Musorgsky IV:

The Female Roles
 

In his own life Musorgsky  was charming and courtly and had several close female friends, but he never married and had no apparent romantic entanglements, so standard  speculations about his sexuality naturally arose. Right now, however, I will limit myself to the operas.

The first version of Boris Godunov (1869) included no major role for a female singer, but only three very small parts (for the innkeeper, for Boris's daughter, and for the children's nurse).  Primarily for this reason, the first version was refused and sent back to Musorgsky, who cheerfully added a prima donna role and two whole new acts. In Khovanshchina there was no such problem: the much-admired role of Marfa was there from the beginning, and while the Lutheran girl Emma's dramatic role is terribly one-dimensional, she does at least get to show off her voice.

Anti-romanticism was one of the main manifestations of Musorgsky's realism, and the ladies' parts in his operas were as unromantic as you could possible imagine. In Boris, sinister Jesuits bully Princess Marina into giving herself to False Dmitri as part of their plan to convert Russia to the Catholic faith. At first she resists, but she eventually gets with the program because the thought of becoming Czarina appeals to her. But she doesn't give anything away for nothing: Dmitri is not going to get any before he becomes Czar.

In Khovanshchina we see the most bizarre love triangle in all of opera. Prince Andrei is obsessed with Emma, who would rather die than be with him. When she finally definitively escapes from his attempts at rape or murder, he is left broken-hearted and still obsessive. However, once Emma is gone, Andrei falls into the clutches of the delusional Marfa, who sings beautifully of their supposed love -- in blatant defiance of the clear fact that Andrei, in his own sick way, is in love with Emma and no longer loves Marfa (if he ever did), and is furthermore about as lame and worthless a character as has ever been seen on any stage.

Besides her delusions about Andrei, Marfa has several other peculiarities. She is a pious Old Believer, but she also can conjure up the spirits of the dead, and three different characters call her a witch or a demon. In the end she joins the other Old Believers in self-immolation and brings the worthless Andrei with her, and self-immolation seems to have been her goal from the beginning. Early on, she dreamed that she and Andrei would burn beautifully, "like two candles", and candles and flames and bright lights show up again and again in her dialogue. (As for Andrei, Marfa's fantasy lover, he dies calling out for his own fantasy lover -- Emma).

So was Musorgsky a misogynist? Considering that he is a grotesque realist like Gogol, and that few or none of his male characters are admirable either, I think that we can answer "No". But I do think that he must have said to himself something like, "If they want prima donnas, I'll give them their goddamn prima donnas".

Appendix

 The rejection of the 1869 Boris, has  traditionally been thought of as a bad, thing, but more recently anti-Soviet critics have claimed that the 1872 version is superior. By and large, I disagree: the two new acts are fine in themselves, but dramatically they amount to a detour plus an anticlimax, and the ending of the 1869 version -- with the death of Boris -- is incredibly powerful. Furthermore, rewriting Boris cost Musorgsky two or three years out of a very short career of about sixteen years. I would gladly trade all the new stuff in the 1872 Boris for a completed version of Khovanshchina.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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