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Updated: May 27, 2025
Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture I found more "operatic" than Boris Godounow.
Little need now to sing the praises of Boris Godunoff, though not having seen and heard Ohaliapine, New York is yet to receive the fullest and sharpest impression of the rôle notwithstanding the sympathetic reading of Arturo Toscanini. Khovanchtchina is even more rugged, more Russian.
Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" maintain themselves upon the stage.
For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace and exile await thee.
The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of inventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater. Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less pretentious. And "Khovanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost no less full of noble and lovely ideas.
"Khovanchtchina" is never so much the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded and cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar, and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could write.
Even the movements of the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naïve and simple and unpretentious.
There is something in those gorgeous melodies, those magnificent cries, those proud and solemn themes of which both "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" are full, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois. Peasant-like though the music is, reeking of the soil, rude and powerful, it still seems to refer to a mind of a prouder, finer sort than that of the other man.
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