Musorgsky with a Smile

PERFORMERS:
Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers and Orchestra
Conductor: Pavel Petrenko

PROGRAMME:
Modest Musorgsky
The Marriage
musical comedy in four scenes to the original text of the comedy by Nikolai Gogol
Stage Director: Alexander Maskalin
Production Designer: Sergei Grachev
Costume Designer: Tatiana Yastrebova
Lighting Designer: Roman Peskov
Musical Preparation: Larisa Gergieva
Concert Masters: Anatoly Kuznetsov, Arina Skugareva

Soloists: Elena Sommer, Denis Begansky, Dmitry Koleushko, Andrei Serov

Comic arias and romances
Stage Director: Alexander Maskalin
Production Designer: Sergei Grachev
Principal Costume Technologist: Tatiana Mashkova
Lighting Designer: Roman Peskov
Musical Preparation: Larisa Gergieva
Concert Masters: Anatoly Kuznetsov, Arina Skugareva
Piano: Vasily Popov

Performed by Evelina Agabalaeva, Yulia Matochkina, Regina Rustamova, Dmitry Garbovskyi, Artur Islamov, Dmitry Koleushko, Roman Lyulkin, Yaroslav Petrianik, Pavel Stasenko, Andrei Tulnikov, Grigory Tchernetsov

Modest Petrovich Musorgsky had an innate gift for comedy which may be observed not just in his musical compositions. With his “inimitable talent”, at private concerts and performances Musorgsky played his own comical songs and romances as well as appearing in the roles of Leporello in Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest and Podkolesin in The Marriage.
“I was laughing so hard” (Borodin), “I laughed till the tears ran down my face and I admired his wittiness and expressiveness” (Rimsky-Korsakov about Dargomyzhsky), “Rehearsals and the performance were an incessant explosion of mirth” (V. V. Stasov) – such anecdotal references afford us a lively image of Musorgsky as a comedian and an impression of his music in the comedy genre.
There are elements of comedy in many of the composer’s works, even those that are far from being comic. In Musorgsky’s music, the comic effect is generally a direct result of the composer hitting the bull’s eye: creating a truly living and real image of a character – and it’s not important if that character is in an opera or a romance (it could also be an instrumental piece, such as Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle from Pictures at an Exhibition). We have, for example, the comical attempts of Mityukha and the people in the Prologue of Boris Godunov to repeat the words of the blind pilgrims and understand their meaning, Varlaam’s affectation in the scene with the bailiffs in Act II of the same opera, or the Scrivener in the first scene of Khovanshchina and the arrogance and narrow-mindedness of Prince Khovansky. In each case, however, the comedy is mixed up with that which is not at all amusing and which is, indeed, most often tragic. The same is true of the song The Prankster: behind the façade of firework-like laughter and humorous hyperbole there is a childish cruelty and a merciless attitude to old age. In the romances Rayok and The Classic Musorgsky – for the first time in the history of the genre – created highly satirical portraits of musicians who opposed the Mighty Five. Closest of all to pure comedy are the romances Ah, You Drunken Sot!, The Seminarist and The Goat, the opera The Marriage and, of course, Sorochintsy Fair – Musorgsky’s lightest work (the roles of Cherevik and Khivrya, the scenes with Khivrya and Popovich, Cherevik and Kuma and numerous other episodes are filled with comedy), although here, too, the comic is often blended with the lyrical and the fantastical.

“We were staggered... enchanted... uncomprehending”; these words of Rimsky-Korsakov may reveal the impression created by the music of The Marriage following its first performance at a private showing in September 1868. Gogol referred to The Marriage as a “totally improbable event in two acts” – it could be said that for opera music of the time (the 1860s and afterwards) Musorgsky’s work, written directly to the text of Gogol’s comedy, was an even more improbable event. Musorgsky considered The Marriage his own “crossing the Rubicon”, a voluntary “cage” from which he would emerge to freedom, to great artistic ideas (which indeed happened: in autumn, also in 1868, he started composing Boris Godunov). Like many other innovative ideas of Musorgsky, the discoveries and inventions of The Marriage were only to be justly appraised in the 20th century. In The Marriage people often saw (as a merit or as a flaw) a work that had been copied from spoken language. The composer himself, calling his opera “an experiment of dramatic music in prose”, defined his task in an entirely different way: “if the sound expression of human thought and emotion through simple dialect is truly recreated in my music and this is a musical art then ‘it’s in the bag’” (quotation in cursive highlighted by the author). In Gogol’s prose, which Musorgsky called “a most capricious piece for music” the changes of ideas – and thus the mood and intonation – occur very frequently, and so there is a tremendous mobility and fractionality of both the vocal and instrumental parts in The Marriage. And yet each character is recognisable and remains himself in the passing and constantly changing musical fabric of the opera: the leitmotifs assist this process. With Musorgsky these are also innovative in type: not symbols and themes or generalised features, but rather precise (and also short) portrait sketches – with a set intonation, gesture and mime of the character. The composer left The Marriage unfinished (only Act I is complete) along with a piano score. After it was published in 1908 the opera was orchestrated on numerous occasions by Russian and other musicians. In 1991 the Mariinsky Theatre commissioned a new orchestral version from the renowned St Petersburg composer Vyacheslav Nagovitsin. His instrumentation, very subtle and respectful, never overshadowing the vocal roles, underlines the characteristics of Musorgsky’s music even more.
Vladimir Goryachikh