Pretenderwith the Jesuitandwith Marina-arewrittena bitunevenly. They contain amazing, inspired episodes,but they also contain weak phrasesof insufficientlywell-defined melodic character, and even somemeaningless tones in two or threespots.'2

Cui persists in measuring the dramaticscenes in the Polish Act by the same kuchkistyardstick he had applied to the Inn Scene: thesuccess or failureof the individualrepliques,or"musical thoughts." The relative "uneven-ness" he thus purports to uncover testifies notonly to the circularity of his judgement but alsoto the dubious relevance of the measuring tool.For in these scenes Musorgsky veered sharplyaway from the pithy naturalistic manner of theInn Scene, seeking a more exalted level of ex-

pression throughagreater"aesthetic distance."The accompaniment is more regularandgener-alized; the rdpliques are longer, attaining attimes the quality of short monologues; thephrase structure is regularized,with frequentrecourse to both literal and sequential repeti-tion. It is senseless to attempt to separate,asCui does, the component phrasesof these longspeeches for individual critical evaluation,since, unlike the repliques in the Inn Scene,they are not contrasted and "characterized"atso local alevel, but areused asblocks in the con-struction of relatively long musical periodsofunified mood.Cui's critical stance-perfect for the InnScene, whose felicities he describesin masterlyfashion-is fartoo close for the PolishAct. Bysoplainly missing the wood for the trees in the re-view, Cui unwittingly dramatized the crucialissue for understandingthe revision of Borisinall its multifaceted aspects: the problem oftone.

IIIt is of course a truism that tragedyrequiresagreateraesthetic distance-what Serov called"aerial perspective"-than comedy. Wherecomedy can be set forth in details and in sharpapergus, tragedy traditionally demands thebroadbrushstroke,the heroic scale.It was apre-eminent aim of realistic theater in the nine-teenth century to breakdown this distinction:to portray,as GeraldAbrahamput it so well ofMusorgsky, "the prose of life as well as its po-etry,"'3and to do it seriously, with high moralpurpose. Ostrovsky's signal contribution, forexample, had been the construction of seriousplays out of elements previously associatedex-clusively with comedy. It is noteworthy, how-ever, that even Ostrovsky reservedthe designa-tion "tragedy" or historical verse plays, usingthe neutral word "drama"or "popular narod-naia) drama"for works in prosewith domestic(bytovoi) settings. Ostrovsky's tendency hadbeen intensified by Serov,who turned one of theplaywright's "popular dramas," Live Not theWay You'd Like (Ne tak zhivi, kak khochetsia)into his last opera (The Power of the Fiend), andby changing the resolution of this drama of do-mestic strife from one of reconciliation to one ofmurder,sought to elevate it explicitly (andoverthe playwright's vociferous objections) to the

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rank of full-fledged tragedy.In this experimentin Ostrovskian musical verismo, special inter-est attaches to the figureof the evil blacksmithEryomka,whose role is cast in musical idiomswhose roots lie obviously, if only in part,in thetraditions of opera buffa (atraditionwhose veryorigins lay in the deflation and mockery oftragic opera).The tension between traditionalgenresand the novel use to which they wereputimpartedto the music of ThePowerof the Fienda pervasive andinsidiously fascinating irony.'4A necessary partof theatrical realismwas therejection of large-scaleform-the rhetoricalso-liloquy, the genre set-piece, what Cui called"Karamzinianstanzas." Hence operatic think-ers who consideredthemselves realists workedprogrammaticallyto divest the musical theaterof its repertoire of conventional formal prac-tices-concerted aria, "monolithic" chorus,morceau d'ensemble. The trick was not easy toturn in opera,however, outside of experimentsof relatively narrowscope, such as the "recita-tive operas" composed by Dargomyzhsky andMusorgsky to pre-existing plays (or such suc-cessors as Prokofiev'searly stage pieces, not tomention Pellkas, Salome, or Wozzeck). Mostoperaticcomposers thought the prospecttoo farlimiting, and their number even included onefrom within the bosom of the kuchka. In an of-ten-quoted letter to the singer Liubov Karma-lina, Borodinwrote:Inmy view ofmattersoperatic havealwayspartedcompanywithmanyofmy comrades. hepurereci-tative style has alwaysgoneagainstmy grainandagainstmycharacter.amdrawnosinging,ocanti-lena,notto recitative, venthough,accordingothereactionsof thosewhoknow,I amnot toobadat thelatter.Besides,I am drawn o morefinished,morerounded,moreexpansive orms.Mywholemannerof treating peraticmaterials different.nmy opin-ion,in theopera tself,noless than n thesets,smallforms,details,nicetiesshouldhavenoplace.Every-thingshouldbepaintedn boldstrokes, learly,viv-idly,andaspracticablyspossible,both rom hevo-cal andorchestraltandpoints.'s

"Small forms, details, niceties": these hadbeen the very essence of the Dargomyzhskianreform that was to have revolutionized musicaldrama. For Borodin, though, it meant the loss ofthe tragic style, which would have spelled theruin of an opera on the epic scale of Prince Igor.But what of Boris Godunov?

Dargomyzhsky, The Stone Guest notwith-standing, was best rememberedby his admirersas a comic talent. In his obituary notice, Serovcalled particular attention to the late com-poser's "inimitable comic gift."'6 And Mu-sorgsky himself had paid Dargomyzhsky thetribute of imitation with Marriage,an out-and-out farce.EvenDargomyzhsky's magnum opuswas universally regardedas a "chamber"opera(Laroche:"[its]true domainis the salon;its trueorchestra, the pianoforte").'7 But if Dargo-myzhsky could foregothe grandmanner,couldMusorgsky affordto do so in a historical operalike Boris?There is evidence to suggest that he came tofeel he could not. During 1870, the year inwhich the first Boris was in limbo betweencompletion andrejection,Musorgsky playedse-lections fromthe operato interestedpartieson anumberof occasions. One of these was agather-ing at Stasov's dacha in Pargolovotoward theend of July. Stasov described the impressionMusorgskymade in a letter to his brotherDmi-try,full of his usual blustery,myopic optimism:Musorgsky rrivedor dinnerand n theeveninghesangso, that all the ladies andgirlsapplaudedimand he hada sort of triumph. recalled he daysofGlinka,whenhe himself wouldsit downat thepi-ano. Since thenI haven'tseenanyonemakesuchaunanimousmpressionon everyonewithoutexcep-tion.'8But that is certainlynot the impressionone getsfrom a rather bemusedMusorgsky'sdescriptionof the same event in a letter to Rimsky-Korsa-kov. In fact he was considerablydisconcertedatthe lack of unanimity. "Asregards he peasantsin Boris, some found them to be bouffe( ),whileothers saw tragedy."'9The annotatorsof the variouseditions of Mu-sorgsky's letters have assumed that he couldonly have meant the peasants in the openingscene of the prologue (Novodevichy), since (toquote the most recent annotation), "the KromyForest scene did not yet exist at the time, andinthe scene at St. Basil's there are no comic ele-ments at all."20But, as we have seen, to say thisis to misunderstand Pushkin, as Musorgskyhimself had evidently misunderstood him. Thefact that the St. Basil's Scene, in late nine-teenth-century realist eyes, seems to contain nocomedy, is precisely the reason why that scene

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must have been the one Musorgsky meant(along with Novodevichy, perhaps).Else whythe parenthetical exclamation point? Bothcrowd scenes employed identical radical tech-niques of choralwriting andchoraldramaturgy,and as these techniques were derivedfrom theprose recitative of the Inn Scene, they them-selves were what constituted the "comic ele-ment." Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov,in a percep-tive aside, noted that the comic elements im-plicit in Pushkin's handlingof the drama"cameout all the more vividly underscoredwith Mu-sorgsky."21And the elder Rimsky-Korsakov,to whomMusorgsky had confided his bewilderment, sofar agreed that the peasants in Boris were"bouffe,"that he parodied hem wickedly in hiscomic operaMay Night (1879) after a story byGogol. At the very end of act II,when the pusil-lanimous town bailiffscringingly begthe mayornot to force them out into the night on a peril-ous errand of justice, they do so to a musical

phrase obviously modelled on Musorgsky'schorus of forced supplication in the Nov-odevichy scene (ex. 1).The humor here was not entirely friendlytoMusorgsky.May Night was the firstmajorworkRimsky composed after putting himselfthrough the rigorousand painful course of self-instruction he undertookupon beingunexpect-edly appointed to the faculty of Rubinstein'sConservatory. So this passage probably con-tains an ironic backwardglance at his own mu-sical origins. But Musorgskyhimself no doubtbegan to view his peasants with a similar ironyafterhis experience at Pargolovo,when he per-ceived that in the eyes--or rather,ears--of hisaudience the prose recitative of his choralscenes ineluctably spelled "comedy,"its tradi-tional medium. From this experience, perhaps,dates his first impulse to revise his opera.To meet the immediate needonly some localsurgerywas required:deletion of the conclud-ing episode in the Novodevichy Scene--which,

a. Tenors

S1 Po- mi-ui, pan Go-o- aBasses

Po- mi- lui, pan Go- lo- vaHavemercy,Mr.Mayor

0- tets nash Kor mi- lets

0- tets nash Kor mi- lets

0- tets nash

0- tets nashOur ather Ourprovider Example1:a.May Night (Moscow,1970),p. 167.b. BorisGodunov,p. 18.

