Killing Khovansky
1,041 words about the past that have absolutely nothing to do with the present (until they do)
“turns out
there are no
dead bodies
after all
unless you
put them there”— D. A. Powell, “A Night at the Opera”
At intermission for Khovanshchina in Salzburg this past spring, I had the opportunity to meet Gerard McBurney, who midwived this new version of Mussorgsky’s unfinished — if not unfinishable — score. Because I am incapable of having a normal human interaction, I immediately told him how much I enjoyed his 1994 essay on the work for the English National Opera.1 He was, understandably, taken aback until I explained that his essay helped me to understand what it was that I love about Khovanshchina.
At first blush, it’s a mess of an opera — such a mess that it requires several live experiences (ideally in different productions). Its rarity also means that those opportunities to see it live are inadequate. If you see it, however, it’s very easy to fall under its spell, even if you aren’t sure of what it is you’re actually falling for. That was the experience I had when I first saw the work at the Met in 2012. It got under my skin, but I had no idea why. I just knew I wanted more.
McBurney points out the symmetry and organization at the heart of Mussorgsky’s libretto, and centers that symmetry in the various layers of time, place, and character that become more meaningful than the plot itself. “There is a quality of coldness in the characters of Khovanshchina,” he writes. “The music often feels almost callously designed to make us feel the great distance between them and us.”
Nonetheless, he adds, “if the composer has turned cold towards his characters, he has certainly not turned cold towards the flood of the greater drama on the surface of which his almost helpless characters bob along.”
I love that image of a flood of drama on which Mussorgsky’s characters bob. The fact that I initially read “flood” as “blood” added another level to this already rich image, and underscored the heat that is at the heart of the work. But that heat’s source isn’t what we think it is. It’s not the people themselves; it’s not their passions or wants or fears. It’s the uncontrollable tide of history.
This can very easily lead to no two interpretations of Khovanshchina being the same. I saw a concert performance of this new McBurney adaptation last year in Helsinki with a slightly different cast. From that evening I still remember Mika Kares’s Prince Ivan Khovansky. Khovansky is the source of the work’s title, and while he’s not a namesake hero or antihero (like Boris Godunov), he takes up a lot of space onstage. His musical lines are vast and imposing, peppered with asides and verbal punctuation — he likes to hear himself talk. Absurdly tall and broad, Kares also physically dominated in the role with a leonine ease. He was manspreading manifest, taking up more and more space as his character amassed more and more power.
And yet, when Khovansky’s attempted coup against a young Peter the Great unravels, Kares deflates to the size of a neutrino. When Kovansky realizes he now faces certain death, Kares let out a short breath of shock. It felt like he was sucking all of the air out of the auditorium. When, a few scenes later, his Khovansky was stabbed by a Peter loyalist, I was genuinely saddened by the loss, which was pathetic in the literal sense of the word. That sadness was soon accompanied by shock, because Khovansky’s death is categorically in the “Fuck Around and Find Out” subfolder of history.
With Vitalij Kowaljow’s Khovansky earlier this year in Salzburg, I was less sorry. In a full staging (by Simon McBurney), Kowaljow sported a wardrobe that embodied Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Moskva. The supertitles for his lines, somewhat tailored to the present moment, led to Khovansky singing of “making Russia great again.” I found that I missed the sympathy I had for Khovansky at the end. This, too, was shocking. But at least I’m not about to start arguing that Ivan Khovansky was practicing politics the right way.
Maybe this is one of the great gifts of Khovanshchina: that we are forced to reckon with the distance that Mussorgsky places between audience and characters and, just as we think we’re onto something in that reckoning, the distance is all but closed up. A gift? No, an augur. That closing of the distance is a warning that the floodwaters of history are once again rising, and our levees won’t hold.
In his essay on Khovanshchina, McBurney points to the second act as the standout of not only the opera, but of 19th-century opera. Khovansky joins Old Believer Dosifei and the classically aristocratic Prince Golitsyn to “wrangle over their respective hierarchical positions in the historical process that swirls around them.” The act unfolds as one uninterrupted scene, represented in one frequently-interrupted musical line as we go from Golitsyn alone to Golitsyn and Khovansky, to Golitsyn, Khovansky, and Dosifei (with various interruptions from Marfa, servants, and Old Believers). “Indeed,” McBurney adds, “in a paradoxical way, all those stops and starts actually increase the sense of unstoppable motion.”
This is Mussorgsky at his most experimental, attempting to layer different forms of time onto one another. Even the densest scenes in Boris Godunov are less focused on time or history as they are on the characters living out those times and historical periods. But something in Khovanshchina detaches and begins to float, inexorably and infinitely. It’s a sonic representation of time’s arrow moving monomaniacally in one direction while history moves in on itself like an ouroboros, forever repeating.
Mussorgsky, who argued at the time he began writing Khovanshchina that “we haven’t moved forward” (meaning that Russia hadn’t progressed since centuries earlier when the early years of Peter the Great’s reign were a dynastic free-for-all), struggled with this. And if this is indeed what he had been going for with his work, McBurney argues, then it might be that his failure to complete it before his death “was not only a result of alcoholic debilitude, but also the excruciating problem of finding a right way to bring an ending to a music and a drama that by no means necessarily demands an ending.” When the swirling historical process is more central than the characters wrangling therein, does an opera really end when the last body falls?
I had, in that moment, an understanding of the Old Believer-levels of fanaticism that many opera lovers exhibited towards the singers I used to work for when they would bring thirty-year-old playbills to the Met stage door to be signed.