With an opening night in the presence of Sergio Mattarella, President of the Republic, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, Giorgia Meloni, prime minister, Giuseppe Sala, mayor of Milan and many others, the season of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan begins.
Now the opera, a popular musical drama in four parts (seven scenes), will continue in its calendar, on 10, 13, 16, 20, 23, 29 December 2022, always starting at 20
The sets were designed by Es Devlin, Ida Marie Ellekilde; the costumes and Luke Halls the videos, while the lights are by Jonas Bǿgh. The main roles are played by Ildar Abdrazakov as the protagonist, Ain Anger as Pimen, Stanislav Tro;mov as Varlaam, Dmitry Golovnin as Grigorij and Norbert Ernst as Shuysky, while Lilly Jørstad is Fyodor. The Chorus of the Teatro alla Scala is directed by Maestro Alberto Malazzi.
Recurring title of the Scala seasons since the Italian premiere of 1909 commissioned by Toscanini (but conducted by Edoardo Vitale), conducted among others by Toscanini himself but also by Guarnieri, Votto, Gavazzeni and Gergiev, Boris Godunov opens the Verona season for the second time after the memorable edition conducted by Claudio Abbado in 1979, directed by Yuri Lyubimov. The version chosen is the original one from 1869, who dismayed his contemporaries for his innovative and realistic traits both from a dramaturgical and musical point of view, and focuses on the theme of individual guilt and its inevitable consequences. A dark and topical story that echoes the subject of Verdi's Macbeth with which the Teatro alla Scala inaugurated the 2021/2022 Season. We are in 1598: Tsar Fëdor died, guards and priests urge the people to pray that the boyar Boris Godunov agrees to ascend the throne. Finally the coronation takes place in the square of the Kremlin cathedrals with an imposing ceremony disturbed, however, by some riots. In a cell of the Chudov monastery, the elderly monk Pimen is about to finish his chronicle of the events in Russia. The chronicle will report the truth about the assassination of Zarevič Dimitri, legitimate heir to the throne, perpetrated on Boris's orders. Pimen narrates the crime to the novice Grigory, who, being the same age as the Tsarevich, decides to pass himself off as him and lead a revolt against Boris to seize the throne. Grigorij takes refuge in Poland avoiding arrest by crossing the border with Lithuania. The last scenes narrate events that happened in 1604: the children of Boris, Xenia and Fëdor have grown up; the tsar governs a country now exhausted by famine in which discontent winds among the people and rumors about the regicide committed are multiplying, while the rebel forces led by Grigory are pressing at the borders. Haunted by the ghost of the Tsarevich, Boris Godunov loses his mind and dies after a last exhortation to his son Fyodor.
Riccardo Chailly and Boris Godunov
Among the by now numerous paths that make up Riccardo Chailly's more than forty years of La Scala experience, the one that crosses the Russian repertoire has a particular importance. After the precocious debut on the podium of the Masnadieri in 1978, called by Abbado to replace Gavazzeni, in 1979 Chailly achieved a warm personal success conducting Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Lirico, followed in 1981 by the critical and interpretative puzzle represented by Soročincy's fair by Musorgsky, solved brilliantly. In 1994 it was the turn of Prokoffev's Angel of Fire, a success that many still remember. “During the first seasons of my Musical Direction – explains the Master – I thought it necessary to focus exclusively on the Italian repertoire, with courses dedicated to Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi's "Youth Trilogy" and the operas that had their world premiere at La Scala. Today the time has come to give space to other voices that are fully part of the history of La Scala. Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov had its first Italian performance in our Theater in 1909 with the direction of Edoardo Vitale and Fëdor Šaljapin as the protagonist, and remained in the following seasons as a constant presence, in particular thanks to Arturo Toscanini who conducted it for four Seasons between 1922 and 1927, to Antonio Guarnieri who proposed it again in 1935, 1941 and 1946, and then, among others, to Antonino Votto and Gianandrea Gavazzeni. In 1979 Boris Godunov was the second non-Italian opera to inaugurate the Season on December 7 after Fidelio directed by Karl Böhm in 1974: an opening choice desired by Claudio Abbado who gave it a memorable interpretation together with the director Yurij Ljubimov. I was Abbado's assistant at the time and I remember the months of rehearsals to create a very innovative show which was also the subject of criticism but which has remained in the history of opera interpretation as well as in that of La Scala. Tullio Sera wrote that the greatness of Boris is perhaps due to the gloomy realism with which Verdi depicts the vertigo of power in Macbeth. Presenting the two works in two consecutive inaugurations also takes on this meaning”.