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nished him with his previouslibretti (TheMan-darin's Son, ThePrisonerof the Caucasus)andalso wrote the words for Borodin'sfarcicalpas-tiche Bogatyri (1867).Beginningwith Ratcliff'snarrative, however, the text is drawn direct,Dargomyzhsky-style, from Pleshcheev's trans-lation of Heine's originalplay, without benefitof librettist. The music, too, takes on an air ofhigh seriousness, the vocal line aspiring o whatCui called "melodic recitative," while the or-chestraaspiredto symphonic continuity andel-oquence by virtue of a textureheavy with pedalpoints, chromatic appoggiaturas,and leitmo-tives.

Musorgskycopied the dramaticshapeof thisscene of Cui's in recasting the opening of hisTerem Scene. In both, a rather lengthy diver-tissement full of songs and games is suddenlyinterruptedbythe entrance of the stern baritoneprotagonist, who, having dispersed the revel-lers,proceedsto sing a crucial andself-revealingmonologue. And the Boris who thus presentshimself in the revised Teremis even more noblethan his 1869 predecessor,even more the com-plex "Dostoevskian" protagonist uniting as-pects of hero and villain. This, too, seems in-debted to the example of Cui's Ratcliff, who isportrayed with some subtlety, in Laroche'swords, as "the victim of his hallucinations andhis morbid sensitivity, musically realized bygiving his music, whatever the blood-thirstysituation, a tender, lyrical cast."26The differ-ence between the central monologues in thetwo Terem Scenes is precisely a matter ofheightened lyricism (for which purpose Mu-sorgsky borrowed another theme from Sa-lammb6, and gave it a broaddevelopment notonly in the orchestrabut in the voice aswell27),and the differencebetween the two concluding

monologues is precisely a matter ofheightenedportrayalof a victimizing hallucination.So what had been a kind of happenstanceinRatcliff, brought about by the juxtaposition ofCui's early and mature styles, became a calcu-lated dramaticdevice in Boris.Musorgskyevenapedthe device of comic relief Cuihadprovidedat the conclusion of the protagonist's mono-logue. In Ratcliff it had been a snoringchorus;in Boris it was the commotion caused by Pop-inka, the Tsarevich'spet parrot.28In light of his dictum aboutPushkin-as-text,the most striking aspect of the revised Teremwas the extent to which Musorgskynow foundit desirable to rewrite the words even as he wasstraying musically from the Dargomyzhskianstraight-and-narrow.Clearly the criteria of themusical and spoken dramas were no more syn-onymous to the creator of the revised Teremthan they were to the authorof the Polish Act,which in so many ways it now resembled; inlight of its "influence" on the Terem, the veryheart of the opera,the Polish Act can hardlybelooked upon as a mere "concession." Equallysymptomatic of Musorgsky's changedestheticis the fact that the recitative declamationin the"new" scenes was far less naturalistic than inthe old. This, too, can best be measured in theTerem Scene, particularly n the episodewhereBoris and Shuisky face off. For here the com-poser retained agood deal of Pushkin's text butset it to new music. We can thus comparediffer-ent settings of identical lines, for instance, therdpliqueof Shuisky shown in ex. 2.The 1869 setting betraysall the earmarksofkuchkist naturalism as described n connectionwith the Inn Scene and Marriage.Particularlycharacteristic are the rest before the word sa-mozvcnets (pretender)and the triplet to which

a. S SHUISKY 3-r

tFr r F r

F? . ? B J i I II10 1r r "r rI

v Lit- ve ia- vii- sia sa- no- zva- nets Ko- rol', pa- ny i pa- pa za ne-gob. accel.L

, ,,, -.

," : , ?T ' ?

e r ov-L- vi sa- y - a ne p- , ip-aigv Lit- ye ia- vii- sia sa- no- zva- nets Ko-rol', pa- ny, i pa- pa za ne- goInLithuaniaapretenderhasappearedTheking,theLords, ndthe Popearebackinghim

Example2: a. BorisGodunov,pp. 141-42 (versionof 1869).b.BorisGodunov,pp. 209-10 (versionof 1871).252



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the beginning of the word in sung. There is nopunctuation to justify the rest;it is the result offastidiously moving the unaccented first sylla-ble of samozvacnetsoff the beat.29Accordingtowhat is by now a familiar habit, the metricalpulses take nothing but accented syllables orrests. At the other place in this excerptwherethree unaccented syllables follow in a row(paipaza neg6), they areall crowded,alongwith the ac-cented syllable, into a single beat.Observe now how comparatively relaxedMusorgsky's standards of declamation had be-come by 1871. The rhythm of samozvainetsissmoothed out for musical reasons, allowing itsfirst syllable to occupy a beat though unac-cented. And the rhythm of pa2pa a neg6 hasbeen spreadout over two beats (evidentlyin theinterest of singability),producinga similarcaseof anunaccented syllable (za)on the beat--and apreposition, at that. Butmost telling of all is theplacement of the unaccented conjunction i(and)on a beat all by itself, so as to prepare heclimax of the phrasemore effectively. The shap-ing of the melodic line has been given prece-dence over correctnessof declamation. In otherwords, abstractly "musical" considerationshave taken precedence over the declamatoryvalues that had beensacrosanct in theheydayofDargomyzhskian realism only a few years be-fore. There is no doubt that the 1871 setting ofthe line is amore effective andmemorable "mu-sical thought."Butit has lost the special and in-stantly recognizable stamp of vintage kuch-kism, now tainted with ineluctable associa-tions of comedy.

From all these various perspectives, the revi-sion of Boris can be viewed as harbingerof thegeneral swing in Russian operaaway from real-ism andkuchkism in the 1870s and 80s. In thisregard,Boris was fully as symptomatic, in itsway, as Rimsky's revisions of Pskovitianka orTchaikovsky's transformation of Vakula theSmith into Cherevichki.3a0nd, of course, Mu-sorgskycontinued in the "new-old"direction inthe two unfinished operasthat followed Boris,Khovanshchina and The Fair at Sorochintsy.The behests of the ImperialTheaters Director-ate played no partin Musorgsky'schangeof di-rection beyondfurnishinghim with an opportu-nity. But this is something we can see farbetter

than Musorgsky's contemporaries.Outside hisintimate circle the first version (to say nothingof Marriage)was not available for comparison.And withal, the revisions were only aharbingerof the swing to which we refer,farfrom its cul-mination.So it should not surpriseus to find that, revi-sions notwithstanding, Boris Godunov struckits earliest audiencesas a veritable ne plus ultraof musical realism. This is shown best, if ironi-cally, by the fact that nothing Musorgskywasable to do in revising Boris could save it frommaking a "bouffe"impression on conservativecritics. Thus V. S.Baskinintransigentlyrefusedto see any merit in the workbeyondthose of theInn Scene, nor any merit in the composer be-yond his lively comic sense:His humorandgenuinewit, whichupto now havefoundexpressiononly in severalcomicsongs(e.g.,"The Billy Goat," "The Seminarist,"etc.), havebrought largemeasureofauthentic omedy o theopera,andhaveenlivenedmanyscenes.Thus,Var-laamandMissail, hewanderingagrantmonks,arenot marionettes rcaricatures,ut arepresented stwo"types" rawn romife;the samemaybe saidoftheinnkeeper,hepoliceman,heYurodivy,nd hetwo Jesuits inthe Kromy cene]. fMr.Musorgsky,given his aptitudes,wished to write comic operas,ofwhich we have none, he might have the placewithinRussian musical literature occupied by Auber[ ]within the French.31And if this is damningwith faint praise,the no-torious open letter to Musorgsky from thepseudonymous "D. Pozdniakov"was an all-outattack:You, along with your whole circle, have too high anopinion of yourself.... You'll never go higher thanyour gifts allow. Yourgenre is petty comic operasofeveryday ife (malen'kaiabytovaiakomicheskaiaopery [sic]). And you, meanwhile, are crawlingaroundn Russianhistory.32The greatest anti-realist indignation wasaroused by the Polish Act, of all things, for itrepresentedto Pushkin lovers atypically "utili-tarian,"anti-aesthetic debasementof the poet'sromantically metaphorical language. Particu-larly severe were the strictures of NikolaiStrakhov, one-time pochvennik par excel-lence,33 who wrote a scathing critique in theform of three letters to the editorof the journalGrazhdanin, none other than Fyodor Dos-

