The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts)
June 22, 2005 Wednesday
A young and ambitious ‘Boris’
by Andrew L. Pincus
LENOX
If you know opera, you know “Boris Godunov.” But do you know “Boris
Goudenow”? Not likely. Johann Mattheson’s opera, composed 159 years
before Mussorgsky’s dark-as-night portrait of the Russian czar, is
just now receiving its world premiere, 295 years after its birth.
Call it a prequel from a time before there were prequels. The Russian
Mussorgsky’s tragedy picks up where the German Mattheson’s happier
work from 1710 leaves off: with Boris’ 1598 coronation as czar of
Russia.
Mussorgsky’s Boris, racked by hallucinations and guilt, ultimately
goes mad and dies.
Fresh from its premiere run in Boston, the Boston Early Music
Festival’s production of Mattheson’s “Boris” opens the Tanglewood
season in performances at 7 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday. Festival
co-directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs are music directors, and
Lucy Graham is stage co-director and choreographer.
The international cast is headed by Vadim Kravets, a Russian, in the
title role. Ten soloists will be joined by adult and children’s
choruses, a 30-piece baroque orchestra and a troupe of dancers, with
period costumes and sets. If past performances in the festival’s
opera series are any guide, the kind of spectacle beloved by baroque
musicians and audiences will be on parade.
The Mussorgsky and Mattheson operatic portraits are “almost
opposites,” says Stubbs. “With Mussorgsky, you have the dark and mad
side of the story.” In Mattheson, “it’s the ambitious, bright, crafty
young Boris who winds his way to the coronation by a combination of
statesmanship and deceit. It’s a young hero, and the whole opera ends
with the happy coronation of the young hero. The two things are
absolutely like day and night.”
But why, you ask, has a three-centuries-old opera by one of the
leading lights of German baroque music — he was Handel’s mentor —
never been seen before? Only an unstaged performance of a different
edition in Hamburg, Germany, this year preceded the staging here.
The short answer is that the score turned up only a few years ago in
Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. O’Dette and Stubbs came upon it
during their explorations of baroque opera for their biennial Boston
festival.
“Boris Goudenow” is the fifth production in the series [all brought
to the Berkshires] since its inception in 1997 with Luigi Rossi’s
“Orfeo.”
A fuller explanation goes back to 1710, when Mattheson was a leading
composer, singer and conductor — “a star in his own time,” according
to O’Dette — at the Hamburg Opera. Internal difficulties at the
company, including doubts whether the musicians could perform
Mattheson’s “Boris,” denied it a premiere. He left the company and,
while still in his 30s, began going deaf and had to give up
composition and performance.
[Mattheson tells a story about himself: In 1704, after singing the
part of a character who commits suicide in his opera “Cleopatra,” he
went to the harpsichord to conduct the rest of the performance.
Handel, who was in command at the keyboard, refused to yield. The two
men fought a duel in which only a large button on Handel’s coat saved
him from being run through. They apparently reconciled; a year later,
Mattheson sang the leading roles in two Handel operas. ]
Soon after Mattheson’s departure from the opera company, it collapsed
amid financial and political problems. He retired to a life of
contemplation and writing critical and theoretical tomes about music.
His four operas, along with his 27 oratorios and numerous other
works, were forgotten.
We fast-forward now to World War II, when Hamburg Library officials,
knowing their city was about to be bombed, sent their most valuable
holdings to a remote castle near Dresden for safekeeping. When
Germany was defeated, Russian soldiers carted off the trove as booty.
It wound up in St. Petersburg, later to be claimed by an Armenian
scholar for Yerevan.
In 1998, as O’Dette tells the story, the secretary to German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl “phoned the director of the Hamburg Library
and said, ‘Meet me in Bonn tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock with a
tractor-trailer.’ ” There, the Armenian ambassador to Germany
presented the librarian with 42 crates of Hamburg Library holdings
from before the war, including the complete works of Mattheson.
O’Dette and Stubbs learned about the recovered score while doing
research for their 2003 festival opera, Johann Georg Conradi’s 1691
“Ariadne.” Wanting to continue their explorations into the
development of German opera, they settled upon “Boris Goudenow” for
this year’s festival.
A selection of Mattheson’s other works complemented the opera in the
Boston festival, which ended Sunday. The overall festival theme was
“East Meets West: Germany, Russia, the Baltic.”
“What emerges,” says O’Dette, “is a picture of an outstanding
composer who has never been recognized by music history because,
tragically, he became deaf at a young age and had to give up
composing and gave all of his music to the Hamburg Library.” As a
scholar, O’Dette adds, Mattheson “wrote so much that music historians
have focused on all of his books and have neglected to look at his
music before it disappeared. So that now we have to opportunity to
evaluate and enjoy the music of a composer who was considered one of
the great German composers of the early 18th century — in fact, the
person Handel went to Hamburg to study how to compose operas with.”
Mattheson’s operatic style is a mix of German and Italian elements,
with some arias in each language. Not yet in the comedy-free opera
seria style favored by later composers, “Boris Goudenow” has love
interest — three couples, all happily united at the end — and a
comic servant. The highly varied solos and ensemble numbers are
shorter than in later operas.
There is no pretender to the throne driving Boris to madness, as in
Mussorgsky.
“It is in every way a different kind of experience from going to see
Mussorgsky,” says Stubbs. “It doesn’t mean that if you love
Mussorgsky, you’ll hate this, or vice versa. But it is an entirely
different thing and much more like a drama with music, with
spectacular scene endings, with dancing and singing and everything.”
In September, the production moves on for two performances each in
Moscow and St. Petersburg, offering Russians a different perspective
on Mussorgsky’s tormented hero. Other cities in the United States and
Europe have also expressed interest but, paradoxically, the opera
can’t be seen in Hamburg, its birthplace.
The festival organizers have discussed a Hamburg staging with
presenters there, says O’Dette. But “then we were confronted with a
rather obscure and nasty clause in the German copyright law which
enabled a local amateur in Hamburg to make kind of an edition of the
work on his laptop and claim he owns performing rights in Germany to
it.”
A machination worthy of Boris. Litigation may offer a way out.
GRAPHIC: Colin Balzer performs the role of Gavust, a foreign prince,
in the Boston Early Music Festival production of ‘Boris
Goudenow’.Nell Snaidas sings the role of Olga, a Russian princess and
Aaron Sheehan portrays Ivan, a Bojar, in ‘Boris Goudenow’.In the BEMF
production of “Boris Goudenow’, standing left to right, Vadim Kravets
performs the role of Boris Goudenow; Ellen Hargis portrays Irina,
wife of the Czar and sister of Boris Goudenow; Marek Rzepka is Fedro;
and in the background, the chorus of old men.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress