OT: A Lost 'Boris Godunov' Is Found and Staged
Wade Hampton Miller
fascinating news.
whm
>From today's NY Times website:
A Lost 'Boris Godunov' Is Found and Staged
By PATRICIA COHEN
PRINCETON, N.J., April 8 - In 1936, two of the Soviet Union's greatest
artists decided to work on a new theatrical production of Pushkin's
"Boris Godunov" for its author's coming jubilee. Sergei Prokofiev
wrote 24 musical pieces while the visionary stage director Vsevolod
Meyerhold mapped out scenes and started rehearsals. The following
year, Stalin's terror fixed its gaze on Meyerhold and he abandoned the
project. Three years later, he was dead, shot by a firing squad.
Now, thanks to the recent discovery of Meyerhold's original notes and
Prokofiev's handwritten score and comments, their collaboration is
finally having its world premiere on Thursday night at the Berlind
Theater at Princeton University, 70 years after its planned opening.
This mammoth undertaking by Princeton, in conjunction with the Russian
State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow, rescues a production
that artists and scholars thought was lost forever. The four sold-out
performances will also introduce Meyerhold, a seminal theatrical
thinker, to an audience largely ignorant of his work.
"I was fairly stunned and I continue to be stunned," said Simon
Morrison, an associate professor of music at Princeton, who excavated
Meyerhold's notes in 2005 from a sealed section of the Russian
archive, to which he managed to gain access. Mr. Morrison, who is
writing a book about Prokofiev, said: "This is one of the scores that
he composed in the '30s when he was at the top of his game, and it
went to waste. He never heard it in his lifetime."
"Boris" ran afoul of the government long before Prokofiev and
Meyerhold got a hold of it. Pushkin's play - about the 16th-century
tyrannical czar Boris Godunov, and Dimitri, a pretender to the throne
- "is very seditious," said Caryl Emerson, chairwoman of Princeton's
Slavic languages and literature department, who is overseeing the
project with Mr. Morrison.
This production, which is using a new English translation by Antony
Wood, is the first in which all 25 scenes that Pushkin wrote are being
performed together, Ms. Emerson said. "It combines three geniuses of
Russian culture," she said. "Pushkin, Prokofiev and Meyerhold, the
poet, the composer and the stage director."
Modest Mussorgsky used Pushkin's play as a source for his fabulously
successful opera "Boris Godunov." But Prokofiev and Meyerhold were
contemptuous of what they considered that work's thick, syrupy,
optimistic and romantic score. Meyerhold, for example, envisioned the
final scene with a choral sound for the crowd that was "dark,
agitated, menacing, like the roar of the sea." He wrote, "One should
feel a gathering of forces, the restraining of an internal rage."
Mussorgsky's was a 19th-century sound, Mr. Morrison said, "Prokofiev
was the first to get at the 20th-century sound."
Meyerhold gave Prokofiev detailed instructions about the kind of
orchestral and choral music he wanted and which scenes it would go in.
Those notes, along with Prokofiev's manuscript, descriptions of the
work in various memoirs and Meyerhold's rehearsal transcripts, guided
this production. "This is an original creation based on some of his
ideas," Tim Vasen, the production's director, said, referring to
Meyerhold. "It's an amazing collaboration with someone who's not in
the room."
Since Meyerhold often worked with architects, Mr. Morrison asked
Princeton's Architecture School to design the set. Graduate students
came up with rows of floor-to-ceiling bungee cords made out of
stretchy surgical tubing (3,750 feet in all) set along grooves that
run across the stage. The cords can be arranged to suggest trees in a
forest, pulled and snapped like bows and arrows during a battle scene
or wrapped around a character's body to evoke emotions like anger or
frustration. The set is remarkably flexible, though it did prevent the
choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, from using pointe steps, because the
dancers' toe shoes kept getting stuck in the grooves.
For a scene set at a Polish ball, Meyerhold wrote that he wanted a
"full orchestra in a social setting performing three numbers,
'Reverie,' 'Polonaise,' and 'Mazurka,' " which Prokofiev composed. Mr.
