‘So resonant': the 19th-century Russian opera being revived across Europe

The Guardian

05-04-2025

A Russian political leader sings about war with Ukrainians and the need for a 'durable peace'. The fractured political elite argues over whether they should pursue closer ties with Europe or embrace Russian traditions.
The plot of Modest Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina was written in the 1870s and is set in the 1680s. But, as the characters lament the fact that their homeland is mired in an endless cycle of violence and unhappiness, the dark and brooding work can feel alarmingly contemporary.
That may explain why productions of the long and complicated opera, which covers a period of political unrest that few outside Russia are familiar with and which used to be performed rarely in the west, are now springing up across Europe.
Last summer, a staging at the Staatsoper in Berlin opened with a scene set in the modern-day Kremlin, with the entire action recast as a contemporary political re-enactment for propaganda purposes.
Another new production premiered in Geneva last month with plenty of modern overtones: the character of a 17th-century scribe was portrayed as a hacker, sitting in an office chair as long lines of Russian computer code appeared on giant screens behind him. Later, the same screens showed video footage of the main characters debating, as if on state television political talkshows.
Next week, yet another production of Khovanshchina will premiere at the Salzburg Easter festival, staged by the British director Simon McBurney. He said his production would be 'very much about today' rather than a historical recreation, and described the opera as 'hauntingly beautiful, and sometimes terrifying', in a video interview in between rehearsals.
Photographs from dress rehearsals in Salzburg showed characters in strikingly modern dress, and McBurney said one of the key influences on his thinking for how to conceptualise the opera was a policy speech Vladimir Putin gave at the Bolshoi theatre some years ago. In fact, McBurney's original plan had been to put it on at the Bolshoi in 2022, in what would have been one of the first times a foreign director had staged a Russian classic on the country's most hallowed stage.
McBurney worked on plans for the staging over many years with his brother, Gerard, a composer who spent time in Russia and has re-orchestrated the finale of the opera, which exists in many different versions because Mussorgsky left it unfinished.
But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine made that plan untenable. The Bolshoi has since been taken over by the Putin loyalist Valery Gergiev, and late last year revived a hyper-traditional production of Khovanshchina with a set design first used in 1952.
McBurney took his ideas to Salzburg, in what is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera that will later be staged in New York. Rehearsal photos show a Putin-like suited politician giving a speech from a lectern featuring a modern Russian coat of arms, in front of a mock-up of the Bolshoi's distinctive stage curtain.
'I don't know how it might have gone down when I was going to do it in Moscow. I don't know what the consequence would have been for me. I'm very sad that we're not able to do it in the Bolshoi,' he said.
Although productions of Khovanshchina inside Russia still tend to feature period sets and costumes, there is plenty in the opera that lends itself to a modern re-imagination. 'If you changed a few names in the libretto, it would describe current events. I can't think of any other opera where that would be the case,' said Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor of the Salzburg production.
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Calixto Bieito, the Spanish director behind the recent production in Geneva, said he wanted to leave some of the contemporary relevance to the imagination of viewers. 'Of course when you read the text you cannot avoid making connections with the present day, but those are connections for the audience to make, not for me,' he said in an interview before the premiere in Geneva. Still, the production was peppered with references to contemporary Russia.
Not every opera house feels the time is right to stage Russian historical dramas. The Polish National Opera was due to stage Boris Godunov, another brooding meditation on power by Mussorgsky, in March 2022, but cancelled the run after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 'At times like these, opera is silent … Let our silence speak of our solidarity with the people of Ukraine,' Mariusz Treliński, the theatre's artistic director, said at the time.
The opera was again scheduled for the 2024-25 season but conditional on the war in Ukraine ending; as that did not happen, it was again removed, and a spokesperson for the theatre said it was 'hard to say if or when' the production would run.
But farther west in Europe, there have been fewer qualms about staging Russian works, further evidenced by news this week that Ralph Fiennes would direct Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Paris next year.
In June, the exiled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will stage Boris Godunov in Amsterdam. According to the website of the Dutch National Opera, he will 'incorporate his own experiences in Russia in this highly topical production'. Serebrennikov led one of Moscow's most successful theatres and mounted several opera productions at the Bolshoi before he was arrested in 2017, and spent nearly two years under house arrest before being freed.
When it comes to Khovanshchina, which ends with the mass suicide of a religious sect by self-immolation, despite the firm Russian context there was also something more universal about the work, said McBurney. People were currently experiencing a 'perception of history', he said, and there was a sense in the air that we were on the brink of major change, just as there was when Mussorgsky was writing in the late 19th century.
'We are aware of a wave, and we don't quite know what form it's going to take, whether it's going to be a sudden acceleration of ecological disaster, or whether it's going to take the form of human violence, we don't know. But we do feel the wave, and in some sense that is why [the opera] is so resonant. You can feel the impending disaster,' he said.