Road to nowhere
Michael Tanner
Khovanshchina Royal Opera House
It was an odd oversight, or possibly it was ignorance, which led Auden not to include Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina in his list of ‘anti-operas’, for it lacks to an extraordinary degree many of the chief constituents which people associate, and rightly, with opera, while even more conspicuously including, often seeming largely to consist of, elements which virtually defy operatic treatment. It may be unfair to describe it, as one eminent conductor did, as ‘Sarastro meets Gurnemanz when both of them are having an off day’, but one sees what he meant. A disproportionate number of the characters are sung by basses, and when they meet — and they do tend to run into one another surprisingly often — they discuss Russia’s destiny and related matters at great length, and usually not to any purpose. Indeed, the way in which successive scenes of the opera fail to get anywhere in itself constitutes a major form of originality, and relates this work most closely to Pelléas, with the difference that there the characters are mainly defined by their irresolution, whereas in Khovanshchina they are almost all ambitious politicians so much at loggerheads with one another in their outlooks that they can only quarrel and separate, or resort to violence, otheror self-directed. It’s appropriate that the final scene should be a mass suicide, religiously motivated. That seems to suggest that any gesture meant to alter the course of events is bound to fail, and that going up in smoke is the only decent path to follow.
It seems all the more odd that the Kirov production, the second opera in their short visit, should be old-fashioned to such an extreme degree. Whereas their Boris relies on suggestions, both in setting and in action, their Khovanshchina is a parody of a traditionalist’s demands on what opera production should be. That means of course lots of time-consuming set changes, so that the opera’s lack of flow is even more glaring. And what we see each time the curtain rises are cardboard castles, shaky flights of stairs, untrustworthy furniture. In this context I suppose it’s only natural that the singers should stomp around, gesticulate, adopt poses which bear no relationship to any behaviour one might encounter in life. And when you think that the whole point of Mussorgsky’s quiet revolution was to make the genre more realistic, if not to take the song out of singing, so that the audience could enter with utmost immediacy into the problems, eternal as they were and hence are, of living bearably in Russia if you’re not in power (not that it seems a lot of fun if you are), it is still stranger that the production team (it originated in 1960, but this ‘new stage version’ dates from 2000, and is by Yuri Alexandrov) should indulge in that kind of setting called ‘realistic’ but insistently drawing attention to its flimsy unreality. Mussorgsky didn’t make things easier for himself by reneging on some of the impressive advances of Boris Godunov, and supplying Khovanshchina with poorly motivated songs and dances, and furthermore writing music of conspicuous conventionality for them. The Persian slave girls’ dance for Prince Khovansky plumbs embarrassing depths.
Furthermore, though Mussorgsky’s interest was in the power politics of an unsympathetic crew, he had to find some way of plausibly bringing them together, and, in the words of Richard Taruskin, Mussorgskian-in-chief, ‘resorted to the most conventional and in this case blatantly anachronistic sort of operatic glue: romantic love’. The creation of Marfa, a kind of Donna Elvira figure, tirelessly turning up to spoil the fickle menfolk’s fun, also gave him the chance to write at length for a female voice. In this production Marfa’s music is quite gloriously sung by Olga Borodina, flooding the theatre with voluptuous warm tone while preaching asceticism. Borodina acts this role more convincingly than anything else I have seen her do, and she is less inclined to wild semaphoring than her colleagues. She has a formidable team of bigoted lechers to stand up to. The Khovanskys, father and son, are the grandly swaggering bass of Sergei Alexashkin and the lusty tenor of Vladimir Galuzin. Their deadly enemy Golitsyn was taken by the indisposed Alexei Steblianko, a fine singer who largely ran out of voice fairly early on. The hateful Boyar Shaklovity came across with vicious impact from Nikolai Putilin, and Dosifei, the leader of the Old Believers, Mussorgsky’s consummate study of religious zeal, horrifying at the same time as it is the only kind of religiousness that can command respect, was taken with staffswinging authority by Vladimir Vaneev, the Boris of two evenings before, showing how calculated his low-key Tsar had been.
The orchestra and chorus, thanks no doubt in large part to the urgings of Valery Gergiev, played and sang with stunning impact. One misses the sparse textures which Mussorgsky, had he lived to orchestrate more than a tiny part of the score, would have given it; and jibs at Shostakovich’s Soviet-style ending. Yet though it is an opera which often seems about to fall apart, it remains an intense fragmentary experience. Now the Kirov Opera should throw out this ludicrous production while maintaining their commitment to the work which at present they only do justice to half of.
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