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Instead of finishing his masterpiece \u201cKhovanshchina,\u201d Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s fiction: a scene from \u201cMoscow-Petushki,\u201d a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of \u201cKhovanshchina\u201d that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history.<\/p>\n
\u201cYerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life \u2014 they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,\u201d McBurney said in an interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In real life, Mussorgsky \u201cembarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,\u201d McBurney added. \u201cAnd he couldn\u2019t finish it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
McBurney has created a new, completed \u201cKhovanshchina,\u201d and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a \u201cmusical folk drama\u201d), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film.<\/p>\n
McBurney called his contribution to the palimpsest of \u201cKhovanshchina\u201d a bridge, built from melodic sketches, between Mussorgsky\u2019s music and the Stravinsky finale. Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed a concert version of McBurney\u2019s completion. On Saturday, it will be staged in Salzburg, with the same conductor and orchestra, and directed by McBurney\u2019s brother, Simon. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it will travel to New York in the future.<\/p>\n
A recent rehearsal of \u201cKhovanshchina\u201d in Salzburg showed the work coming together with a striking, contemporary vision. The piece concerns political intrigue in 1682, but this performance features a blunt, vernacular new translation of the libretto; a staging of skin-crawling immediacy; and a fierce, unsentimental reading of the score.<\/p>\n
Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, this production embraces the work\u2019s unfinished state. McBurney\u2019s bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece. Hearing it, you can\u2019t forget how much is still missing from \u201cKhovanshchina.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWe both agreed that it should be very simple, and instead of trying to create continuity between these bits and pieces, we should just accept that there isn\u2019t any,\u201d Salonen said in an interview. \u201cThese are fragments, and it just kind of is what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
McBurney has been fascinated with Mussorgsky since he was 14, when his father, the archaeologist Charles McBurney, traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss his research findings with scholars. Charles mentioned to his K.G.B. minder<\/a> that his son was fascinated by classical music; the <\/span>minder gave him an enormous case of recordings from the state-owned label Melodiya to bring back to England. Those introduced Gerard to Mussorgsky\u2019s \u201cPictures at an Exhibition\u201d and \u201cBoris Godunov.\u201d<\/p>\n He soon became captivated by \u201cKhovanshchina\u201d as well. \u201cI was always interested in its fragmentary and unfinished nature,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 1984, Gerard McBurney moved to Moscow, where he learned Russian and studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. That experience has been invaluable for his work on \u201cKhovanshchina.\u201d In addition to the musical reconstruction, McBurney has been making a contemporary English version of the libretto, with the translator Hannah Whitley, that preserves the original\u2019s vernacular. In one scene, the authoritarian Prince Ivan Khovansky tells the fanatical leader of the Old Believers, Dositheus, \u201cTogether we will make Russia great again.\u201d At another point, the title of the opera \u2014 often rendered as \u201cThe Khovansky Affair\u201d \u2014 is translated as something unprintable.<\/p>\n Such choices capture the idiosyncratic style of the Russian libretto, which Mussorgsky developed, collagelike, from an obsessive study of the historical record and careful attention to the way people spoke on the street. \u201cHe built himself an armature, and then he stuck these random bits on it,\u201d McBurney said. \u201cAnd then, as the piece possessed him over the years, he started to weave in his own dreamlike riffs on the material.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Simon McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of the theater company Complicit\u00e9 and an actor, is also interested in the work\u2019s contemporary resonances. His staging places it firmly within present-day authoritarianism. But, he said in an interview, the story of \u201cKhovanshchina\u201d hardly needs updating. In the drama, there are no heroes, only ambivalent villains. Power asserts itself mercilessly, and the action is shot through with apocalyptic premonitions, which reminds him of our time.<\/p>\n \u201cThe young people I know sense the presence of the shadow, and therefore the impending catastrophe,\u201d McBurney said. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to bring it into the staging of the opera. It is there already.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, experience has taught him that relevance and realism are not the same thing. McBurney knows that the naturalistic acting style used in film can easily fall flat in opera, which has a slower pace in which the magic lies in a kind of zooming in on time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For \u201cKhovanshchina,\u201d he worked with the singers to \u201cheighten\u201d their acting, he said, making the movements onstage both slower and more intense. \u201cMy job as a director is to get them \u2014 sometimes to teach them \u2014 how to hold the gesture in the body,\u201d he said. \u201cRoot it in the reality, but also find the dynamic form with the body which can work with the dynamic form of the music.\u201d<\/p>\n