Princeton's Boris Godunov, 1936/2007 (2007)

On April 12, 2007, after half-a-year of intense collaboration between Music, Slavic, and Dance, and the School of Architecture, the Berlind at Princeton University premiered a concept. The communications and publicity staff of the university, which prefers to work with clear-cut snappy labels for things, initially found this idea difficult to grasp. Qualifying it as a premiere was the fact that the dramatic text was Pushkin's uncut, uncensored original 1825 version of Boris Godunov (all twenty-five scenes), rehearsed (incompletely) by Vsevolod Meyerhold, with music that Sergei Prokofiev wrote in 1936 specifically for this play but which had never been heard in its proper context. The Princeton production was still a concept, however, and not a revival or a historic restoration, because like so much else prepared for the Death Centennial of 1937, this musicalized play never got to opening night. It remained a partially rehearsed torso. This Review forum hopes to capture some of the excitement of Princeton's creative-restorative project, which Simon Morrison (a professor of Music and Princeton's Prokofiev scholar) and I co-managed for much of 2006-07. For me it was the culmination of thirty years' thinking about Pushkin's play, topped by that unprecedented dream come true: seeing and hearing the whole play live, and alive, in more dimensions than could have ever dreamed of on stage. First, some background to the original collaboration. In the spring of 1936, Meyerhold accepted a commission to produce Boris Godunov for the Jubilee. He persuaded an initially reluctant Prokofiev, just repatriated to Moscow from Paris, to provide a score. Twenty-four pieces of music were eventually composed, the acting company did extensive table-work, and Meyerhold passionately--even obsessively--rehearsed half-a-dozen scenes. This was the director's third attempt to put Pushkin's drama on stage. The first was a studio workshop in set design in 1918-19, from which provocative sketches survive; the second was the Vakhtangov in 1924-25, from which several memoirs survive. By 1936, Meyerhold's excitement was at fever pitch: at last he could provide practical evidence that Pushkin was not only a remarkable dramatist but also a dramatist-director and the initiator of a new dramatic system. (1) But by May 1937 the Boris rehearsals had dwindled to nothing and the production was abandoned. On December 17 of that year, Kerzhentsev's article An Alien Theater (Chuzhoi teatr) appeared in Pravda, denouncing Meyerhold's repertory as presenting classic plays in a crooked formalist mirror. (2) In early January 1938 the Meyerhold was closed, construction on his new building near Mayakovsky Square was halted, and although the director's career temporarily stabilized and even rallied, the rest is part of the familiar chronicle of the Terror consuming its greatest talent. On June 20, 1939, Meyerhold was arrested on charges of Trotskyite espionage with British and Japanese intelligence. After torture and forced confession (followed by a recantation of the confession), he was executed by firing squad on February 1, 1940. Prokofiev left no record of his response to this loss of his collaborator and did not refer to Meyerhold again in his diaries. Prokofiev had accepted three large-scale orchestral commissions for the Jubilee: incidental music for a stage adaptation, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, of Evgenii Onegin for Tairov's Moscow Chamber Theater; the score for a filmed version of The Queen of Spades, to be directed by Mikhail Romm; and this commission for Meyerhold's staging of Boris Godunov. Prokofiev also composed three Romances, and he briefly considered setting Mozart and Salieri. Neither the theatrical productions nor the film were ever realized, apparently for reasons unrelated to the music. Tairov, Romm, and Meyerhold were censured for creative transgressions of a more general sort during this increasingly cautious year, and these three experimental projects unraveled. …