Opening Berwaldhallen’s 2024 Baltic Sea Festival , on August 24th, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gerard McBurney produced a tastefully contemporary and neo-Wagnerian rendition of Modest Mussorgsky’s unfinished “national music drama,” “Khovanshchina ,” to a ravenous public. Awarded, and rightly so, with three ovations, ten soloists from across Europe and three choirs successfully produced one of the most expressive versions of Mussorgsky’s work I’ve ever heard. Complete with lighting and sound effects, opera history achieved an exciting next chapter.
A Bit of a Backstory The opera which typifies the war for the soul of Russia, a war which remains unsolved to this very day, a war which has found its way into the affairs of nearly every country on Earth, Modest Mussorgsky’s first of two unfinished operatic works is nothing short of immortal. Titled, “ Khovanshchina ,” the name translating to a satirical-cum-ironic essentialism of Prince Ivan Andreyevich Khovansky’s attempted arrest of Tsarist power in 1862, dubbed the ‘ Moscow uprising ,’ the work became something of a ‘Black Horse’ upon the face of Russian (operatic) history. Not only was it left incomplete at the time of Mussorgsky’s death on March 28, 1881 but, like other unfinished works like Alexander Borodin’s opera, “ Prince Igor” among many others, certain colleagues, in other words Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, took upon themselves to not only hijack the work but fully rework it.
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