Mussorgsky Operas
Answers for CZAR IN A MUSSORGSKY OPERA crossword clue. Search for crossword clues found in the NY Times, Daily Celebrity, Daily Mirror, Telegraph and major publications. Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, 1870 The following is a list of compositions by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.
During this extraordinary and difficult time, the Met hopes to brighten the lives of our audience members even while our stage is dark. Each day, a different encore presentation from the company's Live in HD series is being made available for free streaming on the Met website, with each performance available for a period of 23 hours, from 7:30 p.m. EDT until 6:30 p.m. the following day. The schedule will include outstanding complete performances from the past 14 years of cinema transmissions, starring all of opera's greatest singers.
The streams are also available through the Met Opera on Demand apps for Apple, Amazon, and Roku devices and Samsung Smart TV. To access them without logging in, click 'Browse and Preview' in the apps for connected TV, and 'Explore the App' on tablets and mobile devices.
Met Stars Live in Concert
If you enjoy the Nightly Opera Streams, be sure not to miss our acclaimed pay-per-view concert series, presenting opera's greatest stars performing live via satellite from striking locations across Europe and the U.S.
Mussorgsky Czarist Opera Crossword Clue
Support the Met and Protect its Future
Hundreds of thousands of people have been tuning in daily to our free performance streams, and many of them have kindly been asking how they can help the Met during this economically perilous time. In response, we have added a 'Donate Now' button below. We thank you for your help.
Or, donate by text message: Text METOPERA to 44321 in the U.S. or 1-917-999-0700 for other countries. Standard text messaging rates apply.
UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Each stream becomes available at 7:30PM ET and remains accessible for on-demand viewing until 6:30PM ET the following day, with the exception of the May 7 stream of Wozzeck, which will be available until May 8 at 12PM ET. The May 8 stream of Madama Butterfly will begin at the normally scheduled 7:30PM ET.
Week 60
Happy Mother's Day
Monday, May 3
Strauss's Elektra
Starring Nina Stemme, Adrianne Pieczonka, Waltraud Meier, and Eric Owens, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Production by Patrice Chéreau. From April 30, 2016.
Tuesday, May 4
Handel'sRodelinda
Starring Renée Fleming, Stephanie Blythe, Andreas Scholl, Joseph Kaiser, and Shenyang, conducted by Harry Bicket. Production by Stephen Wadsworth. From December 3, 2011.
Wednesday, May 5
Thomas's Hamlet
Starring Marlis Petersen, Jennifer Larmore, Simon Keenlyside, and James Morris, conducted by Louis Langrée. Production by Patrice Caurier & Moshe Leiser. From March 27, 2010.
Thursday, May 6
Bellini's Norma
Starring Sondra Radvanovsky, Joyce DiDonato, Joseph Calleja, and Matthew Rose, conducted by Carlo Rizzi. Production by Sir David McVicar. From October 7, 2017.
Friday, May 7
Berg's Wozzeck
Starring Elza van den Heever, Tamara Mumford, Christopher Ventris, Gerhard Siegel, Andrew Staples, Peter Mattei, and Christian Van Horn, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Production by William Kentridge. From January 11, 2020.
Saturday, May 8
Puccini's Madama Butterfly
Starring Patricia Racette, Maria Zifchak, Marcello Giordani, and Dwayne Croft, conducted by Patrick Summers. Production by Anthony Minghella. From March 7, 2009.
Sunday, May 9
Handel's Agrippina
Starring Brenda Rae, Joyce DiDonato, Kate Lindsey, Iestyn Davies, Duncan Rock, and Matthew Rose, conducted by Harry Bicket. Production by Sir David McVicar. From February 29, 2020. Camtasia video not showing free.
Week 61
National Council Auditions Alumni Week
Monday, May 10
Puccini's La Bohème
Starring Teresa Stratas, Renata Scotto, José Carreras, Richard Stilwell, and James Morris, conducted by James Levine. Production by Franco Zeffirelli. From January 16, 1982.
Tuesday, May 11
Mozart's Don Giovanni
Starring Carol Vaness, Karita Mattila, Dawn Upshaw, Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey, Ferrucio Furlanetto, and Kurt Moll, conducted by James Levine. Production by Franco Zeffirelli. From April 5, 1990.
Wednesday, May 12
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
Starring Jane Eaglen, Katarina Dalayman, Ben Heppner, Hans-Joachim Ketelsen, and René Pape, conducted by James Levine. Production by Dieter Dorn. From December 18, 1999.