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toevsky, his closest friend. "To this composer,"he wrote:wordslike--". .. Beneaththe roof of quiet night?How slowly passedthe tedious dayHow slowly the glow of evening diedaway "34-are out of place and unsuited to music. He is, afterall, a musical Realist. He realized that he would havehad to representin sounds the quiet night, the closeof day, the dimming of the twilight. Who needs allthis?And so he throws it all out and sticks in his ownwords: "anguished,""agonizingdoubts,""tormentsof the heart,"andeven "the renunciation ofmy joy"Thereyouhave anexampleof realismand,alas, helevelofcontemporaryrtistic eeling.35Strakhov even professes to find a kind ofChernyshevskiannihilism at workin the Foun-tain Scene, citing its author as one of those who"reason thus: why paint a picture if the samething can be expressedin a modest journalisticarticle? And conversely: in apicturetheremustbe only what can be set forth in a good piece ofjournalism.Everythingelse is nonsense."36It is only too easy to dismiss these fulmi-nations as a particularlyobtuse periodpiece, es-pecially as we have seen how closely Mu-sorgskyhadcleaved to Pushkin'stext beforehisrealism had begun (pace Strakhov)to ebb. ButStrakhov's testimony is a salutary reminderthat the second Boris was not quite the neo-Ro-mantic retreat it has seemed to the likes ofAsafiev. It was right after revising Boris, afterall, that Musorgsky delivered himself of hismost famous realist slogan, his oft-quoted"credo" hat "artificialrepresentationof beautyalone, in the material sense of the word, iscoarsechildishness, the babyhoodof art."37Theadaptation of the Fountain Scene is a case inpoint: Musorgsky rejected the "material" as-pects of "external"beautyin Pushkin'stext, re-placing it with direct emotional reportage.Asone sympathetic Soviet writerhas put it, "in re-writing the poet's text, though much of poeticenjoyment and beauty was lost, [Musorgsky]undeniablyachieved a roughandgaudytheatri-cality that had been lacking in Pushkin."38"Rough and gaudy theatricality": Borodincould not have put it better. It was the operacomposer's perennial stock-in-trade, not theproperty of any aesthetic camp. The phraseaptly describes the quality Strakhov labelled"realist";but just as aptly it defines what wehave seen as evidence of a retrenchment from

the hard-linerealist doctrinesof the 1860s.As amatter of fact, Strakhov gives us an unwittinghint as to the sources of Musorgsky's new-found "theatricality."He volleys off a particu-larly noisome blast at the opening of the Pre-tender'smonologue at the verybeginningof theFountainScene:"Midnight .. in the garden ..by the fountain." These words, he indignantlyobserves, are to be found not in Pushkin's text,but in his stage directions. "Astonishing is theonly word for this musician, who prefers towrite music to prose and not to verse,who doesnot even distinguish prosefrom verse, and whois so illiterate that he cannot even tell ourpoet'sheadings from his verse."" But though we balkat the critic's diagnosis, the symptom to whichhe calls attention is indeed an oddone. Why,in-deed, set Pushkin's stage direction as if it werean actual line of text? Could it have been be-cause it carried orMusorgskyan altogetherdif-ferent kind of resonance, one which had noth-ing to do with Pushkin? The third act of anoperawhose triumphant Russian premierehadtaken place on New Year's Day, 1869, hadopenedas in ex. 3.The kuchkists, whose contempt for Verdihad reached its climax with the much-toutedpremiereof LaForzadel destino, his "Russian"opera, in 1862, had rather ambivalent feelingsaboutDon Carlos,belongingas it did to a genreof which they approved,and to which a coupleof them were already striving to contribute.Atthe time of the Russian premiere, Cui an-nounced that "Don Carlos bearswitness to thetotal collapse of the Italian school and to thegreatMaestro Verdi'scomplete lack of individ-uality,"40 but by the time he came to write histestamentary essay on "Contemporary Oper-atic Forms" n 1889, Cui looked backuponDonCarlos as the first in a series of works (he alsonames Aida and Otello) that may "representthe progressive decline of Verdi's creativepowers, but at the same time a progressive urntoward new forms, founded upon the criterionof dramatictruth."41One can deducefrom thisthat Don Carlos had impressed the kuchkists inspite of themselves, much as Lohengrin haddone a decade earlier, and so it does not straincredibility to suppose that Musorgsky (perhapsnot altogether consciously) turned to Verdi as amodel for the kind of "rough and gaudy theatri-cality" to which he aspired in recasting Boris.42

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DONCARLO(leggendoun biglietto)

8 "A mez-za not-te, ai giar-dindel-la Re-gi- na, sot-to glial- lor del-la fon- te vi- ci- na." Emez-za

Allegro Allegrovivo = 132

not-te; mi par u-dir lmormo- rio del vi- ci- no fon- te... Eb- bro d'a-mor,

P PPleggeroo1

A:. .. - - ..."

k , k - ' ""- - - , ' ..

Example3: Don Carlos(1867),beginningof Act III.

IVThe remaining conspicuous addition to therevised Boris is the one that was most com-pletely "overdetermined"by all the variousim-pulses-stylistic, dramaturgical, ideological--that conditioned the revision. For that veryreason, therefore, it demands close examina-tion.The so-called scene "nearKromy"(pod Kro-mami)-often referred o in the secondary iter-ature as the "Revolution Scene,"invariablyre-ferred to by Musorgsky as the scene of the"tramps"(brodiagi),andofficially designated nthe autograph libretto as "Sokolniki on theDnepr"--has always posed an insurmountableproblem to those who have tried to portraytherevision of Boris as the undertakingof a com-poser at the mercy of sundryforcesmajeures.Ithad nothing to do with the TheatricalDirector-ate's strictures,and it was amuch greaterpoten-tial affront to the censor than St. Basil's, thescene it replaced.The initial impetus toward tscomposition was most likely the concern wehave alreadynoted overthe "tone" of the opera,particularly as concerned the portrayalof the

"peasants."But the specific realizationwas pri-marily conditioned by the influence of revision-ist historiography,particularlyrife in the 1860sand early '70s, on the composer's view of theevents of the Time of Troubles. These two fac-tors were symbiotic: they can be disentangledonly artificially, and that must be kept in mindduringthe discussion that follows.We have associated Musorgsky'sinitial dis-satisfaction with Boris with its private recep-tion in July1870,half ayearbefore the Commit-tee that rejected the opera met to consider it.The first specific conception pertainingto therevision, moreover, seems to have been con-nected not with the Polish Act but with Kromy.Stasov assigned Musorgsky's decision to endthe opera with it to the winter of 1870-71.43And there is reasonto believe it was written, orat least sketched, before the Polish Act wascompleted. Some more chronologyis called forat this point.We have seen that the first scene of the PolishAct (Marina'sboudoir)was composed immedi-ately after the rejection-it was completed 10April 1871-and that Musorgsky then em-

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barkeddirectly on the Fountain Scene. But thenext recordeddate of completion (10September1871) was not the Fountain, but the revisedTerem Scene, on which Musorgskywas at workduring August (aswe know from aletter to Sta-sov).The next scene to which he turned was theCell Scene, a small task that took him onlythree days to complete: the revised full score,minus Pimen's narrativeand with the offstagechoruses, bears the date 13 September 1871.The next dated score is that of the FountainScene at last, completed on 14 December1871-a full three months later.Once again there is lost time-and a lostmanuscript, too--to account for.No autographvocal score of the KromyScene survives. But inthe same letter that gave Stasov the news aboutthe Cell Scene revisions (11 September1871),Musorgsky enthusiastically announces that hewas "planning the tramp scene: novelty uponnovelty / novelty of novelties-tremendouslypleasing."44So that is where Kromyfit in: mid-Septemberto (say)November 1871, if we allowtwo months for its completion in vocal score.That he waited till last to finish the FountainScene may be taken as an additional confirma-tion that he was basingit on apriordraft,as Sta-sov maintained. Or perhapsit was simply thescene that interested him least.

