New Boris

Greatest impersonation of the late Basso Feodor Chaliapin was the fear-racked 17th-Century Tsar in Moussorgsky's Boris Godounov. In 1908, Chaliapin was the first man to sing Boris outside of Russia, in 1929 the last to sing it at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. Other bassos --notably the Metropolitan's Adamo Didur, the Chicago Opera's Vanni Marcoux--donned the wig and beard of Boris, but they were haunted by the Chaliapin performance, just as in the opera the Tsar is haunted in his biggest scenes by the wraith of the young heir to the Russian throne, whom he has murdered. Last week, its last this season, the Metropolitan revived Boris for one of its best bassos, Ezio Pinza. Though Pinza was longer on voice than Chaliapin, and equal to him in build and makeup, critics agreed that the haunt still held.

The hero of Boris appears in only three of the long, episodic music drama's nine scenes,* must work hard to dominate its diffuse action. If Pinza failed to dominate, it was partly because the whole production was one of the finest the Metropolitan has mounted in years. Aside from the fact that it was sung in Italian, it would doubtless have pleased hard-drinking neurotic Modeste Moussorgsky, who, when he wrote the opera in 1873, attempted to make the People the protagonist, gave the chorus a great "Revolutionary Scene," in which he planted ideas which did not come to fruit in Russia until 1917. This scene, which ends with a song sung by an idiot (signifying plenty), underscores its point, as the curtain falls, with red fire in Russia's sky in the backdrop.

* The Metropolitan uses the last of the four versions of Boris, as revised by Moussorgsky's friend, Rimsky-Korsakoff.

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