294. The Maid of Pskov (Rimsky-Korsakov)

The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga (Боярыня Вера Шелога)

• Opera in 1 act
• Composer: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
• Libretto: The composer, after Lev Mey’s play
• First performed: Solodovnikov Theatre, Moscow, Russia, 27^th December 1898, conducted by Iosif Truffi

BOYAR IVAN SEMYONOVICH SHELOGA	Bass	Nikolay Mutin
VERA DMITRIYEVNA, his wife	Soprano	Sofiya Gladkaya
NADEZHDA NASONOVA, Vera’s sister	Mezzo	Yevdokiya Stefanovich
PRINCE YURI IVANOVICH TOKMAKOV	Baritone or bass	Anton Bedlevich
VLASYEVNA, Nadezhda’s nurse	Contralto	Varvara Strakhova

SETTING: Pskov, Russia; 1555.

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The Maid of Pskov (Псковитянка)

• Opera in 3 acts
• Composer: Rimsky-Korsakov
• Libretto: The composer, after Mey’s play
• First performed: Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia, 13 January (O.S. 1 January) 1873, conducted by Eduard Nápravnik

TSAR IVAN VASILEVICH THE TERRIBLE	Bass	Osip Petrov
PRINCE YURIY IVANOVICH TOKMAKOV, the tsar’s deputy and posadnik in Pskov	Bass	Ivan Melnikov
BOYAR NIKITA MATUTA	Tenor	Vasily Vasilyev II
PRINCE AFANASY VYAZEMSKY	Bass	Vladimir Sobolev
BOMELY (BROMELIUS), royal physician	Bass
MIKHAIL ANDREYEVICH TUCHA, son of a posadnik	Tenor	Dmitriy Orlov
YUSHKO VELEBIN, courier from Novgorod	Bass	Vladimir Sobolev
PRINCESS OLGA YURYEVNA TOKMAKOVA	Soprano	Yuliya Platonova
BOYARÏSHNA STEPANIDA MATUTA (STYOSHA), Olga’s friend	Soprano	Bulakhova
VLASYEVNA, wet nurse	Contralto	Darya Leonova
PERFILYEVNA, wet nurse	Contralto	Olga Shryoder
Guard’s voice	Tenor	Pavlov
Judges, Pskovian boyars, governor’s sons, oprichniks, Muscovite Streltsy, maidens, people

SETTING: Pskov; the Pechorsky Monastery; at the Medednya River, 1570.

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Most of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas are based on Russian legends and fairy-tales, but his first, The Maid of Pskov, is a historical work, revolving around Ivan IV Grozny (the Terrible, or the Formidable), his illegitimate daughter, and the massacre of Novgorod. It is a sibling of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, written on the same table and the same piano, when the two composers shared lodgings.

The opera begins with a prologue, The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga, which can be performed separately. It is based on an 1870s revision, and premièred in 1898. Set in 1555, it presents a situation rather than a drama: Vera has given birth to a baby while her husband, the boyar Sheloga, is away fighting in the tsar’s Livonian War. She confesses to her sister Nadezhda that the baby is not her husband’s; she was seduced by a handsome boyar (she hints that the man is the tsar). In the last scene, her husband returns, and Nadezhda tells him that the baby is hers.

The little opera serves its purpose as a prologue, but, although Rimsky-Korsakov permitted it, is insubstantial as an opera in its own right. Vera’s guilt and the sisters’ closeness is well portrayed. The musical highlight is undoubtedly Vera’s melancholy lullaby (an adagio that begins with divided cellos, an ostinato figure over a sustained E flat), while her narration of her seduction, which she likens to being lost in a forest, is subtly orchestrated. (This is Rimsky-Korsakov, so that goes without saying!)

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The Maid of Pskov takes place 15 years later, in 1570. Ivan has laid waste to the wealthy city of Novgorod, killing thousands of its citizens, then turned his attention to nearby Pskov. Olga, the maid from that city, is his daughter; she dies at the end – shot by his men. Her boyfriend, Mikhail Tucha, is the ringleader of the resistance against the autocrat; when the tsar’s secret police, the oprichniki, open fire on the Pskovites, she rushes out of the tent, and is killed. The opera ends with Ivan cradling her corpse, weeping over it. Olga never finds out Ivan is her father, but she has always been drawn to him, dreamt about him, and prayed for him. As my father says, Russian history summed up in one opera plot.

The idea for the opera, an adaptation of a play by Lev Mey, was suggested to Rimsky-Korsakov by Balakirev and Mussorgsky, “who were better read in Russian literature”.¹ The censors objected to republican elements (democratic terms used by the people of Pskov, once the capital of the Pskov Republic, until Moscow annexed it in 1510) and to the operatic depiction of a pre-Romanov tsar (in case he did anything as undignified as sing ditties), but Rimsky-Korsakov had the protection of the then-tsar’s son². Completed in 1872, The Maid of Pskov premièred in 1873.