Thursday, May 13
Strauss'sDer Rosenkavalier
Starring Renée Fleming, Christine Schäfer, Susan Graham, Eric Cutler, Thomas Allen, and Kristinn Sigmundsson, conducted by Edo de Waart. Production by Nathaniel Merrill. From January 9, 2010.
Friday, May 14
The Audition
This feature-length documentary takes you behind the scenes of the Met's National Council Auditions, in which, each year, thousands of hopefuls compete for a cash prize, the chance to sing on the Met stage—and the opportunity to launch a major operatic career. Directed by Susan Froemke.
Saturday, May 15
Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia
Starring Isabel Leonard, Lawrence Brownlee, Christopher Maltman, Maurizo Muraro, and Paata Burchuladze, conducted by Michele Mariotti. Production by Bartlett Sher. From November 22, 2014.
Sunday, May 16
Donizetti's Roberto Devereux
Starring Sondra Radvanovsky, Elīna Garanča, Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecień, conducted by Maurizio Benini. Production by Sir David McVicar. From April 16, 2016.
Mussorgsky Opera Boris
Russia's chief domestic product, it sometimes seems, is suffering. The Russians have had plenty of it. The total American mortality in all our wars is still less than a million. But the loss of Russian life between 1914 and 1945 alone— through foreign and civil war, famine, and the gulag— was between 50 and 60 million. That's equivalent to one-third of Russia's population in 1914.
The 17th Century wasn't a very happy time in Russia either; and if the loss of life was far less then, that was because the population was less than a tenth of its early 20th-Century level. Modest Mussorgsky chose this period as the setting of both Boris Gudonov and Khovanshchina, and if the latter is only his second best opera, that still makes it the second best Russian opera ever written.
Khovanshchina's relative lack of exposure outside Russia stems from several factors. It was left incomplete at Mussorgsky's death, and the rather awkward disposition of its major plot lines in the final scenes leaves a sense of abortive development and resolution.
A deeper issue is its lack of a dominant character, as in Boris; the protagonist is really Russia itself, whose agony is projected in the great waves of choral song that render this work unique in the annals of opera but leave it, ultimately, more spectacle than drama.
Taste for fatalism
It's not that Mussorgsky's psychological penetration is any less acute in Khovanshchina La vestale. , but simply that his individual characters are swamped by circumstances beyond their control and seem doomed, whatever their efforts. In a work that lasts four hours long, such a plot requires a certain taste for fatalism.
The issue is compounded by the fact that Khovanshchina contains relatively few arias of the sort that Western operagoers relish. Mussorgsky projects his text and powerfully clothes it, but he rarely embellishes it. This approach makes for a strikingly modern kind of music drama, but it provides few vocal cushions.
In Boris, this text-centered musical language propels the tragic action forward. But in Khovanshchina, although its individual characters meet certainly tragic, not to say appalling, ends, we have a sense of being pulled toward a larger center of suffering that's beyond personal destiny and beyond redemption, too— at least in this life.
That's not a vision theater patrons wish to confront too often. It's the reason why we see more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than of King Lear.
Anarchic rebellion
The plot of Khovanshchina— loosely, The Khovansky Affair— is briefly told. The blustery Ivan Khovansky (bass Anatoli Kotscherga, in his Met debut) heads rather than leads the quasi-anarchic rebellion of his guard, the Streltsy, against the child co-tsars Ivan and Peter. He clashes with the Westernizing Prince Golitsyn (Vladimir Galouzine), who is the lover of the Regent Sophia but otherwise without a base of support.
In a subplot, Khovansky's dissolute son Andrei (Misha Didyk) jilts his loyal fiancée, Marfa (Olga Borodina), an adherent of the persecuted sect of Old Believers led by the charismatic priest Dosifei (Ildar Abdrazakov). Khovansky is assassinated after a bacchanal (rather tamely staged here); Golitsyn is sent into exile; and the Old Believers, Marfa included, immolate themselves in the opera's final scene.
Only the Streltsy, certainly the most culpable party, are spared at the last moment. But such arbitrariness, as Mussorgsky darkly suggests, is the essence of tsardom itself.
Unlike Boris, where the tsar dominates the stage, neither Ivan nor Peter (the future Peter the Great) appears; rather, it's the idea of tsardom itself— remote, unaccountable and absolute— that haunts the stage. The tsar is at once Russia's only hope and its certain doom. What then is Russia itself but a fatality?