The show signed by Kasper Holten and his creative team offers a reading of the work centered on the themes of consciousness opposed to power and truth opposed to censorship.
At the root of directorial reflection there is the origin of the libretto, Pushkin's play, composed in 1825 and published in 1831. Removing the epic of the "time of troubles" Pushkin was openly inspired by the great Shakespearean historical dramas, not only in the grandeur of the fresco but also in the depth of the characters. On the other hand, it is interesting to observe how Shakespeare lived in the time of the historical Godunov. Some solutions adopted in the show are based precisely on Shakespeare's theater, such as the representation of the sense of guilt through the materialization of ghosts, real or imagined, on the stage. The specter of the Zarevič murdered by Boris to conquer power will be a recurring element, a visible sign of the guilt and finally of the madness of his killer. Another element that will be placed in the foreground is the figure of Pimen, who we will see on stage; not from the beginning intent on writing his chronicle, a truthful and therefore politically dangerous testimony of the facts that Boris and his scribes try to hide. At the center of the exhibition is exactly this reference to the truth and the need to bear witness to it. The viewer will be transported into Pimen's chronicle and therefore into history, in which past, present and future intersect and influence each other. A circular story in which violence returns as a constant.
The story, divided into seven scenes, is divided into two distinct parts which will be underlined by the insertion of an interval
In the first four scenes we witness the public coronation ceremony as a means of propaganda to attract the people, Pimen's subversive testimony of truth and Grigory's decision to distort this truth to usurp power: in short, we witness what happens to Boris by looking at him from the outside. In the remaining three scenes – which takes place almost seven years later – we are together with Boris, we see how he tries to live with his guilt, we feel his fear and his path towards madness by entering his mind. Here too the temporal planes intersect: Boris's children, Fëdor and Ksenija, will have the same fate as the Zarevič but also as many victims of the blind violence of absolute power. With the death of Boris, a circle made of ink and blood closes, in which we see history and its narration represented together.
The staging makes use of the scenography by Es Devlin. The British artist has broadened the scope of her activity from operatic set design to major events, from ceremonies for the London and Rio de Janeiro Olympics to Adele and Beyoncé tours to large sculptures in Trafalgar Square, for the Victoria and Albert Museum and Art Basel, up to the original collaboration with the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli. The costumes of the Danish Ida Marie Ellekilde cross history ranging with a creative and non-philological spirit from the times of Boris Godunov to those of Pushkin, of Musorgsky up to alluding to the present.
Versions of Boris Godunov
The composer then proceeds between 1871 and 1872, in a period in which he shares a room with Rimsky-Korsakov, to a radical revision (the so-called "original version") which provides for the addition of three new scenes. Two make up the spectacular "Polish act" in which not only a series of popular songs intervene to dampen the general gloom, but the tenor voice of Grigorij (the "false Dimitri") finds space and heroic expansion alongside Marina, the female character who it was missing from the first version. The third, which reworks themes of the "scene of the innocent", shifts the ending from the humble tones of Boris's death to the grandiose revolt in the forest of Kromy. Not only is the continuity broken in favor of a "picture dramaturgy" that moves between different places and times, but all the music is rewritten by attenuating the realism in favor of a more accentuated lyrical momentum. The revision was enough to get the opera performed, which was staged at the Mariinsky on 8 February 1874, but not to decree its success. Critics and colleagues accused the author of bad taste and musical ignorance: in fact a real lynching.
The survival of the title on the stage is due in large part to the revision completed by Nikolaj Rimsky-Korsakov in 1896, who reinvents the work by covering it with a lush orchestration of immense seduction but in stark contrast to the rough and severe colors desired by Musorgsky. Meanwhile, in 1928 the Russian musicologist Pavel Lamm published a critical revision including the two original versions in the score, respectful of the will of the author and of his highly accurate manuscripts. The first ever performance ofUr-Boris takes place on February 16, 1928 in Leningrad. A new version was then prepared by Eostakovie between 1939 and 1940 and was staged in Moscow in 1959. The definitive executive recovery of theUr Boris will have to wait for the Kirov version directed by Valery Gergiev in 1992.
