In Salzburg

The version of Khovanshchina that Mussorgsky left behind when he died was as messy as the history it depicts. He began working on the opera in 1872, the bicentennial of Peter the Great’s birth. For the Russian state it was an occasion to mark how far the country had come in two centuries. Mussorgsky was more pessimistic: ‘“We’ve gone forward,” they say,’ he wrote that summer to the critic Vladimir Stasov. ‘I say: “We haven’t moved!”’

Khovanshchina, a score with at times confounding stillness, was a musical and theatrical representation of the stasis that Mussorgsky observed. Tasking himself to point out ‘the present in the past’, he began collecting source material for a historical epic. The plot he created with Stasov covers the turbulent period of Russian history from the death of Tsar Fyodor III in 1682, when nine-year-old Peter assumed the throne with his older half-brother Ivan, to Ivan’s death in 1696. In the time between nine-year-old Peter’s coronation and the moment he assumed full control of the empire, several factions vied for power. Uneasy alliances formed and fractured. Revolts led to mass torture and executions.

All of this, to Mussorgsky’s eyes, had very clear continuities with the present. ‘This is a time of secrecy, lies, treachery and profiteering, and we tremble every minute of our useless lives,’ one of Khovanshchina’s soloists sings. There are more than a dozen characters, who all tend to talk past one another. The third act (of five) features a negotiation between the progressive aristocrat Golitsyn, the reactionary traditionalist Ivan Khovansky and the schismatic Old Believer Dosifei. It quickly turns into a shouting match in contrasting musical styles. The scene is a good example, as the composer and musicologist Gerard McBurney wrote in 1994, of the way Mussorgsky uses music ‘not as a means of engaging our sympathies with the characters onstage, but as an instrument for the dissection and exposure of the living tissue of lies and deceit that joins the different characters together’.

Mussorgsky’s alcoholism caught up with him before he could finish Khovanshchina. At the time of his death in 1881 he had completed a piano score but hadn’t begun the orchestration. He was also still working out the final act, where, after Golitsyn is exiled and Khovansky is killed, the Old Believers opt for martyrdom by self-immolation in protest against the tsar, whom they view as the Antichrist. Several other composers tried to finish the opera, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich and (together) Stravinsky and Ravel, but there is no definitive version. One common approach today is to use Shostakovich’s orchestration but with the finale by Stravinsky and Ravel. This was never going to lead to a coherent opera, but part of Khovanshchina’s appeal is its messiness. The first time I saw it performed, in 2012, I had no idea what I’d just heard, but was transfixed.

A new version of Khovanshchina, reimagined by Gerard McBurney, uses the Shostakovich/Stravinsky-Ravel pairing but also includes a page of recently discovered vocal fragments, written in Mussorgsky’s hand, which provides a bridge from Shostakovich’s score to the final chorus.

McBurney worked too with the sound designer Tuomas Norivo to create a larger soundscape for the entire opera. The final orchestral chord in one scene, for instance, is stretched out until it resembles something between an air raid siren and a drone. When I heard the premiere of this version last summer at the Helsinki Festival, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the final chorus dissipated into the crackling of flames, as if the audience were part of the Old Believers’ immolation.

In that concert, the new score fragments sounded slight to me. In a fully staged concept for the Salzburg Easter Festival last month, however, directed by Gerard’s brother Simon McBurney – with Salonen again conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra – they reshaped the whole thrust of the work. Many contemporary directors of Khovanshchina have paid lip service to Mussorgsky’s aim to find the present in the past, usually by making visual references to current Russian politics. Claus Guth’s production last year for the Berlin Staatsoper, for example, featured a contemporary Kremlin office and nods to Putin’s germophobia.

Simon McBurney goes further, offering a visual experience as immersive as Norivo’s soundscapes. True, the Streltsy could easily be Wagner Group mercenaries, and Khovansky (Vitalij Kowaljow) wears the gilded camp of New Oligarch chic. But when he sings of his ambition to restore Russia to its former glory, the line is translated in the supertitles as ‘We’ll make Russia great again.’ In other scenes he’s trailed by a lackey wearing a horned fur hat like the ‘QAnon shaman’, a reference that should land even more decisively as and when this production is performed at the Met.

Other characters, such as Golitsyn (Matthew White) and Shaklovity, move more subtly in tailored suits and minimalist offices, but are no less tainted. As Shaklovity, a fellow progressive who eventually kills Khovansky, Daniel Okulitch offered a masterclass in sinister diplomacy while playing a politician with the staying power of a cockroach. (‘I’m the devil’s advocate,’ he tells a minor character. ‘But in the end, he’s a total idiot,’ they respond in an aside.)

The Old Believers, Dosifei (Ain Anger) and his follower Marfa (Nadezhda Karyazina), seem less bent on seizing power than surviving religious persecution. Marfa’s greatest sin, in her own telling, was a brief love affair with Khovansky’s dissolute son, Andrei (Thomas Atkins). Yet the fragments of score discovered by Gerard McBurney complicate this interpretation. At the end of the opera, with his father dead and the Streltsy facing torture and execution, Andrei joins Marfa and the other Old Believers on their funeral pyre, apparently moved by their devotion and the chance to die with some agency. He approaches the pyre with fear – this isn’t a deathbed conversion – and Marfa sings: ‘I will not let you go. I will burn in the fire with you.’

The new fragments indicate that Mussorgsky had planned to do more with this introduction to the final scene. His sketches show an Andrei more resistant to dying with Marfa, with more outbursts and moments of delusion. Marfa’s repeated words meanwhile come to sound more like a threat than a promise, a fulfilment of her own wish to die with the lover who abandoned her. In a true crisis, Mussorgsky seems to be saying, there are no simple heroes.

Simon McBurney’s staging emphasises this. Andrei, at one point unable to walk as he drifts in and out of lucidity, is dragged across the stage by Marfa. At the end, he’s too heavy for her to move into the church where the rest of the Old Believers have assembled. We hear the final chorus offstage, disembodied, as ashes drift onto the pair. Marfa is distraught, frantically burying Andrei’s unconscious body in dirt and ash as the opera fades. Unlike in the concert version, the soundscape doesn’t end in the crackle of flames but with the slow, glacial vibrations that opened the work – a deep, planetary groan (Mussorgsky complained of Russian bureaucrats ploughing ‘the black earth’ for centuries without giving it a chance to breathe).

The Old Believers saw Peter the Great’s rise to power as a sign of the impending apocalypse, and their deaths as a way of reaching salvation. As Caryl Emerson wrote in 1994, their death is a victory that the audience is excluded from: ‘We are the ones walled out and left behind.’ In last year’s concert performance in Finland – a country with its own historic struggles to break free from Russian imperialism and a renewed threat of invasion – it felt right to bring the audience into the fold.

But eight months and two thousand kilometres make a difference. Last September, a far-right party topped the ballot in Austria’s parliamentary elections for the first time since the Second World War. In December, the day after the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, the federal government announced plans to deport Syrian refugees. The past is in the present everywhere in Austria, not least in Salzburg, where the Easter Festival was founded by Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi Party twice to preserve his career.

Simon McBurney seemed to have all this in mind in his staging. It seems right to wall out the audience at the end, and Marfa with them. The tragedy of history isn’t always about those who die; it’s also about those who have to keep living through it.