Boris Godunov at Deutsche Oper Berlin

Political processes and the special dynamic associated with them are at the core of BORIS GODUNOV, Modest Mussorgsky’s only completed opera. Having created, in Czar Boris, one of the most striking characters in the history of opera - an intelligent ruler and benevolent father, who came to the throne by dint of sound leadership, a smart marriage but also the murder of a child -, Mussorgsky then portrays the ruler’s demise, with Boris in the end succumbing to his own bad conscience, under pressure from his external enemies.

The Boris we are shown is not an autonomous individual who is proactive in steering and influencing politics but meets an heroic end as a result of tragic ensnarement. Rather he is subject to the imperatives of political processes, imperatives that he is only marginally more able to influence than his own people, whom Mussorgsky depicts as a kind of second protagonist through his impressive chorus scenes. In their suffering at the hands of an absolutist czar and aristocracy and also in their manifestation as riotous mob in the final revolution scene in the opera, the people are presented as an anonymous mass, devoid of an awareness of their own role, power and responsibility. Yet the composer allows individual characters to stand out from the crowd. He manages, often with great economy of dialogue, to confer on these characters contours of personality and destinies as a way of painting a nuanced and ambivalent picture of the power and impotence behind individual actions.

The piece is staged by the English director Richard Jones, who is a regular at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and has also worked at the New York City Opera, the English National Opera, the opera houses of Amsterdam and Frankfurt and the Bregenz Festival. He gave his Berlin debut in 2004 at the Komische Oper Berlin with Alban Berg’s WOZZECK. BORIS GODUNOV is his first directorial project at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.