Vasen has placed some of the musicians and the conductor, Michael
Pratt, onstage. Wearing 18th-century-style wigs that look like neon-
colored cotton candy, the musicians are stacked on levels behind a
giant red window frame, like an extended "Hollywood Squares" set.
Although he originally worked with Stanislavski, Meyerhold came to
disdain the naturalistic method of acting, preferring much more
stylized, physical movement that he developed into a system called
Biomechanics. He drew on a wide range of influences, from Kabuki to
Frederick Taylor's time-motion studies, to create theater that would
dissolve the wall between actor and audience.
An enthusiastic revolutionary, Meyerhold initially found his "people's
theater" embraced by the Bolsheviks. But by the 1930s, Socialist
Realism had become the approved revolutionary aesthetic, and
Meyerhold's avant-garde, cinematic style was considered subversive.
Mr. Vasen, with advice from Mr. Morrison and Ms. Emerson, has
incorporated these ideas into the play. Marina, the Polish princess
with whom Dimitri falls in love, stands rigid, arms at her sides,
wrists bent at 90-degree angles like a mannequin while her suitor
professes his undying love. To accompany her command to "Reveal your
heart to me," Prokofiev wrote an "Amoroso" that was inspired by the
cheap, trashy soundtracks of 1930s Hollywood melodramas.
During the battle scenes, Mr. Vasen uses one of Meyerhold's physical
warm-up exercises - a rhythmic, mechanized toe-to-heel step - for the
soldiers' march. Prokofiev composed what Mr. Morrison calls a "musical
cartoon," using carnival rhythms and the fife and drum. During Sunday
night's rehearsal, the line of soldiers, wearing helmets like the Tin
Man's in "The Wizard of Oz," clumped toward the edge of the stage, and
then pivoted. One went a couple of inches too far and accidentally
fell off the stage before quickly scrambling back up. After the scene,
Mr. Morrison shouted up to a few musicians perched on a balcony to
slow down the tempo.
Harlow Robinson, who wrote a biography of Prokofiev and is a professor
at Northeastern University in Boston, said of the Princeton production
that it was "certainly significant to be hearing and seeing it all
together." The original aborted production "promised to be very
brilliant."
A Russian television crew from the state-run Channel 1 was scheduled
to film Tuesday night's dress rehearsal and explain to viewers how it
is that this essentially Russian work is being first performed in New
Jersey. In Russia, Pushkin is more often read than performed,
particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, which ended state
subsidies and introduced artistic freedom.
>From Mr. Morrison and Ms. Emerson's perspective, only a university
with resources like Princeton's could afford such an undertaking. The
15 actors (who play 70 parts), 10 dancers, 24 choral singers and 35
musicians are all undergraduates. "The entire campus became a kind of
creative workshop, an atelier," Mr. Morrison said.
Many are taking part in the play as part of an academic course. On
Thursday, a three-day symposium begins with Russian and other
scholars, and there is an exhibition of materials from the period at
the Firestone Library on campus here. Putting on the four performances
is costing an estimated $140,000, Mr. Morrison said. The performances
are sold out, but he said there was a chance some seats would become
available before curtain time. There are also free tickets to
Wednesday night's dress rehearsal that may become available 20 minutes
before the 8 p.m. start.
For Mr. Morrison, "one of the great tragedies of musical history is
what happened to Prokofiev's art." Only half of what Prokofiev
composed is known; the rest was unpublished, altered or lost, he said.
Though Prokofiev's music for "Boris" has been recorded, Mr. Morrison
said, "the music doesn't make sense without the words." Now, after
seeing this production, he said he felt as if the "words don't make
sense without the music."
Mark & Steven Bornfeld
Saw this yesterday in the paper. I love discoveries like this, esp.
when scores and manuscripts are found in grandma's bureau. Thanks for
posting this.
Steve
--
Mark & Steven Bornfeld DDS
http://www.dentaltwins.com
Brooklyn, NY
718-258-5001