Khovanshchina

Moscow in the 1680s. After decades of turmoil, a young Tsar prepares to consolidate his power and build a new Russia, but powerful forces are ranged against him. First, the old guard of the army, under the leadership of the dangerously charismatic Prince Ivan Khovansky; second, the Old Believers—Orthodox fanatics convinced that to reform Russia is to endanger its very soul. As Khovansky plots rebellion and the Old Believers invoke higher powers, the hopes and loves of a younger generation stand little chance before the violence of the state and the tragic course of a nation’s destiny. In his opera Khovanshchina (The Khovansky Affair), Modest Mussorgsky turns Russian history into a gripping human tragedy. It was a mighty task, and the self-taught composer (he wrote the libretto too) left the score incomplete at his death in 1881. Successive Russian composers, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich, have all attempted to complete it. But the heart of the drama—from its ravishing orchestral prelude “Dawn Over the Moscow River” through mighty choral scenes to the cataclysmic finale—is unmistakably Mussorgsky’s own. Khovanshchina is an opera of epic emotions but no easy answers: an unsparing portrait of a Russia torn between East and West, tyranny and chaos, that seems to become only more relevant (and urgent) with time.