Are the Tsars out tonight?

Stephen Wadsworth‘s vision of Boris Godunov will be more limited than Peter Stein‘s—at least so far as timing goes. Though the original director’s version would not have run anything near as long as his 12 hour Devils on Governor’s Island last summer, Wadsworth found a way to make the production both lighter in weight and about 15 minutes shorter from curtain to curtain.

Last night at “Met Talks” Wadsworth said that the first thing on his mind on his rushed trip to Baden-Baden and Salzburg that he made in July after he accepted Mr. Gelb’s assignment to replace Stein, was to reduce the time for the scene changes. In Baden Baden he caught up with Valery Gergiev and Rene Pape who, as it happened, were performing that night, including a scene from Boris. In Salzburg he had lunch with the set designer Ferdinand Wogerbauer and a process between director and designer which can and desirably should take two years has been completed in two months and a bit. (Ferdinand was on the panel too and seemed to defer to Stephen.)

The shop held everything until the new instructions arrived. Some of the set elements will be lighter and will be flown instead of rolled. Stein’s conception may have had massive set elements but it presented spare surfaces in which the singers would predominate, a sparseness that has been retained as depicted in slides flashed on the fire curtain behind the speakers.

“I hope there will be stairs for him to fall down when he dies,” whispered Companion, remembering those spectacular Talvela tumbles of yore. It remains to be seen, after all we didn’t know the Rainbow Bridge was missing on Monday, just thought it was a Beckettian take on the hollowness of glory when the gods walked into the wings.

Gergiev was there on the panel too and said of the original Mussorgsky orchestration being used—considered “crude, crude, untutored” in the past—even portions that he questioned twenty years ago he now finds further examples of genius. (Crude maybe, but untutored in these snese of European music in 1869 is/was the point.) He has conducted the opera in the original 1869 version which omits the scene with Marina, Dmitri and the Jesuit Rangoni; without this scene the opera becomes a study in guilt, with Boris at the center. With the Polish scene a strong political dimension is added which gives the work its epic character—as indeed Pushkin’s play on which it is based does in spades. Marina has on her mind the throne of Russia as does Dmitri, they are hot for each other for reasons of state. Whole countries and peoples are at play in the extended drama. The people are protagonists.

Wadsworth knows the Met chorus and loves working with them, he said: there will be 120 of them in this production and 20 (or did he say 30?) supers. Everyone praised the cast who we were told were down on level C for a sitzprobe—at 7:30 the fire curtain rose a bit; Gergiev said, “that’s for me” and ducked under it to head downstairs. (Reminder: young Ekaterina Semenchuk who sand Didon so marvelously last winter at Carnegie is to be Marina.)

If anyone thinks that the inclusion of the Polish scene is innovative, what peculiarly enough, no one said, was that it has been included in every Met production since the 50s which is where I began. Back then we had the Rimsky-Korsakov orchestration. Under Chapin we had the Shostakovich orchestration, and in the last revival of that Everding-Ming Cho Lee production, we had the Mussorgsky orchestration and in addition to the Polish scene the St. Basil scene (when the fool challenges Boris with his deceit) and the Kromy Forest scene (remember all those logs?) Both of those wonders will be included in this production.

Once experienced, Boris is for always. That lean orchestration brings it to our today ears far more intensively than the R-K or D.S. lushness would. As for me, I rejoice in the gloom.