The Slavic Soul

What an opera company chiefly needs to stage Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov is a big chorus and a basso who can sing Boris. Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera has had the chorus, but, for the last half a dozen years, no basso vocally and physically imposing enough to inspire a revival of the opera. Last week, with no less than two Borises on its roster, the Met revived the massive opera which, for half a century, has been the glory of the Russian soul and one of the operatic wonders of the world. Consensus of audience and critics: Boris Godunov is back to stay for a while.

Much of the impact of the performance was due to the rich sight and sound of the choral processions. Squads of choristers--representing peasants, monks and nobles --moved from monastery to Kremlin to forest, singing Mussorgsky's vibrant music and bearing assortments of 16th century crosses, banners, icons and double-headed axes. But the triumph of the evening was the Boris of imposing (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.) Canadian-born George London.*

London, 31, is a bass-baritone, and to those who remembered the majestic Boris of the late great Feodor Chaliapin, his voice seemed a bit light. But his singing of Mussorgsky's long lines of foreboding melody had a noble air, his English diction was clear and his acting--as the czar who has murdered his way to power--swept his listeners up in the dramatic story. He was surrounded by a topflight cast (standouts: Mezzo-Soprano Blanche The-bom, Basso Jerome Hines, Tenor Brian Sullivan), but it was London's night. He was called out for eleven curtain calls--to stand regally in character with furrowed brow--and the cares of a Slavic world still on his shoulders.

The Met's revival of Boris was also a triumph of a sort for Composer Modeste Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881). For the first time in history, the U.S. saw and heard Boris approximately as he wrote it. Mussorgsky lacked experience in orchestration; after he died, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov did a professional job of score, and scene-doctoring on the long (four hours) opera. It is Rimsky's revision which the world has come to know. But the Met mounted Mussorgsky's own version. Among other things, it meant that the opera had to end, not with the dramatic death of Boris, but with a lone idiot's lament for his country.

The Mussorgsky version was not as smoothly powerful as Rimsky's version, but it held the listeners' attention right up to midnight. Then, as Mussorgsky intended, the curtain came down on the prophetic lines:

Russia's sorrow is great Cry, cry, Russian land, Hungry people, cry . .

*Who will alternate in the role, in later performances, with Italy's Cesare Siepi.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.