One can be sure, though, that it was Kromy hatinterested him most. This scene took Mu-sorgsky further from Pushkin than anythingelse in the revision. Itsconceptualsourcecanbefound neither in Pushkin's play nor inPushkin's factual source,Karamzin'sHistory.Itis to be found in the writings of Musorgsky'scontemporary Nikolai Kostomarov, the veryone (naturallyenough)who, in a remarkmuchpublicized by Stasov, called the operaa "pageofhistory."45Kostomarov was aneo-populistwho"insisted that the simple people rather thantsars were the propersubject of the true histo-rian."46The incorporationinto Boris Godunovof this view of the people, as an active historicalforce rather than an obtusely passive bystander,altered the fundamental conception of the operaand went directly counter to the ideological anddramaturgical thrust of the scene it replaced.47The crowd is now anything but "bouffe," andneither is the genre of the music it sings.

Instead of the realistic, Pushkin-derivedproseof the recitativeof St.Basil's,we now havea frankly "operatic"text put together by Mu-sorgskyhimself with help from Stasovandafewothers. It consists of what amounts to sevenlarge-scale, self-contained "numbers" linkedoccasionally byshortsnatchesof the choraldec-lamation that had formerly been the standardprocedure.It may seem at first ironic or evenparadoxical orMusorgskyto have soughtto de-pict the crowd in active, quasi-anarchisticre-volt bymeans of music so much more "orderly"than before. But this orderliness androundnessof form served the same "tragic"elevation ofscale and tone as we have encountered n the re-vised TeremScene,andavoided the miniaturis-tic, detail-heavy effect of the recitative style,which had evoked for early hearers an un-wantedimpression of comedyThe Kromyscenario consists of the followingmusically discrete sections:1.Orchestralntroduction, ntranceof the choruswith thecaptiveKhrushchevthroughig. 12).This stheonesectionwhich makesuse ofchoral ecitativein the older tyle.2. The "glorification" of Khrushchev (figs. 12-20).Strophicchoral song based on the folk song Chto neyastreb sovykalsia s perepiolushkoiu ("Did theHawkNot SoarAloftwith theQuail?").nterjectionsof proserecitative between the verses.3. Episode of the Yurodivy with the boys (figs. 20-25), transferred rom the St. Basil'sscene.4. Entrance of Varlaam and Missail (figs. 25-29).Strophicsong, based on the bylina O Vol'ge Mikule("OfVol'gaandMikula"),some interjectionsof cho-ralrecitative.5. "Revolutionary" chorus, Rakhodilas', razgu-lialas' udal' molodetskaia (figs. 29-53). Freelyhan-dled da capo form. Middle section based on the folksong Zaigrai, moia volynka ("Play, my bagpipes,play").6. The False Dmitry's procession (figs. 53-72), in-cluding hymns of the Jesuits,Dmitry'sproclamationand the crowd's glorification of the False Dmitry.The processionmusic is adapted romthe processionof the priests in the Temple Scene of Salammb6.7. The Yurodivy's ament (fig.72 to end),transferredfrom the ending of the St. Basil's scene.

Although the Kromy scene begins very muchin the style of the "bouffe" choral writing of256



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1869, prose recitative is quickly abandonedascarrierof the dramaticthread.Startingwith thesecond section, recitative doesnot even link thesections. This results in a certain episodic,static quality in the scene's progress,but alsolends it a frieze-like monumentality unlikeanything in the opera save the much simplerCoronation choruses. Such a scene is hardlymeant to play like spoken theater. It is closer topageant,even oratorio.Except for the opening section in whichKhrushchevis strungup, and the episodeof theYurodivy and the boys-which actually be-longed to the 1869 version, and hence derivesfrom Pushkin-action -in the Kromy scene islimited to entrances and exits. The characters,andin particularthe chorus,do not so much act(unless the directorcooks up some meretriciousstage business for them) as reporttheir feelingsand thoughts in broad, simple musical con-structions-"opera seria" answers"bouffe"The same desireto counteract the bouffonne-rie of opera dialogue may also underlie Mu-sorgsky'sdecision to bringVarlaamandMissailback as leaders of the revolt against Boris--astrange decision, for surely they, if anyone,know that the Pretenderis only Grishka Otre-piev in a plumed hat. On one level, their returncan be seen as merely anothermanifestation ofthe composer's habit of "economizing" in thecast of characters, already noticeable in theearlyversion of the opera(the policeman in theInn Scene, Pimen in the Death Scene).Butit hasa deeper significance, too. Asafiev recalled be-ing told by Stasov that Musorgskymeant Var-laam to be a "horrifyingandterrible" igure,thevery opposite of what he had been in the Inn.48And Musorgsky himself averredto Golenish-chev-Kutuzov that "Varlaam and Missail ...evoked laughter until they appeared in the'tramps' scene. Then everyone realized whatdangerousbeasts these seemingly funny peopleare."49 o even the comedy of the InnScene wasto be, as it were, retroactively neutralized.Through Musorgsky's departures from Pushkinin Kromy, Kostomarov may be seen polemiciz-ing with Karamzin. Characters who were ini-tially spoofed are "recapitulated" in a spirit ofgrim and threatening earnestness.Nor is this the only ironic recapitulation tobe found in the Kromy Scene. Two characters,Khrushchev and the Pretender, are hailed by the

crowd with shouts of "slava "asBoris had beenhailed in the Prologue.The first of these glori-fications is contemptuous and sarcastic; theirony is conventional. But when the Pretenderis hailed with offstage trumpets mimicking theCoronationfanfares,the effect is chilling. Onceagain,for all its apparentnew-foundautonomy,the crowd has been manipulated. Here theironic resonance goes beyond Boris to anotheroperathat had endedon a note ofpopularrejoic-ing, Glinka's A Life for the Tsar with its con-cluding Slavsia chorus. As the crowd blindlyfollows the "risen" Dmitry offstage and theirslavas die away, the ironic pathos becomes al-most unbearableas the lonely Yurodivy, eft be-hind amid fires andruin, croonshis prophecyofdarknessand woe.

The new monumentality of the Kromy Scene,its reliance on the kind of thing Serovhadcalled"musico-scenic frescos," and in particularitsheavy reliance on folk-song motives-all thiswas really the resurgence of musico-dramaticmeans the Dargomyzhskian reform had re-jected.It was Rimsky-Korsakovwho hadshownhow they could continue to beemployedwithina realist context in Pskovitianka, particularlyin the scene of the Pskov Council, the so-calledveche, which was composed while Musorgskywas between versions of Boris and at a timewhen the two composers were especiallyclose-living together, in fact. Musorgskywasparticularly impressed with the way Rimskyhad succeeded in giving the chorus the qualityof a collective character-an active participantin the drama-without debasingthe tone of theopera. "Korsinkahas concocted some magni-ficent history with the choruses in the veche-just as it should be," wrote Musorgsky to thePurgoldsisters,50exactly one month before hisown choruses were pronounced "bouffe" byStasov's hand-pickedaudience. During the fallof 1871, the Kromy Scene was composed by aMusorgsky who had daily contact with thesounds of Pskovitianka, then in the process oforchestration.s' Recalling Borodin's oft-citedcomment on the mutual benefit Musorgsky andRimsky derived from their brief cohabitation-"Modest has perfected Korsinka's recitative anddeclamational side, while the latter has elimi-nated.. . the incoherence of [Musorgsky's] for-