Modernity vs. messiah
Tsarism was still absolute in Mussorgsky's time, although Western influence was growing pronounced, and change was in the wind. The figure of Golitsyn was a stand-in for contemporary modernizers, while Khovansky and the Old Believers represented different elements of 19th-Century conservatism.
The latter in particular (although long extinct as a movement) exemplified the persistent strain of Russian messianism that saw the land and its people as divinely chosen, and destined to testify by martyrdom. Such attitudes are by no means unknown today, and Mussorgsky, without endorsing them, felt that they embodied a truth about the Russian experience that could be conveyed theatrically in no other way.
Surely the music vouches for it. Khovanshchina is a lament for an entire people unique in the annals of opera; and for all its flaws and loose ends, it's uniquely moving.
The Met wisely left the singing and conducting chiefly in the hands of Russians (and former Russians), although the Met chorus was in very fine form. Among the principals, Olga Borodina's Marfa and Ildar Abdrazakov's Dosifei were particularly outstanding.
Vapid sets
The staging elements were rather less so, however. Ming Cho Lee's sets alternated between the vapid modernism— call it Constructivism Lite— that afflicts so many operatic productions, and doll's house interiors that, framed in darkness, straitjacketed their scenes to no particular effect. The stage direction had balletic precision, but little urgency or life.
In short, the Russian elements of the production were full and robust, but the American ones (the chorus aside) curiously stilted and bloodless. Perhaps history was the difference?
Five of the production's six scenes followed the orchestration done by Shostakovich in the 1950s, a time when Khovanshchina would have been particularly significant in Russia. Shostakovich scored the last scenes too, but conductor Kirill Petrenko chose to substitute a version by Stravinsky with a much more subdued ending. For Shostakovich, the Old Believers' voluntary martyrdom contained unmistakable accents of defiance; for the deeply Orthodox Stravinsky, quietism instead.
The Russians are still debating Khovanshchina; they probably always will. What's not in doubt is its profound humanity.
I have mentioned King Lear. It's pointless to compare the two works, or the two artists. But it suffices to mention them in the same sentence.
Boris Godunov Mussorgsky
Mussorgsky Operas
Answers for CZAR IN A MUSSORGSKY OPERA crossword clue. Search for crossword clues found in the NY Times, Daily Celebrity, Daily Mirror, Telegraph and major publications. Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, 1870 The following is a list of compositions by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.
During this extraordinary and difficult time, the Met hopes to brighten the lives of our audience members even while our stage is dark. Each day, a different encore presentation from the company's Live in HD series is being made available for free streaming on the Met website, with each performance available for a period of 23 hours, from 7:30 p.m. EDT until 6:30 p.m. the following day. The schedule will include outstanding complete performances from the past 14 years of cinema transmissions, starring all of opera's greatest singers.
The streams are also available through the Met Opera on Demand apps for Apple, Amazon, and Roku devices and Samsung Smart TV. To access them without logging in, click 'Browse and Preview' in the apps for connected TV, and 'Explore the App' on tablets and mobile devices.
Met Stars Live in Concert
If you enjoy the Nightly Opera Streams, be sure not to miss our acclaimed pay-per-view concert series, presenting opera's greatest stars performing live via satellite from striking locations across Europe and the U.S.
Mussorgsky Czarist Opera Crossword Clue
Support the Met and Protect its Future
Hundreds of thousands of people have been tuning in daily to our free performance streams, and many of them have kindly been asking how they can help the Met during this economically perilous time. In response, we have added a 'Donate Now' button below. We thank you for your help.
Or, donate by text message: Text METOPERA to 44321 in the U.S. or 1-917-999-0700 for other countries. Standard text messaging rates apply.
UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Each stream becomes available at 7:30PM ET and remains accessible for on-demand viewing until 6:30PM ET the following day, with the exception of the May 7 stream of Wozzeck, which will be available until May 8 at 12PM ET. The May 8 stream of Madama Butterfly will begin at the normally scheduled 7:30PM ET.
Week 60
Happy Mother's Day
Monday, May 3
Strauss's Elektra
Starring Nina Stemme, Adrianne Pieczonka, Waltraud Meier, and Eric Owens, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Production by Patrice Chéreau. From April 30, 2016.
