Blood-Warm

In 1872 Russian Composer Modest Mussorgsky began putting together a notebook entitled "Khovanchina; a People's Musical Drama--Materials." It was the biggest project of his career: a historical opera dealing with the abortive revolt of the feudal Princes Khovansky and their followers (Khovanchina) against the Westernizing influences of Peter the Great's court.

Mussorgsky's notebook did not fatten very quickly. Poverty, a growing fondness for vodka, other musical chores, and the necessity of supporting himself by work as a government office drudge kept distracting him. When he died in 1881 at the age of 42 there were still some patches of the opera left undone. His friend Rimsky-Korsakov finished the work, and the opera had its official premiere in St. Petersburg in 1911, began to get scattered performances outside of Russia.

Last week the golden curtain at Man hattan's Metropolitan Opera House went up on Khovanchina for the first time. As the gloomy drama rolled along, at the lumbering pace of a sullen rhinoceros, the audience was sometimes confused by the Russian palace politics, put off by the arthritic English libretto. But gradually the glowing music, which had been expertly edited by able Conductor Emil Cooper, put them in a good mood.

"I want to do people," Mussorgsky wrote a friend--"big, without any paint or tinsel." Among the paint & tinsel he avoided were the fripperies of Italian and French opera with their wooden recitatives and stagy arias, and the prettied-up harmonies of such fellow Russians as Tchaikovsky. In Khovanchina, Mussorgsky came very close to his ideal of realistic singing speech.

Prince Ivan Khovansky, whose part Met Veteran Lawrence Tibbett acted better than he sang, took his music as well as his politics from the old Russia. His contingent of astrakhan-capped soldiers and gaily clad peasant followers carried him along on a swelling surge of music flavored by the Russian folk songs which Nationalist Mussorgsky loved so dearly. Mussorgsky mined the rich vein of Russian liturgical themes to back up the somber, icon-bearing Old Believers. Led by the young zealot Marfa (Rise Stevens) and the fervent patriarch Dossife (Jerome Hines), they sang the opera's most exciting music.

When the final curtain fell, with Ivan Khovansky murdered and his son Prince Andrei, zealot Marfa and the entire sect of Old Believers singing a resounding funeral dirge around a pyre they had built for themselves, first-nighters were still shaky on plot details. But critics and audience were agreed that they had been introduced to three hours of blood-Warm music which, with familiarity, might become as well liked as Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

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