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mal construction, in a word, made Modest'sthings incomparably more musical"52-theKromyScene may be viewed as one of its mostnotable offspring.This is not the place fora detailedcritiqueofRimsky's veche;53 t will suffice to call atten-tion to a few of its salient aspects. Chief amongthem is the caretaken to maintain musical con-tinuity-"coherence in formal construction,"as Borodin put it-and this was saliently im-partedto Musorgsky.InKromy,once the initialepisode with Khrushchevis past, what choralrecitative there is takes its place againsta back-dropof leading melody elsewhere in the musi-cal texture. In section no. 4 (see above)this lead-ing melody is furnished by Varlaam's andMissail's song. In no. 6, when the chorus(led byVarlaam)threatens the Jesuits while they aresinging for help to the Virgin Mary,the orches-tra "organizes"the whole episode with an osti-nato bass melody resembling, if not actuallybasedon, a folk song (ex.4).This technique ofhangingrecitativeon a me-lodic thread,often symmetrical or else "devel-opmental,"and often of folk-lorecharacter,wasborroweddirectly fromPskovitianka. Ithas lit-tle precedent in the first Boris, but pervadesRimsky's operafrom the very openingscene, inwhich agame of catch for the chorusof maidensis accompanied by a quite elaborateorchestralfantasyon an eighth-note ostinato theme whichis neversungon stage,butwhich is so fully real-ized in the orchestraas to be performable n itsown right. Therefore some form of the tech-nique is used in many scenes, notably in theveche.54

Musorgskyhad tried this trick once or twicein the earlier Boris(e.g.,Grishka's nterrogationof the Hostess in the Inn Scene while Varlaamsings his second song, or Boris'sdeath agoniesagainsta chorusof monks), but hademployeditstrictly "empirically."That is, he used it whenthe specific stagesituation called forit, never el-evating it, as Rimsky had, into an abstract con-structive device. More typical of Musorgsky'searlier procedurewas the opening of the CellScene. The tortuous viola figurerunningin six-teenth notes accompanies Pimen's writing, butnot his singing. It comes to an end the momenthe openshis mouth, and thereafter(with the ex-ception of the climax at the end of the openingmonologue) is confined to filling the gaps be-tween his phrases. When Pimen sings, the or-

chestra is reduced to a melodically neutralpunctuation, as it is formost of the Innand(un-revised)Terem Scenes as well.In the second Boris, the Rimskian device oforganizing and unifying recitative scenes bymeans of a continuous andinternally coherentorchestral fabric went beyond Kromy: it alsomotivated the famous chiming clock in theTerem Scene. Forthe clock's mechanical whirrand clang provided an ideal formalizing back-dropto set off Boris's freeparlando, fixing andintensifying the emotion through an external-ized musical structure-however minimal-discrete and differentiatedfrom what had pre-ceded it, and hence the more memorablein itsgeneralized impression.55 ndeed,a comparisonof the 1869versions of both Teremmonologueswith their 1871 counterpartswill illustrate thispoint perhapsbetter than anything else in therevision. Whatin the secondversion are two to-tally distinct, indeedcontrastingimpressions-the noble "arioso"based on a broadmelody outof Salammba vs. the melodramatic hallucina-tion with the clock, the two sharingno musicalmaterial whatever-were originally a pair ofvery similar recitatives, quite undifferentiatedin musical means. The accompaniments toboth had been woven out of a common fund ofleitmotives (upto the moment of the hallucina-tion, at any rate)and were thus to an extent lit-erally interchangeable; moreover, because oftheir leitmotive base, the two monologuesshared material with their surrounding pas-sages as well, and thus tended to fade a bit intothe musical woodwork. The merits of the twoconceptions could be debatedat length; all thatis intended here is to show how fundamentallyanddeliberately they differ.

To returnto Kromy: he scene shows its kinshipwith Rimsky's veche also in its new way oftreating folk material. The two songs in the1869 Boris had been handled with true kuch-kist-realist circumspection-both the Corona-tion slava and Varlaam's second song56 repre-sent actual singing in the course of the action.They frame the action with elements of genre,of local color. The three folk songs in Kromy,onthe other hand, are the action at the pointswhere they occur,.s7And in the case of at leastone of them, actual singing is not the object of"depiction,"but the distilled essence of a mood.

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CZERNIKOZOSKI ND LAWICKIN J. I - i J J

-.-30Vir- go ju- va, ju- va ser-VARLAAM

Krep- che via- zhi Da pre- se-CHORUS

vos tu- os. Sanc- tis- si- ma Vir- go ju- va,

-chot- sia ma- ni- e dla- nei Da ot-- ff

Gai- da

ju va Ser vos tu- os, Sanc- tis- si- ma,

ri- net-sia po- moshch' des ni- tsy

Gai- da, na o-si- nu

Jfp fp /P p ifF

mow

______ _sgas- , _

Example 4: Boris Godunov, pp. 408-09.259

RICHARDTARUSKIMusorgskyMusorgsky



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The first of them is the mocking glorificationof Khrushchev.It is precisely the kind of thingMusorgsky would have set to a bold, "bouffe"recitative in the first Boris. Ifwe areto believeGolenishchev-Kutuzov's memoirs (Sovietwrit-ersunderstandablyprefernot to), this veryman-nered, ritualized expression of so sophisticatedan emotion as sarcasm was later something ofan embarrassmentto the composer.58Varlaam'sand Missail's rabble-rousing ong,which incites the crowd to the riot expressedmusically in the "revolutionary"chorus,paral-lels, in means and effect, the conclusion ofRimsky-Korsakov's veche, and was unques-tionably modelled upon it. The relationshipbe-tween Rimsky's scene andMusorgsky'sis sug-gested not only by the former's chronologicalantecedence, but also by the fact that the use offolk song was somewhat better motivatedthere. In Mey's Pskovitianka, a band of muti-neers call for a formalsong of farewell to Pskov.The folk song that follows in Rimsky's setting,therefore, is one that would have been sungeven werethe playpresentedin its original, spo-ken form, andhence conformswholly to kuch-kist standardsof "organic"relationship to theaction. There is no comparable preparationofVarlaam'sand Missail's song, though in its in-exorablestrophic unfolding (abettedby orches-trationof steadily mounting sonority) t haspre-cisely the same function as in Pskovitianka. Itsymbolizes the sweeping, spontaneous spreadof an idea throughthe populace,in this case re-venge upon Boris and the acceptance of theFalse Dmitry as rightful Tsar.The deploymentof forces in Boris is the reverse ofthat found inRimsky's scene: in Pskovitianka the folk songis sung by a chorusof mutineers punctuated byrecitative ejaculations by the principals,whereas in Kromy,the folk song is sung by thetwo soloists and the interjections of recitativecome from the chorus. But so characteristicisthe texture, and so unlike anything else in Mu-sorgsky's work, that its conceptual derivationfrom Rimsky's veche is clear.The most radical use of folk song in theKromy Scene, however, is the "revolutionary"chorus, Razkhodilas', razgulialas'.59 This cho-rus does not represent the crowd in the act ofsinging, but in actual, spontaneous revolt. Theuse of so formal a set piece for such a purpose isas far from the dramaturgical principles that

ruled the firstBoris as can be imagined. Linger-ing kuchkist scruples can be perceived in theway Musorgsky fragmentsthe chorus into sec-tions so as to avoid the static "monolithic" ef-fect so frequentlyderided n Cui'sreviewsofop-eras by Tchaikovsky and Serov.60 But aconventionally conceived "chorus" t nonethe-less remains. It carriesno overt "action," butfunctions dramaturgicallyas an "aria"-and ada capo ariaat that The use of folk song in thistype of formal context also had antecedents inPskovitianka, particularly the act I love duet.When Rimsky's operawas performed n 1873,as a matterof fact, the composerwas rebukedbyCui for using a folk song to express "personal"emotions.61No such stricture could be appliedto Musorgsky'schorus,however: its sentimentis entirely andproperlycollective. But the char-acterization of the crowd is monolithic-a sin-gle collective personagegivingvoice to a single,unanimous collective sentiment, rather han anunruly, internally divided collection of "types."While the crowd's unanimity is not unmoti-vated, this chorus (along with the revisedTerem monologue) represents the clearest re-treat from kuchkist realism in the interest ofmonumentality, of aesthetic distance-in aword, of "tragedy."

VIf one of the traits of the extremist realism towhich Musorgskyadhered n the 1860s was pet-tiness of scale and the resulting debasementoftone, another was casualness of overall form.This was a point of principle. "Formlessness,"as pre-eminently exemplified by The StoneGuest, was one of the great kuchkist shibbo-leths. Stasov, who reveredDargomyzhsky for"destroyingall conventional rules and forms"for the sake of truth to life,62 could praiseWagnerand even Serovto the extent that theysharedthe "generalaspirationto formlessness"that characterized"all the latest and best musicof ourtime."63Crudelyconstrued,formlessnessmeant simply the avoidance of academic"forms." More subtly understood, it meant thewhole realist value system which emphasizedthe piquancy of the individual moment over thecoherence of the whole in artwork of all media.