Tuesday, May 4
Handel'sRodelinda
Starring Renée Fleming, Stephanie Blythe, Andreas Scholl, Joseph Kaiser, and Shenyang, conducted by Harry Bicket. Production by Stephen Wadsworth. From December 3, 2011.
Wednesday, May 5
Thomas's Hamlet
Starring Marlis Petersen, Jennifer Larmore, Simon Keenlyside, and James Morris, conducted by Louis Langrée. Production by Patrice Caurier & Moshe Leiser. From March 27, 2010.
Thursday, May 6
Bellini's Norma
Starring Sondra Radvanovsky, Joyce DiDonato, Joseph Calleja, and Matthew Rose, conducted by Carlo Rizzi. Production by Sir David McVicar. From October 7, 2017.
Friday, May 7
Berg's Wozzeck
Starring Elza van den Heever, Tamara Mumford, Christopher Ventris, Gerhard Siegel, Andrew Staples, Peter Mattei, and Christian Van Horn, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Production by William Kentridge. From January 11, 2020.
Saturday, May 8
Puccini's Madama Butterfly
Starring Patricia Racette, Maria Zifchak, Marcello Giordani, and Dwayne Croft, conducted by Patrick Summers. Production by Anthony Minghella. From March 7, 2009.
Sunday, May 9
Handel's Agrippina
Starring Brenda Rae, Joyce DiDonato, Kate Lindsey, Iestyn Davies, Duncan Rock, and Matthew Rose, conducted by Harry Bicket. Production by Sir David McVicar. From February 29, 2020. Camtasia video not showing free.
Week 61
National Council Auditions Alumni Week
Monday, May 10
Puccini's La Bohème
Starring Teresa Stratas, Renata Scotto, José Carreras, Richard Stilwell, and James Morris, conducted by James Levine. Production by Franco Zeffirelli. From January 16, 1982.
Tuesday, May 11
Mozart's Don Giovanni
Starring Carol Vaness, Karita Mattila, Dawn Upshaw, Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey, Ferrucio Furlanetto, and Kurt Moll, conducted by James Levine. Production by Franco Zeffirelli. From April 5, 1990.
Wednesday, May 12
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
Starring Jane Eaglen, Katarina Dalayman, Ben Heppner, Hans-Joachim Ketelsen, and René Pape, conducted by James Levine. Production by Dieter Dorn. From December 18, 1999.
Thursday, May 13
Strauss'sDer Rosenkavalier
Starring Renée Fleming, Christine Schäfer, Susan Graham, Eric Cutler, Thomas Allen, and Kristinn Sigmundsson, conducted by Edo de Waart. Production by Nathaniel Merrill. From January 9, 2010.
Friday, May 14
The Audition
This feature-length documentary takes you behind the scenes of the Met's National Council Auditions, in which, each year, thousands of hopefuls compete for a cash prize, the chance to sing on the Met stage—and the opportunity to launch a major operatic career. Directed by Susan Froemke.
Saturday, May 15
Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia
Starring Isabel Leonard, Lawrence Brownlee, Christopher Maltman, Maurizo Muraro, and Paata Burchuladze, conducted by Michele Mariotti. Production by Bartlett Sher. From November 22, 2014.
Sunday, May 16
Donizetti's Roberto Devereux
Starring Sondra Radvanovsky, Elīna Garanča, Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecień, conducted by Maurizio Benini. Production by Sir David McVicar. From April 16, 2016.
Mussorgsky Opera Boris
Russia's chief domestic product, it sometimes seems, is suffering. The Russians have had plenty of it. The total American mortality in all our wars is still less than a million. But the loss of Russian life between 1914 and 1945 alone— through foreign and civil war, famine, and the gulag— was between 50 and 60 million. That's equivalent to one-third of Russia's population in 1914.
The 17th Century wasn't a very happy time in Russia either; and if the loss of life was far less then, that was because the population was less than a tenth of its early 20th-Century level. Modest Mussorgsky chose this period as the setting of both Boris Gudonov and Khovanshchina, and if the latter is only his second best opera, that still makes it the second best Russian opera ever written.
Khovanshchina's relative lack of exposure outside Russia stems from several factors. It was left incomplete at Mussorgsky's death, and the rather awkward disposition of its major plot lines in the final scenes leaves a sense of abortive development and resolution.
A deeper issue is its lack of a dominant character, as in Boris; the protagonist is really Russia itself, whose agony is projected in the great waves of choral song that render this work unique in the annals of opera but leave it, ultimately, more spectacle than drama.
