Varlaam's Song

Борис Годунов (BORIS GODUNOV)
Musical drama in a prologue and 4 acts
Composer: Modest Mussorgsky (1839–81)
Libretto: Modest Mussorgsky, after Aleksandr Pushkin’s drama (1831) and Nikolay M. Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (1816–26)
First performance: Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, 22 October 1873 (Revised Version of 1872).
Revised version: St Petersburg Conservatory, 28 November 1896 (Rimsky-Korsakoff version).
First performance of Original Version of 1869: State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Leningrad, 16 February 1928

SETTING: Moscow; the Lithuanian frontier; a castle in Sandomierz, Poland; Kromï, from 1598 to 1605.

‘Boris Godunov’, one of the masterpieces of Russian opera, is a sombre, magnificent work. The story spans some seven years, from the accession of Boris Godunov to the throne in 1598 to his death in 1605. The work is Shakespearean in its structure: a chronicle play, with an allegorical view of history; and characterisation: Boris, one of the greatest roles in all opera, is both guilt-stricken child-murdering regicide and loving father. He is supposed to have had Dmitriy, the last son of Ivan the Terrible, murdered to become Tsar (and may in real life have poisoned Ivan with mercury), and is haunted by the vision of the murdered boy; while retribution also comes from outside, in the form of the False Dmitriy, an ambitious renegade monk who claims the throne.

There are various versions of the work; that used here is the Rimsky-Korsakoff reorchestration of 1896.

‘Kak vo górode býlo vo Kazáne’ (By the Walls of Kazan)
In a wild drinking song, the monk Varlaam sings of how Ivan the Terrible defeated the Tartars at the town of Kazan.

Varlaam, a vagabond (bass): Boris Christoff
The Pretender under the name Grigoriy (tenor): Dimitr Ouzounov
Missail, a vagabond (tenor): Milen Paounov

Conductor: André Cluytens
Orchestre de la Société du Conservatoire de Paris
Paris, 1962

Picture: M.A. Shiskov design for the Inn scene of Boris Godunov (1874)