To the committed realist, then, a whole wassimply a sum of parts. And as we have seen, the1869 Boris exemplified this view all too clearly260



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posed scenes, in fact, their role is minimal.Rangoni, for example, has only the most per-functory identifying theme (adescendingchro-matic scale), and Marinahas none at all. In re-vising the Terem Scene, moreover,Musorgskyso attenuated the occurrences ofleitmotives as-sociated with the title characterthat they tendto lose their significance as such altogether.One of the most important ones, the theme onwhich the concluding monologue had beenbased (see ex. 7 in part1 of this essay)was actu-ally eliminated from the Terem Scene, so thatwhen it appears n the Death Scene as a partofthe farewell to the Tsarevich("Donot askhow Iattained the throne"[Ne sprashivai,kakim pu-tiom ia tsarstvo priobriol]), t is no longer a re-currence,and hence no leitmotif.This lessened reliance on leitmotives hasbeen noted before, and is usually cited as evi-dence of disaffection fromWagnerianmethods.But that is an unwarrantedextrapolation,sincethere is no reason to call the use of leitmotivesin the earlier Boris Wagnerianto begin with:models in The Stone Guest and particularly nCui's William Ratcliff were far closer tohand.65What the suppressionof the Borismotives actu-ally suggests is that Musorgskywas sensitive totheir "levelling" propensity, which made for asameness amongBoris's utterancesthat was es-pecially undesirablein the Teremmonologues.A further incentive toward curtailing theBoris motives may perhaps be found in thegreatly expandedrole the Dmitry motive playsin the revised version, a role so spectacularlyspotlit that awish to suppress ts competitorsisplausible. To be sure, the motive's enhancedprominencewas partlya mereby-productof thePretender's much greater presence in the re-vised opera. (He now appearedin two morescenes than before,for a total of four to Boris'sthree.)But a carefulcomparisonof the progressand deployment of the Dmitry motive in thetwo versions will show that the situation wasnot that simple, that the difference affectednotonly the portrayalof the Pretender but that ofBoris as well, and that there may be some betterexplanations for some of the deletions from the1869 score than have hitherto been offered inthe literature.In our discussion of the 1869 Boris we em-phasized the dual nature of the Dmitry theme:that it shifted in reference between the mur-

deredTsarevich and the Pretender,and that theambiguities in its treatment were animportantcontributor to the portrayalof Boris'spsycho-logical deterioration. All of this remains true ofthe revisedversion as well, with one telling andimmensely clarifying refinement: in the newversion the motive refers only to the Pre-tender-except in Boris's derangedmind. Theconsistency with which certainotherwise inex-plicable, even paradoxical alterations realizethis changeleaves no doubt as to its intentional-ity.Cuts and revisions in the Cell Scene, theTeremSceneandthe Death Scene all contributeto the newly clarifiedsignificanceofthe leitmo-tif. With Pimen's narrative ofthe murderatUg-lich gone, the first appearanceof the motivenow coincides with Grigory'sfirst glimmer ofambition, at Pimen's line, "Hewould have beenyour age,andwould be reigning."The leitmotifcomes in at the last word,while in Musorgsky'stypically detailed stage direction, "Grigoryma-jestically draws himself to his full height, then,with feigned humility, settles down again."Thus an unmistakable bond is forgedbetweenthe leitmotif and the Pretender'sprogress;theslain Tsarevich is no longer directly involvedwith it. The motive recursonly once in the re-vised Cell Scene, shortly before the end, whenGrigory hangs back at the door while Pimengoes off to Matins, anduttershis threatto Boris.Although mention is made in this speech of thedead Tsarevich, its true significance is the for-mal launching, as it were, of the Pretender'sca-reer. The link forgedhere between the opera'smain leitmotif and the progress of the FalseDmitry is amply reinforced,of course, by theInn Scene that immediately follows.Now the clarification of the Dmitry mo-tive's significance (particularly,as we shall see,in light of the role it will play in the revisedTerem)might alreadybe deemedsufficientmo-tivation for cutting Pimen's narrative,howeverregrettableor inexplicable the cut may now ap-pear to us, who revere Musorgsky and hisworks. And I believe it in fact to have been themain reason, especially in view of the fact thatcutting the narrative was the very next step Mu-sorgsky took after revising the Terem Scene.66But another reason may be adduced as well: thefailure of Cui's William Ratcliff, whose drama-turgical progress was fatally impeded by a

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plethora of narratives in place of directly por-trayed action. Every critic fixed upon thisflaw,67and,indeed, anyone who sat throughtheopera would have found it trying. Now whileMusorgsky did referto the removal of Pimen'snarrative as an "abbreviation" n his reporttoStasov,68 bbreviationas such couldhardlyhavebeen his aim, considering how much that wasdramaturgicallyunessential was added(partic-ularly to the Terem Scene)in the courseof revi-sion. So what led him to Pimen'snarrativemusthave been the fact that it contained two refer-ences to the infant Dmitry throughthe motivehe now wanted to refocus exclusively on thePretender.Indeed,comparisonof the use of themotive in the two versions of the Terem Scenewill confirm our hypothesis that the main ob-jective in dropping he narrativewas to getridofits associations with the slain Tsarevich.In the 1869 version of the Terem Scene, theDmitry motive had figuredveryprominently.Itis first heard at the very end of Boris's centralmonologue in unambiguous reference to theslain Tsarevich. Thereafter, it sounds repeat-edly and with shifting significance duringtheexchange with Shuisky, as we have noted

above. In the 1871 version its use is sharplycur-tailed. It is heard only twice, and is completelyavoidedin Boris'srewrittenpart.The firstrefer-ence now correspondsto what had beenthe sec-ond occurrence of the motive in 1869: the cli-mactic moment when Shuisky reveals that thePretenderis calling himself the risen Dmitry,and plants the thought for the first time inBoris'smind that it might be true. The only re-maining use of the motive comes in Shuisky'snarrativeof the events at Uglich, where in placeof the very prominentdisplaythe motive hadre-ceived in 1869 (cf.ex. 12 in part I),we get only acouple of quiet, veiled allusions, in which themotive appears n a kind of inchoate state, iden-tifiable byits major-sixth nitium, but minus itsfalling-fourth cadence (ex. 5). The ambiguity ofthe reference,in which the motive is insinuatedby Shuisky but never quite sung by him, sug-gests that a hint is being dropped: hat it is leftfor Boris (andthe audience)to draw the conclu-sion.And draw it he does. The references to theDmitry theme in the Death Scene are fraughtwith anunbearable rony.When it is firstheard,in the Boyar's chorus, it refersunambiguously

SHUISKYAit-9-a __k.Ia 0?".i.._I-

No det- skii lk tsa- re- vi- cha Byl sve- tel, chist i ia- sen;

1

Glu- bo- ka- ia, strash- na- ia zi- ia- la ra- na; A na u-stakh e

rr rr

But the Tsarevich'schildishfacewas bright,pure,andclear; he woundgapeddeepandfearful ..Example5: BorisGodunov,pp.220-21.

