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Boris Godunov 20 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY’S BORIS GODUNOV By 2007, Boris Godunov the Play was back — but with a difference. My earlier preoccupations with this text had been precisely that, textual; now an opportunity had arrived to perform it. The performance that resulted at Princeton University in April 2007 was like nothing Pushkin himself could have imagined in the 1820s. In part this was because the genius of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Prokofiev had been added to his own; in part it was because Pushkin, a passionate theatergoer and spectator from the hall, had no practical experience with the stage. He had read his play out loud (illicitly) to his friends, and eventually it was published in censored form. But he never benefited from the feedback of a production. Pushkin was not a “man of the theater” as Shakespeare (or even as his contemporary Alexander Shakhovskoy) had been, an intimate presence backstage who not only does theater but lives it, familiar with every production detail. In Pushkin’s dramatic writing, one senses first of all the great poet sitting, listening, and looking on, not the actor or director moving around in theater space and looking out. Meyerhold always maintained that Pushkin was one of Russia’s greatest stage directors — whose gift, through no fault of his own, was never realized. Th us his vision had to be teased out of the page and stage direction. Only another great director could take on that task. Meyerhold’s fascination with Pushkin’s Boris Godunov began even before the Revolution. By 1936, when he launched his fi nal, ill-starred attempt to stage the play, the subversive aspects of Pushkin’s historical vision could no longer be contained or tolerated. Th e challenge that this Boris project presented to our cast of undergraduate actors and musicians was unprecedented, as was the magnitude of the international response. Th e three excerpts below come from a retrospective forum on the project originally published in Pushkin Review / Пушкинский вестник, the USA-based annual in Pushkin Studies, vol. 10 (2007): 1–6, 32–34, and 41–45. Other sections of the forum include an antic account by the director, Tim Vasen, of his encounter with Pushkin, Meyerhold, and Russian repertory (including snippets from his diary kept during his research trip to Moscow); testimonials from each member of the acting company; two essays on visual illustrations to Pushkin’s play conceived respectively as comedy and as tragedy; and a selection of color production photos. Other professional venues, such as the Prokofi ev journal Th ree Oranges, no. 14 (November 2007, special Boris issue), published tentimonials from orchestra and Glee Club participants, alongside articles by theater scholars on Meyerhold, Prokofi ev, and the debacles of 1936. In 2008, Princeton University published a commemorative picture-book of stills, and a DVD exists of the entire production. — 362 — --------------------------------------- 20. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY’S BORIS GODUNOV -------------------------------------- EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: PRINCETON’S BORIS GODUNOV, 1936/2007 2007 On April 12, 2007, after half-a-year of intense collaboration between Music, Slavic, the programs in Th eater and Dance, and the School of Architecture, the Berlind Th eater at Princeton University “premiered a concept.” The communications and publicity staff of the university, which prefers to work with clear-cut labels for things, initially found this idea diffi cult to grasp. Qualifying it as a “premiere” was the fact that the dramatic text was Pushkin’s uncut, uncensored original 1825 version of Boris Godunov (all twenty-fi ve scenes), rehearsed (incompletely) by Vsevolod Meyerhold, with music that Sergei Prokofi ev wrote in 1936 specifi cally for this play but which had never been heard in its proper context. Th e Princeton production was still a “concept,” however, and not a revival or a historical restoration — because like so much else prepared for the Pushkin Death Centennial of 1937, this musicalized play never got to opening night. It remained a partially assembled torso. Th is Pushkin Review forum hopes to capture some of the excitement of Princeton’s creative- restorative project, which Simon Morrison (Professor of Music and Princeton’s Prokofi ev scholar) and I co-managed for much of 2006–07. For me it was the culmination of thirty years’ thinking about Pushkin’s play, topped by that unprecedented dream come true: seeing and hearing the whole play live, and alive, in more dimensions than Pushkin could have ever dreamed of on stage. First, some background to the original Russian collaboration. In the spring of 1936, Meyerhold accepted a commission to produce Boris Godunov for the Pushkin Jubilee. He persuaded an initially reluctant Prokofi ev, just repatriated to Moscow from Paris, to provide a score. Twenty-four pieces of music were eventually composed, the acting company did extensive tablework, and Meyerhold passionately — even obsessively — rehearsed half-a-dozen scenes. Th is was the director’s third attempt to put Pushkin’s drama on stage. Th e fi rst was a studio workshop in set design conducted during the Civil War years 1918–19, from which a sequence of provocative sketches survive. Th e second was for the Vakhtangov Th eater in 1924–25, from which memoirs survive. By 1936, Meyerhold’s excitement was at fever pitch: at last he could provide practical evidence that “Pushkin was not only a remarkable dramatist but also a dramatist-director and the initiator of a new dramatic system.”1 But by May 1 In this same note from 1936, Meyerhold advised his company to “always start your day by reading some Pushkin, even if only two or three brief pages.” See Aleksandr Gladkov, — 363 — ------------------------------------ PART III. MUSICALIZING THE LITERARY CLASSICS ----------------------------------- 1937 the Boris rehearsals had dwindled to nothing and the production was abandoned. On December 17 of that year, Kerzhentsev’s article “An Alien Th eater” [“Chuzhoi teatr”] appeared in Pravda, denouncing Meyerhold’s repertory as “presenting classic plays in a crooked formalist mirror.”2 In early January 1938 the Meyerhold Th eater was closed, construction on his new building near Mayakovsky Square was halted, and although the director’s career temporarily stabilized and even appeared to rally, the end of the story is the familiar chronicle of the Terror consuming its greatest talent. On June 20, 1939, Meyerhold was arrested on charges of Trotskyite espionage in a spy ring with British and Japanese intelligence. After torture and forced confession (followed by a recantation of the confession), he was executed by fi ring squad on February 1, 1940. Prokofi ev left no record of his response to this loss of his collaborator and did not refer to Meyerhold again in his diaries. Prokofi ev had accepted three large-scale, high-profi le orchestral commis- sions for the Pushkin Jubilee: incidental music for a stage adaptation, by Sigiz- mund Krzhizhanovsky, of Evgenii Onegin for Tairov’s Moscow Chamber Th eater; the score for a fi lmed version of Th e Queen of Spades, to be directed by Mikhail Romm; and this commission for Meyerhold’s staging of Boris Godunov. Prokofi ev also composed three Pushkin Romances, and he briefl y considered setting Mozart and Salieri. Neither the theatrical productions nor the fi lm were ever realized, apparently for reasons unrelated to the music. Tairov, Romm, and Meyerhold were censured for creative transgressions of a more general sort during this increasingly cautious year, and these three experimental projects unraveled. Th e surviving rehearsal transcripts of the abandoned Boris suggest that Meyerhold wanted the acting to be energetic, with overlapping scenes and minimal barriers between auditorium and stage. Th e play would be saturated with music, both of the “diegetic” sort (music heard inside the story space) and a more fl exible “mood music” illustrating thoughts or fantasies. One of Prokofi ev’s major anxieties throughout his Jubilee work was how to avoid the sound of the canonized “operatic Pushkin” (Musorgsky for Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky for Evgenii Onegin). His practice was to compose a “looser” score of discrete musical modules that could be repeated and recombined at the director’s discretion. In November 1936, the composer completed a piano score that featured drunken singing, ballroom dancing (a polonaise and mazurka), Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, ed. and trans. Alma Law (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 141. 2 “Khronika strashnykh dnei: ‘Chuzhoi teatr’ (17 dekabria 1937),” in Ar’ye Elkana, Meierkhol’d (Tel Aviv, 1991), 366–70, esp. 367. — 364 — --------------------------------------- 20. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY’S BORIS GODUNOV -------------------------------------- a reverie, and an amoroso in the style of fi lm music. Th ese vibrant and gaudy show pieces were punctuated by two laments (one for Ksenia, another for the Holy Fool — both to Pushkin’s words), a sing-along for blind beggars, three behind-the-scenes choruses, and four songs of loneliness. Russia, musically, is an a capella place; people hum or moan rather than sing to orchestral accompaniment. Th e battle music for scene 17 is a musical equivalent of the macaronic mix of three languages in Pushkin’s text, a percussive clash of three diff erently tuned ensembles performed at incompatible tempi: one for Boris’s “Asiatic” troops and one for the Pretender’s Polish/“Western” forces, each interrupted by German mercenaries. In the Berlind Th eater, these local brass bands were stationed in diff erent parts of the hall. A challenge to the collaborators was to achieve the eff ect of narod bezmolvstvuet [the people are silent] at the end, for Meyerhold was keen to attach this canonized 1830 stage direction to the full 1825 play. A hummed male chorus representing the dark, menacing rumble of the crowd was to swell throughout the fi nal scenes “like the roar of the sea” — and then subside.
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