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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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1/27/04
Boris Gudunov
Reviewed by Laurel Kenner
Boris Gudunov was written in 1868-9, the two years
after the composition of the Blue Danube.
But unlike the optimistic Strauss piece, which served to cheer the Viennese
after a big Austrian defeat by the Prussians, Mussorgsky's is a work of
nationalist despair.
Boris Gudunov is regarded not only as Mussorgsky's masterpiece, but as among the
best works by the group of Russian composers to which he belonged --
Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev, Cui. Their Russia was a backwater -- no
music conservatory in the entire country, no opportunity for higher musical
education. Nevertheless, these amateurs proved that anybody with a fine ear and
musical
flair can write music of the highest order without benefit of traditional
training in counterpoint, orchestration and harmony. They succeeded by
approaching all these things empirically (a familiar process to Specs).
Governmental meddling and censorship forced Mussorgsky to rewrite his original
score to include a big female lead (I found it as disharmonious as a pig at a
ball) and to censor himself (the original Pushkin play had been condemned by
Tsar Nicolas I as anti-monarchical and anti-clerical. And it is -- one of the
best scenes is a drunken monk inveighing against sin and corruption, illustratedby the citizenry's propensity to be stingy with the contributions: "No money
for God." Tsar Boris Gudunov himself was a murdering, lying wretch.
Austria went on to produce Arnold Schoenberg, while the Soviet Union had the
Stalinesque grotesqueries of the Shostakovich 5th symphony. But thank goodness
that courtesy of the optimistic Mr. Strauss we still dance to the Blue Danube.
-- Laurel (Metropolitan Opera performance of Jan. 27, 2004)