"It is [a] fully illuminated story that Richard Taruskin, in the
path-breaking essays collected here, unfolds around Modest Musorgsky,
Russia's greatest national composer. . . . [Taruskin's] tour de force
comes with a frontal attack on all the Soviet-bred truisms that for a
century have refashioned Musorgsky from what the evidence suggests he
was-an aristocrat with an early clinical interest in true-to-life
musical portraiture and a later penchant for drinking partners who were
both folklore buffs and political reactionaries democrat."-from the
foreword
Incorporating both new and now-classic essays, this book for the first
time sets the vocal works of Modest Musorgsky in a fully detailed
cultural, political, and historical context. From this perspective,
Richard Taruskin revises fundamentally the composer's historical and
artistic image, in particular debunking the century-old dogmas of
Vladimir Stasov, Musorgsky's first biographer. Here the author offers
the most complete explanation of the revision of the opera Boris
Godunov, compares it to contemporaneous operas by Chaikovsky and
Rimsky-Korsakov, advances a revisionary characterization of
Khovanshchina as an aristocratic tragedy informed by a pessimistic
view of history, discusses Musorgsky's use of folklore, and, focusing on
Sorochintsi Fair, brings to a climax his refutation of Musorgsky as a
protorevolutionary populist. The epilogue is a survey of revisionary
productions of Musorgsky's works at home during the Gorbachev era.