“The opera met with favour, especially the second act; I was called out many times. During the course of that season Pskovityanka was sung ten times to full houses and great applause. I was pleased, though the press, with the exception of Cui, belaboured me soundly… On the other hand, the scene of the Pskov vol’nitsa (commonwealth volunteers) struck the fancy of the young students, who were bawling the song of the vol’nitsa to their hearts’ content up and down the corridors of the academy.”³

Rimsky-Korsakov famously had had no formal training in harmony or counterpoint; he did not learn those aspects of musical science until he was appointed professor of musical composition, harmony, and orchestration at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, managing to stay one chapter ahead of his students. As he mastered music theory, he became dissatisfied with what he had composed:

“I felt its harmonic exaggerations; I was aware that the recitatives were ill made and ripping open at the seams; that there was lack of singing where singing should be; that there were both under-development and over-lengths of form, lack of the contrapuntal element, and so on. In a word, I was conscious that my former technique was unworthy of my musical ideas and my excellent subject. Nor did the instrumentation, with its absurd choice of keys of the English horns and the trumpets (two corni in F and two in C; trumpets in C), with its lack of variety in the violin bowing, with its absence of a sonorous forte, give me any rest, in spite of the fact that I had won an established reputation as an experienced orchestrator.”⁴

While editing the scores of Glinka’s operas, Rimsky-Korsakov substantially revised The Maid of Pskov, and added many scenes (including the prologue that became Vera Sheloga). This version, however, was never performed; many, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s own wife, did not like it, and he himself “felt that in its new guise my opera was long, uninteresting, and rather heavy, in spite of a better structure and notable technique”.⁵ “In the first version, I had suffered from insufficient knowledge, in the second from superabundance of knowledge and inability to direct it. I felt that the later version had to be abridged and worked over once more; that the right, desirable form of Pskovityanka lay somewhere midway between the first version and the second.”⁶

Finally, in 1891, Rimsky-Korsakov revised the opera once more, with an instrumentation that he described as “half-Glinka, half-Wagner”. That third version, performed in 1896 with Chaliapin, is that performed in Russia today.

The Maid of Pskov is written somewhat in the style of Dargomyzhsky, aiming at truthful and realistic setting of the word, rather than at operatic lyricism. Nevertheless, it contains one distinctive, beautiful melody, associated with Olga’s love for Ivan; first heard in the overture, it appears in Act II sc. 4 when she asks the tsar for a kiss, and in Act III sc. 1 when she describes to Tucha her encounter with the tsar and her happiness.

The Maid of Pskov also contains two impressive crowd scenes: Act I sc. 2, the Veche, which, like Boris Godunov’s Coronation Scene, opens with an ominous cascade of bells; and Act II sc. 1, the entrance of Ivan into Pskov. This is the tsar’s first appearance, and the opera only comes to life once Ivan appears; from there, he dominates the work. Ivan, tyrant and destroyer of cities, bereaved father, is a superb rôle for a bass; both Chaliapin and Boris Christoff sang it.

Act III begins with a hunt and storm, modelled on that in Berlioz’s Troyens. The opera ends with a powerful chorus lamenting the fall of Pskov and the end of its people’s freedom.

Richard Taruskin argues that in this opera, Rimsky-Korsakov “brought to its very peak the historical realist genre best-known in the West from Moussorgsky’s work”.⁷ Unlike Boris Godunov, however, The Maid of Pskov has seldom been performed outside Russia, and its appeal might not cross national borders. For all the excellence of the later scenes, it does not quite connect with me, and I suspect one must be Russian to truly appreciate it. Nor is some of the context explained for a non-Russian audience: at its most basic, what Novgorod did to incur the tsar’s wrath, and why Pskov is threatened; how Lithuania is involved; and who or what Mistro may be.

Besides, the drama feels remote, and, apart from Ivan, the characters never quite come to life. Olga, for instance, has no scene with her presumed father, Prince Yuriy; and her affair with her lover, Mikhail Tucha, seems conventional, her relations showing, as Newmarch⁸ [p. 293] observed, less warmth and tenderness than those with Ivan the Terrible!

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Recordings

Listen to: Galina Gorchakova (Princess Olga), Vladimir Ognovienko (Ivan the Terrible), and Vladimir Galusin (Mikhail A. Tucha), with the Kirov Opera & Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev, St. Petersburg, 1994; Philips.

Watch: Vyacheslav Pochapsky (Ivan the Terrible), Maria Gavrilova (Olga), and Pavel Kudryavchenko (Tucha), conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov, Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, 1999.

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Works consulted

• Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judith A. Joffe, ed. Carl Van Vechten, London: Eulenburg Books, 1974, originally published Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.
• Rosa Newmarch, The Russian Opera, London: Herbert Jackson, 1914.
• Martin Cooper, Russian Opera, London: M. Parrish, 1951.
• Robert Layton, “Rimsky-Korsakov’s First Opera”, article accompanying 1994 Gergiev translation, 1997 Philips.
• Piotr Kaminski, Mille et un opéras, Paris: Fayard, 2003.
• See also: Phil’s Opera World.

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1. Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judith A. Joffe, ed. Carl Van Vechten, London: Eulenburg Books, 1974, originally published Alfred A. Knopf, 1923, p. 88. ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 125. ↩︎
3. Ibid, p. 132. ↩︎
4. Ibid, pp. 176–77. ↩︎
5. Ibid., p. 179. ↩︎
6. Ibid., p. 258. ↩︎
7. Quoted in Robert Layton, “Rimsky-Korsakov’s First Opera”, article accompanying 1994 Gergiev translation, 1997 Philips. ↩︎
8. Rosa Newmarch, The Russian Opera, London: Herbert Jackson, 1914, p. 293. ↩︎