Original "Boris"

Modeste Petrovich Moussorgsky's happiest moment came on March 16, 1881, when, in a St. Petersburg hospital, surrounded by strangers, Fate permitted him to die. For 46 years he had been beaten by life. His first love, and his last and real love had died. He had lost his devoted mother. He had a permanent quarrel with his brother. He had had financial collapse, humiliating work as a government clerk at small pay in the department of woods and forests--worst of all, lack of recognition for his music. Final blow: his life-child, the opera Boris Godonnov, tragic and powerful story of a guilty Tsar, a work loved by the people, rejected by the critics, had been taken out of the repertoire of the famed Marie Theatre and never again performed during his life. Drugs and cognac were no longer an escape from reality. Death was best. Moussorgsky died but Boris lived on, to furnish one of the strangest case histories in the literature of music. Composed in 1874, it was until last year known to the world only in a prettified version as unlike that of the original as if Murillo had painted over an El Greco, as if Tennyson had rewritten William Blake. Rimsky-Korsakov, good friend of Moussorgsky, composer of Sheherazade, La Coq d'Or and Sadko, professor and purist, had been the one to perform this doubtful service for Boris. He ironed out the harshnesses, modified the harmonies, polished the scoring. Moussorgsky's way of writing music, he said, "was the bumptiousness of the amateur." To revise it was an "unspeakable satisfaction." Condescendingly he added: "If the people are ever persuaded that the original is better than my version, they will put this aside and perform Boris from the original score." The Rimsky version became a model for opera houses of the world and the medium for Basso Chaliapin's incomparable Tsar. Then, last year. Professor Paul Lamm, working under the music section of the Russian State Publishing Department at Moscow, published a version "in accordance with the autographed manuscripts, including hitherto unpublished scenes, episodes, fragments, and variants"--the original Boris. In this form it was produced on the Soviet stage. Last week this edition was brought out by the Oxford University Press and announced for its first performance outside of Russia by Leopold Stokowski, enterprising maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra (see below). He plans performances in Philadelphia and Manhattan with the assistance of the Mendelssohn Choir and eminent soloists to be announced. Moussorgsky wrote in 1872: "While I was writing Boris, I was Boris." Revival for Boris thus meant resurrection for the "debauched, defeated" composer whose madness of yesterday is the modernity of today.