Mussorgsky: The marriage

Opera no 41

Mussorgsky: The marriage

Soloists

USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra

Gennadi Rozdestvensky

In last year’s project my Mussorgsky piece was Kovanchina an opera on the largest scale with all of the characteristics that one would expect from a big 19th century Russian opera. https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/03/mussorgsky-kovanchina.html

This opera is about as far removed from that (and indeed Boris Godunov)  as one can imagine. It is more in the style of a conversation piece with only a small number of characters in a simple domestic setting. Mussorgsky here was doing some that Dhagomiskhy was also attempting in The Stone Guest  (something I also listened to last year)., ie write an opera which had no recitative or arias but was in a continuous arioso, rather like a sung play. To mind my Mussorgsky was much more successful, perhaps because this was a much shorter piece.

But this is another example of the seeming inability of the 19th century Russian opera composers to actually finish anything properly. This was it seems going to be a much longer work but Mussorgsky only completed the first act before turning to other projects. And he never orchestrated it. Early performances were with piano accompaniment. The orchestration in this version was by Rozdesvensky, the conductor of the performance. To start with I found it quite attractive but soon I felt more and more that it was quite out of touch with the musical language. It inhabited an early 20th century sound world much more reminiscent of Stravinsky in pieces such as as Mavra. Ultimately it became really irritating.

All in all I found it a difficult piece to assess. Partly because of the orchestration issues but also because without following all of the nuances of the Russian language in translation I did feel that I didn’t get the real experience of what the opera must be like to a native speaker. But I am glad that I heard it, though I can’t imagine that I will return to it in a hurry.