A different Boris Godunov in Boston

[Hugh Olmsted]

Dear colleagues,

This is to bring to your attention an historic musical event connnected
with early Russian studies.

The opera Boris Goudenow (1710), by Johann Mattheson, is to receive its
world premier at the Boston Early Music Festival, June, 2005
(http://www.bemf.org/pages/festEx.htm)
June 14, 16, 18, and 19,
Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College
219 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

This performance will be the centerpiece of the 2005 Boston Early Music
Festival, whose general theme is "East meets West: Germany, Russia and
the Baltic States."

Mattheson's opera, which has never before been performed, is a work
totally separate from the familiar Pushkin - Mussorgskii drama and
opera.  The degree of this difference can be judged from a glimpse at
the plot.  After the death of Czar Theodorus Ivanowitz [sic], a lengthy
tale unfolds of alliances, love triangles, intrigue, the antics of a
hedonistic comic servant, Bogda, and one banishment.  At the
culmination Boris is crowned and announces a general amnesty.  With the
new Czar's blessing, various couples, their names only partly familiar
to us, are united or reunited: Axinia and Gavust, Ivan and Olga, Irina
and Fedro.  In a lively final Chaconne, everyone celebrates the
omnipotence and generosity of Cupid.

Based on historical descriptions deriving from the Swedish traveller,
Peter Petreus (Regni Muscowitici Sciographia, Stockholm, 1615) and the
derivative retelling by S. Erasmus Francisci (Acerra
exoticorum...Frankfurt, 1672-74); cf. D. Tschizewskij (Zeitschr. f.
slav. Philol XXX [1962]-2:237-42), this version concentrates just on
the period of Fedor Ivanovich's death and the events leading up to
Boris's accession to the throne.

Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) was one of Northern Europe's leading
composers, directors, and theorists in the 18th-century, and mentor to
the younger Georg Frideric Handel.  He was well known as a writer about
music; but since any of his actual compositions were few and little
known, modern music historians have not until recently been able to
assess Mattheson's actual creative musical talent.

At the composer's death in 1764 the score of Boris, never performed
during the composer's lifetime, was among a collection of 41
autographed scores of his compositions all left to the Hamburg
Stadtbibliothek; and there it lay, occasionally studied but still
unperformed, well into the 20th century.

During the cataclysms of World War II the Hamburg Library was
destroyed.  The Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians records the
following painful conclusion about Mattheson's works:  "unless
otherwise stated [in individual exceptional instances], all presumed
lost in the destruction of the Hamburg Library."  In a similar vein,
the eminent musicologist Hellmuth Christian Wolff wrote in his 1957
book on the Hamburg Opera, Die Barockoper in Hamburg (1678-1738), "When
I undertook this work in the years between 1938-1941, I had no idea
that ... the musical examples from many operas which I had transcribed
would be the only remains of the then rich sources of the Hamburg
Opera.  Irreplaceable is the loss of the entire manuscript section of
the Library of Hamburg.  Among the most painful losses are almost all
the scores of Johann Mattheson, in particular his Boris Goudenow."

However, as the post-cold war thaw released more and more of the tabus
and secrets of the wartime and cold-war eras, it became known that not
all the Hamburg Library's collections had necessarily been destroyed;
that not long before the bombing of Hamburg, the State Library had sent
its most valuable manuscripts to a castle near Dresden for
safe-keeping.  It was also ascertained that after the war Russian
soldiers had transferred the collection to St. Petersburg, and that
further, many of the most precious volumes had, through the
intervention of an Armenian musicologist, found their way specifically
to Erevan.  When the collection in Erevan was located, it proved to
contain a body of 565 manuscripts, including 31 of the original 41
autographed scores of the operas and oratorios of Johannn Mattheson.
And the score of Boris Goudenow was discovered to be among them!  In
1998 the score of Boris was returned to Hamburg.  The opera proves to
be a real masterpiece, newly establishing Mattheson's place as a
composer of the highest order.

For general information about the festival, including links to details
about the opera, the festival and exhibition, the large number of
concurrent events, and ticket purchase, the BEMF web site is:
https://www.bemf.org.

Hugh Olmsted
Slavic Specialist, Harvard College Library, ret.
    Notes based on materials on the BEMF web site
(http://www.bemf.org/pages/festEx.htm) and on other sources.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------