Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

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Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
César Cui (1835–1918), a military engineer by profession, composed fourteen operas, though only the
first of them – A Prisoner in the Caucasus (1881) – is based on an overtly nationalist subject. Others
include William Ratcliff (1868), The Saracen (1898) and A Feast in Time of Plague (1900).
Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) studied composition briefly with Balakirev but was otherwise
self-taught. His musical style was idiosyncratic and in vocal lines he aimed to imitate the natural
inflections of speech as closely as possible. The resulting music was among the most individual
composed by any Russian composer of the time. Of the ten operas he began, most reached only a
fairly rudimentary stage before being abandoned in favour of other projects. They included Oedipus
in Athens (1860), Salammbô (1866) and The Marriage (1868). Mussorgsky’s most famous opera, Boris
Godunov, was first composed in seven scenes; this version was completed in 1869 but was rejected
by the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. A second version, consisting of a prologue and four acts,
followed in 1872, but was again rejected. Two years later, however, a modified form of the second
version was finally performed at the Mariinsky Theatre. From 1872 until 1880 Mussorgsky worked
sporadically at Khovanshchina, another historical opera. He was distracted from that in 1874, when
he began a comic opera based on Gogol’s short story Sorochintsy Fair, but from 1875 he tried to work
on both at the same time, with the result that neither was complete when he died. The task of editing
Mussorgsky’s music for posthumous publication was carried out mainly by Rimsky-Korsakov. He
completed and orchestrated Khovanshchina, which was first performed in 1886. He also drastically
rewrote Boris Godunov, changing the order of scenes, ‘correcting’ Mussorgsky’s harmony and
part-writing and incorporating some of his own music. Since Rimsky-Korsakov’s death a gradual
rediscovery of the original versions of Mussorgsky’s music led to increasing dissatisfaction with the
bowdlerised versions. A new edition of Boris, conflating a variety of sources, came out in 1928, but
it was not until 1975 that the original full score was used as the basis for a scholarly edition by David
Lloyd-Jones. Sorochintsy Fair had an even more chequered history. Some parts of it were completed
by Anatoly Lyadov and others by Vyacheslav Karatïgin. A full version was prepared by Cui in 1915,
incorporating some of his own music, and in 1923 a different version by Nikolai Tcherepnin was
produced at Monte Carlo, using music from Salammbô and other pieces by Mussorgsky in place of
Cui’s additions.
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) was the most prolific opera composer of the Kutchka. He
favoured Russian and mythological subjects and had a gift for telling harmonies and subtle
orchestration. He operas include The Maid of Pskov (three versions, 1872, 1877 and 1892), May Night
(1879), The Snow Maiden (two versions, 1881 and 1895), Mlada (1890) [not to be confused with an
earlier, unfinished opera-ballet on the same subject with contributions by Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov and Léon Minkus, Christmas Eve (1895), Sadko (1896), Mozart and Salieri (1897),
The Tsar’s Bride (1899) and The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900). Five further operas, including The Golden
Cockerel, were written after the turn of the century.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was not a member of the Kutchka, nor is he generally thought
of as a nationalist, despite the distinctly Russian flavour of most of his music. He composed operas
throughout his career, although only two of them are well known in the West. His earliest was The
Voyevoda (1868), which ran for only five performances the following year. Tchaikovsky destroyed
the score, but it was reconstructed after his death. A second opera, Undine (1869), was rejected
by the Imperial Opera and was also destroyed. The Oprochnick (1872) was a success at its first
performances at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1874, but Tchaikovsky was not satisfied with it. He was
happier with Vakula the Smith (1874), so much so that he revised it extensively in 1886 with a new
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