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of the Polish Act and Kromy, to have allowedthe Dmitry motive to retain its formerdoublemeaning would practically have amounted toUltramontane propaganda.From the double perspective of ideological up-datingandelevation of tone it has beenpossibleto account forvirtually all aspectsof the revisedBoris-in particular, the deletions from the1869 score, as well as the additions. The one cutwhich one is willing to believe Musorgskymade primarilyin the interests ofdramaticpac-ing was Shchelkalov's monologue (the readingof the Tsar's ukase to the assembled boyers)atthe beginning of the Death Scene. Its contentmerely recapitulatesinformationalready amil-iar to the audience, and it thereforedelays theaction to no good purposesave the weaving of anew concatenation of significant leitmotives--Shchelkalov'sown, Boris's,the Pretender's--af-ter the fashion of the two discardedmonologuesfrom the Terem Scene. It was a technique withwhich Musorgskywas evidently disenchanted.Yet even here additional, aesthetically moresubstantial reasons could be adduced f desired.One is the nature of the vocal writing. Kuchkistrecitative at its most ascetic, it amounts, formost of the monologue's duration, to no morethan a "lection tone" that risesbychromaticde-grees through an octave and more. It was thekind of thing even his fellow kuchkists had be-gun to tire of in Musorgsky from the time ofMarriage."One cannot acknowledgeas a musi-cal thought a multitude of repeatednotes takenfrom the components of this or that chord,"carpedCui about the Cell Scene, farless an of-fenderin this respectthan Shchelkalov's mono-logue.7 The latter is a prime example of whatBorodincalled Musorgsky's"clumsy originaliz-ing (koriavoe original'nichanie)"72at its mostextreme, particularlyin view ot the bizarrehar-monic sequence that underlies the chromaticascent of this un-melodic recitative. Itis easy toimagine a passage like this being receivedwithcondescension andreproofat kuchkist soirees,dismissed, like Marriage,as a "curiosity"and a"chosemanquie."73The state of the sources, moreover, suggeststhat the readingof the ukase had alreadybeencut from the 1869 version of the operaby thetime Musorgsky had the full score bound for

submission to the Theaters Committee. Thepagination of the full score is unaffectedby thisexcision (unlike those of the end of the Nov-odevichy scene or of St.Basil's,which left gaps).Thus this particular deletion is not, properlyspeaking, part of the 1871 revision at all. It isalso not insignificant that Lamm should havemade his serendipitous discovery of the mono-logue among Stasov's papersat the Public Li-braryin Leningrad.For Stasov, who could al-ways be counted on to praise and cherishMusorgsky'swildest productions,had also beenthe recipientof the Marriageautographaftertherest of the kuchka had rejectedthat most aber-rant of all Musorgsky'schildren.

VIWe have come to the end of our lengthy anddiscursiveinvestigation of the revision of BorisGodunov, but something is lacking. If we aretomaintain that the version Musorgskymade in1871, orchestrated in 1872, and published in1874 representshis intentions and not his con-cessions; if we are to maintain that the revisionwas prompted by fundamental aesthetic andideological reconsiderations and not by mereconsiderations of expedience; if, finally, we areto maintain that the revisedBoris is the authen-tic masterpiece and the earlier version but adocument of aparticularmoment in the historyof Russian operaand of its composer'screativedevelopment-then we are missing some cor-roboration from the composer, some explicitrather than merely circumstantial indicationthat he shared our view.Such a document exists. InpresentingStasovwith the autographof Marriageas a forty-ninthbirthdaypresent on 2 January1873, Musorgskywrote a warmly moving dedicatoryepistle fromwhich we quote in part:Howshall onepleasea dearone?Theanswer omeswithouttheslightesthesitation,as it does oall hot-heads:givehim ofyourself.Andso am Idoing.Takemy youthful aboron Gogol'sMarriage,ook uponthese experiments in musical speech, comparethemwith Boris, set 1868 alongside 1871, andyou will seethat I am giving you myself irrevocably.74

Implicit in Musorgsky's comparison of 1868and 1871 (and not 1869) is his judgement of thefirst Boris, a judgement quite in accordancewith the Stasovian assessment with which we265

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opened ourinvestigation. As the composernowsaw it, the first Borisrepresentedthat last stageof his apprenticeship.It was only as a result ofrevisions taken after,but not because of, its re-jection, that the operaachieved what his friendcalled "its completed form, [as]one of the great-est works not only of Russian but of all Euro-peanart."That completedformpossesses anin-tegrity of structure,style, andsignificance suchas the earlier version had notably lacked. At-

tempts at second-guessing it run a serious riskof compromising this integrity. For it was thefruit of a thoroughcritical reassessment bornofan artistic maturity which the popular mageofMusorgsky as the Oblomov of music still un-justly denies him. The unabated rage to con-flate, on the otherhand,rests on no such seriouscritiquebut on a mass ofuncriticalassumptionsand reliance on positivistic scholar- -'shipoverartistic udgement.

APPENDIXFOLKTEXTSIN BORIS GODUNOV

Pushkin,ikeOstrovsky fterhim,wasfondof in-terpolatingongs nto hisplays.Sometimes, s inthecase of the Yurodivy'slament in Boris,he wrote thewordshimself,evidentlyexpecting tune to be im-provisednperformance.t other imes,as nactIIofTheStoneGuest,he wouldsimply ell acharacterosing without specifyingwhat. On still other occa-sions he wouldcall foraspecific ongbytitle or nci-pit.There s a famous nstanceof this last device nBoris Godunov:Varlaam's ong in the InnScene.It isusually thought that Varlaam sings two songs. Thefirst indication, after the wandering monks drink forthe first time, reads: "Varlaam strikes up a song: 'AsIt Was in the Town of Kazan' " (Kak vo gorode bylovo Kazani). A page later, as he begins to get drunk,Pushkin indicates: "He drinks and sings: 'The YoungMonk Was Tonsured' " (Molodoi chernets postrig-sia). Actually, though, these are the first and secondlines of a single song. Pushkin's indications seem tocall for a typical piece of stage business: Varlaamstrikes up a song, but is distracted by Grigory's re-fusal to join him in drinking. After a brief argument,he waves Grigory away in disgust, turns his attentionto his drink, and takes up his song where he left off.The text of the songPushkinmeantVarlaam osing was first published in 1780 by Nikolai Novikovin his famous Pesennik (Songbook), and was firstidentified as Pushkin's source by V. I. Chernyshev in1907. It runs as follows (the italicized line is a refrainthat is to be sung after each line, adapted to the re-spective concluding words):

Kakvo gorodebylovo Kazani,Zduninai, nai, nai vo Kazani,Molodoi chernetspostrigsia,Zakhotelos'chernetsupoguliati,Chto za te li za sviatyezavorota,Zavor6tamibesedushkasidela,Kakvo toi li vo besedestary baby;Uzh kak tut chernets ne vzglianet,Chernechishcheklabuchishcheprinakhlupil.Kakvo gorodebylovo Kazani...[firstfive lines, plus refrains,repeat]Kak vo toi li vo besedemoloditsy;

Uzh kak tut chemets privzglianet,Chernechishche klabuchishchepripodnimaet.Kakvo gorode ..Kakvo toi li vo besedekrasnydevki,Uzh kak tut chernets privzglianet,Chernechishcheklabuchishche doloi sbrosit,Ty sgorimoia skuchnaiakel'ia,Propadi y moe chernoeplat'e,Uzh kakpolno mne dobromolodtsuspasat'siaNe pora1'mne dobrumolodtsuzhenit'sia,Chto za dushechke nakrasnoi na devitse.75As once it was in Kazan own,Hey,hey, n Kazanown,A young monk got himself shorn,But then he wantedto live it up,What were the holy gatesto him?Foroutside the gatesthere was an arbor,And in this arborwere some old women.Ohyou can bet our monk didn'tlook in there,Butshut his monk's cowl tightAs once it was in Kazan own ...And in this arborwere some youngbrides.Andyou can bet our monk lookedrightinAndliftedhis monk's cowl upjustabitAs once it was in Kazan own ...And in this arborweresome prettyyoungmaids,Andyou can bet our monk lookedrightinAndthrew his monk'scowl downon the ground."Ohburnup, drabcell of mineOhget lost, black robe of mineOh how tiredIam of salvation,sweet youth that IamIsn't it time Igot married, weet youth that Iam,To one of these fine sweet prettyyoungmaids?"