Taste for fatalism
It's not that Mussorgsky's psychological penetration is any less acute in Khovanshchina La vestale. , but simply that his individual characters are swamped by circumstances beyond their control and seem doomed, whatever their efforts. In a work that lasts four hours long, such a plot requires a certain taste for fatalism.
The issue is compounded by the fact that Khovanshchina contains relatively few arias of the sort that Western operagoers relish. Mussorgsky projects his text and powerfully clothes it, but he rarely embellishes it. This approach makes for a strikingly modern kind of music drama, but it provides few vocal cushions.
In Boris, this text-centered musical language propels the tragic action forward. But in Khovanshchina, although its individual characters meet certainly tragic, not to say appalling, ends, we have a sense of being pulled toward a larger center of suffering that's beyond personal destiny and beyond redemption, too— at least in this life.
That's not a vision theater patrons wish to confront too often. It's the reason why we see more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than of King Lear.
Anarchic rebellion
The plot of Khovanshchina— loosely, The Khovansky Affair— is briefly told. The blustery Ivan Khovansky (bass Anatoli Kotscherga, in his Met debut) heads rather than leads the quasi-anarchic rebellion of his guard, the Streltsy, against the child co-tsars Ivan and Peter. He clashes with the Westernizing Prince Golitsyn (Vladimir Galouzine), who is the lover of the Regent Sophia but otherwise without a base of support.
In a subplot, Khovansky's dissolute son Andrei (Misha Didyk) jilts his loyal fiancée, Marfa (Olga Borodina), an adherent of the persecuted sect of Old Believers led by the charismatic priest Dosifei (Ildar Abdrazakov). Khovansky is assassinated after a bacchanal (rather tamely staged here); Golitsyn is sent into exile; and the Old Believers, Marfa included, immolate themselves in the opera's final scene.
Only the Streltsy, certainly the most culpable party, are spared at the last moment. But such arbitrariness, as Mussorgsky darkly suggests, is the essence of tsardom itself.
Unlike Boris, where the tsar dominates the stage, neither Ivan nor Peter (the future Peter the Great) appears; rather, it's the idea of tsardom itself— remote, unaccountable and absolute— that haunts the stage. The tsar is at once Russia's only hope and its certain doom. What then is Russia itself but a fatality?
Modernity vs. messiah
Tsarism was still absolute in Mussorgsky's time, although Western influence was growing pronounced, and change was in the wind. The figure of Golitsyn was a stand-in for contemporary modernizers, while Khovansky and the Old Believers represented different elements of 19th-Century conservatism.
The latter in particular (although long extinct as a movement) exemplified the persistent strain of Russian messianism that saw the land and its people as divinely chosen, and destined to testify by martyrdom. Such attitudes are by no means unknown today, and Mussorgsky, without endorsing them, felt that they embodied a truth about the Russian experience that could be conveyed theatrically in no other way.
Surely the music vouches for it. Khovanshchina is a lament for an entire people unique in the annals of opera; and for all its flaws and loose ends, it's uniquely moving.
The Met wisely left the singing and conducting chiefly in the hands of Russians (and former Russians), although the Met chorus was in very fine form. Among the principals, Olga Borodina's Marfa and Ildar Abdrazakov's Dosifei were particularly outstanding.
Vapid sets
The staging elements were rather less so, however. Ming Cho Lee's sets alternated between the vapid modernism— call it Constructivism Lite— that afflicts so many operatic productions, and doll's house interiors that, framed in darkness, straitjacketed their scenes to no particular effect. The stage direction had balletic precision, but little urgency or life.
In short, the Russian elements of the production were full and robust, but the American ones (the chorus aside) curiously stilted and bloodless. Perhaps history was the difference?
Five of the production's six scenes followed the orchestration done by Shostakovich in the 1950s, a time when Khovanshchina would have been particularly significant in Russia. Shostakovich scored the last scenes too, but conductor Kirill Petrenko chose to substitute a version by Stravinsky with a much more subdued ending. For Shostakovich, the Old Believers' voluntary martyrdom contained unmistakable accents of defiance; for the deeply Orthodox Stravinsky, quietism instead.
The Russians are still debating Khovanshchina; they probably always will. What's not in doubt is its profound humanity.
I have mentioned King Lear. It's pointless to compare the two works, or the two artists. But it suffices to mention them in the same sentence.
Boris Godunov Mussorgsky
Mussorgsky Czarist Opera Crossword
♦
