"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.
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