For his ninth opening of the season, Maestro Riccardo Chailly has chosen to conduct Boris godunov in the first version in seven scenes presented by Musorgsky at the Imperial Theaters of St. Petersburg in 1869
The opera, among the greatest masterpieces of musical theatre, has a complex gestation and history. The composer, born into a family of landowners and turned to music abandoning his military career, had suffered the economic consequences of the abolition of serfdom, reducing himself to an uncertain and precarious life, undermined by alcohol and epilepsy. Boris godunov it is his first work, and breaks the conventions of the musical theater of the time with disruptive effects. The libretto, in the composer's hand, draws on Puekin's tragedy and on History of the Russian state by Alexander Karamzin to draw a Shakespearean drama of guilt against the backdrop of the so-called "Time of Troubles" (1598-1614), the years of anarchy between the death of Ivan the Terrible and the advent of the Romanovs. To do this, Musorgsky imagines a visionary and anticipatory musical language that breaks up the closed forms of traditional opera in favor of an absolute adherence to the morphology of the Russian language. After just over a year of work, from October 1868 to December 1869, Musorgsky presents a radically innovative work to the commission of the Imperial Theaters of St. Petersburg: divided into 7 scenes, it does not have closed numbers, it does not contain a sentimental plot , has no relevant female part but does not even include a heroic or amorous tenor. It is the so-called Ur-Boris o Boris original: dense, gloomy, deep. Today La Scala presents it as the inaugural title; it was then far too unusual for the commission, which rejected it by six votes to one.
The different versions of the Boris – observes Franco Pulcini – reflect different moments of national sentiment in Russia: theUr-Boris echoes the Russian religious and spiritual tradition focusing on the theme of individual guilt with accents in some ways analogous to Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. This drama of conscience will take on more markedly historical-political features in the original version of 1874, with the addition of the Polish act. The rejection of both versions desired by Musorgsky reflects the sense of inferiority of nineteenth-century Russians towards European culture and their fear of appearing primitive, brutal, savage. A sentiment to which the instrumental mastery of Rimsky-Korsakov finds refuge with its arabesque tint that attenuates the violence of the author's realism. The Soviet era, on the other hand, influences Eostakovie's version in which the Polish act becomes a metaphor for the fear of external aggression felt by the Russians during the Cold War years. L'Ur-Boris, with its Shakespearean accents and its almost religious reflection on the Dostoevskian themes of crime, guilt, inevitable punishment and the coexistence of good and evil, presents a universal character more than other versions.
The protagonist
Ildar Abdrazakov arrives with Boris godunov at its sixth December 7th. From the debut ne the sleepwalker in 2001 Abdrazakov sang at La Scala ne The force of Destiny, Macbeth, Samson and Dalila, Iphigenia in Aulide (with Riccardo Muti, 7 December 2002), Fidelio, Moïse and Pharaoh (with Riccardo Muti, 7 December 2003), Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, Les contes d'Homann, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Carlo, Ernani and the last three season openings with Riccardo Chailly: Attila on 7 December 2019, the evening "A riveder le stelle" on 7 December 2020 and Macbeth on December 7, 2021, as well as in numerous concerts. Equipped with a vocal technique and scenic qualities that allow him to prepare a vast repertoire, Abdrazakov also in his commitments of these seasons ranges fromItalian in Algiers (Salzburg 2022 and 2023 with Cecilia Bartoli, St. Petersburg 2022) and from Turkish in Italy (Vienna, 2022) a Attila (London 2022), Don Carlo (Munich, 2022 and 2023), The damnation of Faust (Naples 2023); not exactly a Boris godunov (Valdivostok and Milan 2022, Munich 2023).
Alla Scala will return again in March 2023 to play the four evil characters in the Contes d'Homann directed by Frédéric Chaslin. His concert activity is also intense which, after the galas at the Verona Arena and in St. Petersburg, will bring him back to the United States in 2023 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons.