This is really a song Varlaam would sing. As Cherny-shev remarks, "An exuberant song about a monkwho likes carousing with pretty girls, of course, goesmuch better with Pushkin's Varlaam than a heroicsong about the taking of Kazan. What does he careaboutKazan?"76s a matterof fact, performersfPushkin's play can even interpolate the song with itsauthentic tune, for this was published (as Pushkinundoubtedly knew) in the collection of Lvov and

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Pratsch, Sobranie narodnykh russkikh pesen s ikhgolosami (1790) as no. 90, in the section devoted toround dances (ex. 7).Now Stasov, who researched this song for Mu-sorgsky and missed this source, certainly knewLvov-Pratsch.He mayhave beenmisled, in checkingits table of contents, by the garbled irst word (Chtoin place of Kak).But more likely he merely assumedthat any song with Kazan n the title would belongtothe large and noble family of historical songs aboutIvan the Terrible's conquest of the Tatarcapital in1552, despite the obvious fact that if Varlaam hadbeen with Ivan on this campaign he would have tohave been much older than the age of fifty, which isthe age Grigory ascribes to him on faking Boris'sedict later in the scene.About half a dozen songs on the conquest of Kazanhad been published by December 1868, when StasovgaveMusorgskythe text he had chosen forBoris.77nhis necrology of 1881 Stasov cited as his source thefamous collection of Kirsha Danilov, Drevnie ros-siiskie stikhotvoreniia, first published in 1818,which does in fact contain ahistorical songabout Ka-zan.78That was not the song he gave Musorgsky,however. Instead, he chose one that had been takendown by the pochvennik poet (and Serov's bestfriend)Apollon Grigorievfrom the singingof agypsysingerin Moscow. Grigoriev hen imparted his songto Pavel Yakushkin, who published it in 1860 in thejournal Otechestvennye zapiski (andlater the sameyearin book form).79But this still was not Stasov's source. FromMu-sorgsky's scrupulous notation in the autographli-bretto,we know that the book Stasovgavehim was asmall and relatively little-known collection adaptedfor children by Ivan Khudiakov (1842-76) entitledSbornik velikorusskikh narodnykh istoricheskikhpesen, published in Moscow toward the end of1860.8o n figure 1, Khudiakov'stext (which he tookfrom Yakushkin's publication in Otechestvennyezapiski, as a footnote acknowledges) is set side byside with Musorgsky's song text forcomparison.Thefirst four lines of Khudiakov's ext, a sort of introduc-tion,81 were omitted by Musorgsky. He replacedthem with five of his own, which linked the bodyofthe song to Pushkin's incipit, Kakvo gorode bylo vo

Kazani. Thereafter,many small changes were madein the wordingand the scansion so as to adaptto Mu-sorgsky's melody, but the only real departurewas athree-line interpolation toward the end. (Fora trans-lation, see any libretto.)Since Stasov did not know the source of Pushkin'sincipits, neither he nor Musorgsky knew that thenext time Varlaamsang he was merely continuingthe same songas before.So in the operaVarlaamhas asecond song. The text, about a broken-downtramp,has so far eluded identification, and may have beeneither adopted directly from oral tradition or elseeven invented by the composer. The music wasadaptedfrom a wedding song Rimsky-Korsakovhadtaken down from the singing of his mother andwould publish later as no. 71 in his One HundredRussian FolkSongsof 1877: "The BellsWereRingingin Novgorod" (Zvonili zvony v Novgorode).82In his necrology, Stasov claimed that the threefolksongs that were interpolated by Musorgsky ntothe second version of Boris-the Hostess's Song ofthe Drake, the Nanny's Song of the Gnat, and theTsarevich's "Clapping Game"--were all "taken byMusorgskyfrom the collection of Shein, which Ihadlearned about not long before" the period of revi-sion.83He meant Pavel Vasilievich Shein'shuge col-lection, Russkie narodnye pesni, published in eightinstallments between 1868and 1870in the quarterlyChteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve Istorii iDrevnosti Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universi-tete ("PapersRead n the ImperialSociety of RussianHistory and Antiquities at Moscow University"),and reissued in book form in 1870, just before Mu-sorgsky's revisions got under way. The collection isbetter known in its revised and still furtherexpandedsecond edition, Velikoruss v svoikh pesniakh, ob-riadakh, obychaiakh (The Great-Russian in HisSongs, Rites, and Customs, St. Petersburg, 1898).Since Stasov's citation of the source for Varlaam'ssong has proved incorrect, it is surprisingthat thislatter assertion of his had never been put to the test,but has been repeated endlessly and uncritically inall subsequent literature. As it turns out, some cor-rection is againrequired.Shein's 1870 collection contained 871 songs plusmany variants, arranged by category. The first

r F m-Chto vo go- ro- de bylo vo Ka- za ne zdu-ni- nai,__ nai,- nai,_- vo.. Ka- za- ne.

"-" ' L i f I- " iop oI p P 0 opi

Example 7: Ivan [i.e., Johann Gottfried] Pratsch, Sobranie russkikh narodnykh pesen s ikh golosami(2nd expanded end., St. Petersburg, 1806), vol. II,part 3 (Pesni khorovodnye), no. 4 (p. 58).267

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"The Taking of Kazan" (Ivan Khudiakov, Sbornikvelikorusskikh narodnykh pesen [Moscow, 1860],pp. 112-13).VziatieKazaniUzh vy liudi li, vy liudi starodavnyeMolodye molodtsy poslushaite,Esche ia vam rasskazhuprotsarevyi propokhod,Progroznatsaria IvanaVasil'evicha.

On podkhodompodkhodilpodKazan'gorodok,A podkopy podkopalpod Kazankupodreku.Chto tataryzhe po gorodu pokhazhivali,Chto groznatsariaIvanaVasil'evichapoddraznivali.Chto i tut-to nas grozentsar'prikruchinilsia,On povesil buinu golovu na pravoeplecho,Utupil on iasny ochi vo syru-mat'zemliu,On velel-li gosudar' sar'pushkarei szyvat',Pushkareisozyvat', zazhigal'shchikov,on velel sudar'skorokaznit', skoroveshati.Ne uspel molodoi pushkar'slovo vymolvit',... ,.Vosku iarogosvecha zateplilasia, --.--.. "Chto i s porokhombochkazagorelasia,

Chto pobilo tatar' soroktysiachei i tri tysiachi.

BorisGodunov:Varlaam'sSong (act I, sc. ii).

Kakvo gorodebylo vo Kazani,Groznyitsar'pirovalda veselilsia.On tatareibyl neshchadno,Chto-b m bylo dane povadnoVdol'po Rusiguliat'.Tsar'podkhodompodkhodil,da,podKazan'gorodok,Onpodkopypodkopal,da, podKazankureku.Kak atare, to, po gorodupokhazhivaiut,Na tsariaIvana, o, pogliadyvaiut,Zli tataroveGroznyi tsar',to, zakruchinilsia,Onpovesil golovushkona pravoe plecho.Uzh kak stal tsar'pushkareiszyvat',Pushkareivse zazhigal'shchikov.

- Zadymilasiasvechka vosku iarova,--Podkhodilmolodoi pushkar', o k bochechke.A i s porokhomto bochkazakruzhilasia.Oi k podkopampokatilasia,dai khlopnula.Zavopili,zagaldilizli tatarove,Blagimmatom zalivalisia.Poleglotataroveit'mat'mushchia,Polegloikh soroktysiachei i tri tysiachi.

Tak, to, vo gorodebylo, vo KazaniFigure 1

category,an unprecedentedassemblage of 122 chil-dren's songs, was the one on which Musorgskychiefly drew for the songs at the beginning of theTerem Scene. But there is no one-to-one correspon-dencebetweenanyof the songsin Sheinandthe textsin the libretto.Rather, he composerfreelyconflatedand embroidered, making reconstruction of hissources a difficult task. In figure 2, the text of theTsarevich's "ClappingGame" is set alongside thesongsfromSheinon which it drew. No translation soffered, for the texts are largely nonsense and"mouth music," and the object of comparison ismerely verbal correspondence.For an idea of whatthese nursery rhymes are about, any translation ofthe libretto will do (Lloyd-Jones'ss perhaps he mostfaithful).It will be seen that Musorgskydrewupon at leasteight differentsongs in Sheinto supplythe text of theClappingGame.As children'ssongno. 44, Turu, urupetushok, is used the most, andas most of it is used,one might call it the basic source. And sure enough,that is the title by which Stasov referred o the Clap-ping Game in the necrology.The various Shein textsare linked by connective lines of Musorgsky'spre-sumable invention, and substitutions and minor al-terations in word form and word order are the rule

rather than the exception. Still, it is fair to say thatthe text of the ClappingGame came fromShein.One cannot say as much of the other two songs,however. Three lines from the Nanny's Song of theGnat may be related to dance song no. 40 in Shein,which figures also in the ClappingGame (see figure2):Nanny's Songline 1:Kakkomardrovarubil,2:Komarvodu nosil.16:RebrakomaruslomaloShein, Dance SongNo. 40line 1l:Tarakanrovarubil,3:Komarvodu vozil8:Rebrapolomala

And a couple of other lines are to be found scatteredelsewhere in Shein, to wit:Nanny's Songline 3:Klopikmesto mesil24:Zhivotochek nadorvalSheinKlopbaniushkutopil (Children'sSongno. 69,line 10)Zhivot nadorvali(Children'sSongno. 71, line 9)

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Legend: I= Section I,Detskie pesni (Children'sSongs)mI Section mI,Pliasovye (DanceSongs)The numberfollowing the colon designatesthe songwithin a section and that following the slash,the lines

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