An Unfinished Opera Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

New York Times

12-04-2025

Instead of finishing his masterpiece 'Khovanshchina,' Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk.
That's fiction: a scene from 'Moscow-Petushki,' a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of 'Khovanshchina' that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history.
'Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,' McBurney said in an interview.
In real life, Mussorgsky 'embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,' McBurney added. 'And he couldn't finish it.'
McBurney has created a new, completed 'Khovanshchina,' and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a 'musical folk drama'), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film.
McBurney called his contribution to the palimpsest of 'Khovanshchina' a bridge, built from melodic sketches, between Mussorgsky's music and the Stravinsky finale. Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed a concert version of McBurney's completion. On Saturday, it will be staged in Salzburg, with the same conductor and orchestra, and directed by McBurney's brother, Simon. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it will travel to New York in the future.
A recent rehearsal of 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg showed the work coming together with a striking, contemporary vision. The piece concerns political intrigue in 1682, but this performance features a blunt, vernacular new translation of the libretto; a staging of skin-crawling immediacy; and a fierce, unsentimental reading of the score.
Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, this production embraces the work's unfinished state. McBurney's bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece. Hearing it, you can't forget how much is still missing from 'Khovanshchina.'
'We both agreed that it should be very simple, and instead of trying to create continuity between these bits and pieces, we should just accept that there isn't any,' Salonen said in an interview. 'These are fragments, and it just kind of is what it is.'
McBurney has been fascinated with Mussorgsky since he was 14, when his father, the archaeologist Charles McBurney, traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss his research findings with scholars. Charles mentioned to his K.G.B. minder that his son was fascinated by classical music; the minder gave him an enormous case of recordings from the state-owned label Melodiya to bring back to England. Those introduced Gerard to Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Boris Godunov.'
He soon became captivated by 'Khovanshchina' as well. 'I was always interested in its fragmentary and unfinished nature,' he said.
In 1984, Gerard McBurney moved to Moscow, where he learned Russian and studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. That experience has been invaluable for his work on 'Khovanshchina.' In addition to the musical reconstruction, McBurney has been making a contemporary English version of the libretto, with the translator Hannah Whitley, that preserves the original's vernacular. In one scene, the authoritarian Prince Ivan Khovansky tells the fanatical leader of the Old Believers, Dositheus, 'Together we will make Russia great again.' At another point, the title of the opera — often rendered as 'The Khovansky Affair' — is translated as something unprintable.
Such choices capture the idiosyncratic style of the Russian libretto, which Mussorgsky developed, collagelike, from an obsessive study of the historical record and careful attention to the way people spoke on the street. 'He built himself an armature, and then he stuck these random bits on it,' McBurney said. 'And then, as the piece possessed him over the years, he started to weave in his own dreamlike riffs on the material.'
Simon McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of the theater company Complicité and an actor, is also interested in the work's contemporary resonances. His staging places it firmly within present-day authoritarianism. But, he said in an interview, the story of 'Khovanshchina' hardly needs updating. In the drama, there are no heroes, only ambivalent villains. Power asserts itself mercilessly, and the action is shot through with apocalyptic premonitions, which reminds him of our time.
'The young people I know sense the presence of the shadow, and therefore the impending catastrophe,' McBurney said. 'I'm not trying to bring it into the staging of the opera. It is there already.'
Still, experience has taught him that relevance and realism are not the same thing. McBurney knows that the naturalistic acting style used in film can easily fall flat in opera, which has a slower pace in which the magic lies in a kind of zooming in on time.
For 'Khovanshchina,' he worked with the singers to 'heighten' their acting, he said, making the movements onstage both slower and more intense. 'My job as a director is to get them — sometimes to teach them — how to hold the gesture in the body,' he said. 'Root it in the reality, but also find the dynamic form with the body which can work with the dynamic form of the music.'
In Salonen's reading of that music, Mussorgsky's score is lean, metallic and very fast. Older recordings of 'Khovanshchina' tend to be sumptuous and Romantic, luxuriating in the composer's folk-inspired melodies. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra renders the same melodies as ephemeral as the bits of text from which Mussorgsky assembled his libretto. Mussorgsky's unusual spinning modulations convey the feeling of events spiraling out of control.
'I thought from the start that it shouldn't linger, because history is moving really fast at this point,' Salonen said. 'There are some moments of calm — little oasis moments — but it should never be static.'
Still, the past has had a way of inserting itself into this production. The Russian mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina sings the part of Marfa, who is caught between love and the strict dogmas of the Old Believers. Some of Karyazina's ancestors on her father's side were members of that faith. They never talked about it, until her grandfather told her about her roots while they were listening to a scene from 'Khovanshchina' on the radio.
A tragedy of Mussorgsky's drama is how political upheaval severs connections among people, their land and their history. 'People want to feel that they're not just a bit of fluff and when they die, there will be nothing left of them,' Gerard McBurney said. 'Somehow, if they could feel that their roots drew from the soil they loved when they were first growing up — that's a constant theme in the text of this opera. It's the longing for an impossible dream.'