Boris Godunov, Royal Opera House, ★★★★★

Michael Church

Modest Musorgsky’s first and greatest opera was attemptedly rewritten by many hands – including Rimsky-Korsakov’s – before people realised that its first version was the best. And it’s Richard Jones’s eloquent production of that initial version which is now back on the Covent Garden stage, for its third revival.

Its power lies in its simplicity. Miriam Buether’s painterly designs divide the world into two: a gilded and brightly-lit upper region where the ruling classes fight for the crown, and a tenebrous world below out of which the starving populace passes judgment on its corrupt rulers, and appeals for divine mercy.

The plot is sprung with the slow-motion murder, in a sinister silent scene, of the defenceless little heir to the Russian throne. Did Boris order that murder, and is it guilt which is now driving him mad, as he reluctantly consents to accept the crown?

The brilliance of Jones’s production lies in the way he manages to present both the mental disintegration of the protagonist, and at the same time the disintegration of an entire society (with some extraordinary pre-echoes of Russia today).

Short scenes in this very short opera chart the progress of these two malign strands with the inevitability of a ritual; the tension is steadily ratcheted up as Musorgsky nears his pessimistic democratic conclusion. Boris’s anxious political manoeuvrings are offset by a sweetly homespun scene with him en famille, and also by a slapstick episode with two drunken monks in a tavern (Musorgsky views his compatriots with an anthropologist’s eye). I won’t reveal the shocking coup de theatre with which Jones sews up the plot in the final few moments.

Religion pervades every scene of this work. Its musical sound-world – dominated by bells – is profoundly different from anything in the bel canto repertoire, and as this production conducted by Mark Wigglesworth demonstrates, the choral sound has a depth and warmth which gives it massive carrying power. Here the chorus becomes a leading voice.

Six of the solo voices are remarkable: Hannah Edmunds as Boris’s daughter Xenia, and five outstanding male singers – John Daszak as the fixer Shuisky, Adam Palka as the historian Pimen, Jamez[sic] McCorkle as the plausible pretender to the throne, Mingjie Lei as the sad and suffering Holy Fool, and Bryn Terfel – magnificent beyond all telling – in the title role.

Musorgsky’s opera was based on Pushkin’s poem Boris Godunov, and Pushkin’s inspiration had been Shakespeare’s King Lear; so it was no surprise that Musorgsky’s protagonist and his truth-telling Fool should re-enact the crux of Shakespeare’s drama where the king and the Fool are thrown together in a raging storm. ‘Woe to Russia, weep for Russians’ they sing: yes, now as then.

Until Feb 18