Godunov gracias a Princeton

{Nota del editor: si el lector se siente ignorante por la informacion y personajes descritos en esta noticia, no tema. El editor lo acompaña}


PRINCETON, N.J., April 8 — In 1936, two of the Soviet Union’s greatest artists decided to work on a new theatrical production of Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” for its author’s coming jubilee. Sergei Prokofiev wrote 24 musical pieces while the visionary stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold mapped out scenes and started rehearsals. The following year, Stalin’s terror fixed its gaze on Meyerhold and he abandoned the project. Three years later, he was dead, shot by a firing squad.
Now, thanks to the recent discovery of Meyerhold’s original notes and Prokofiev’s handwritten score and comments, their collaboration is finally having its world premiere on Thursday night at the Berlind Theater at Princeton University, 70 years after its planned opening.

This mammoth undertaking by Princeton, in conjunction with the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow, rescues a production that artists and scholars thought was lost forever. The four sold-out performances will also introduce Meyerhold, a seminal theatrical thinker, to an audience largely ignorant of his work.

“I was fairly stunned and I continue to be stunned,” said Simon Morrison, an associate professor of music at Princeton, who excavated Meyerhold’s notes in 2005 from a sealed section of the Russian archive, to which he managed to gain access. Mr. Morrison, who is writing a book about Prokofiev, said: “This is one of the scores that he composed in the ’30s when he was at the top of his game, and it went to waste. He never heard it in his lifetime.”

“Boris” ran afoul of the government long before Prokofiev and Meyerhold got a hold of it. Pushkin’s play — about the 16th-century tyrannical czar Boris Godunov, and Dimitri, a pretender to the throne — “is very seditious,” said Caryl Emerson, chairwoman of Princeton’s Slavic languages and literature department, who is overseeing the project with Mr. Morrison.

This production, which is using a new English translation by Antony Wood, is the first in which all 25 scenes that Pushkin wrote are being performed together, Ms. Emerson said. “It combines three geniuses of Russian culture,” she said. “Pushkin, Prokofiev and Meyerhold, the poet, the composer and the stage director.”

Modest Mussorgsky used Pushkin’s play as a source for his fabulously successful opera “Boris Godunov.” But Prokofiev and Meyerhold were contemptuous of what they considered that work’s thick, syrupy, optimistic and romantic score. Meyerhold, for example, envisioned the final scene with a choral sound for the crowd that was “dark, agitated, menacing, like the roar of the sea.” He wrote, “One should feel a gathering of forces, the restraining of an internal rage.” Mussorgsky’s was a 19th-century sound, Mr. Morrison said, “Prokofiev was the first to get at the 20th-century sound.”

Meyerhold gave Prokofiev detailed instructions about the kind of orchestral and choral music he wanted and which scenes it would go in. Those notes, along with Prokofiev’s manuscript, descriptions of the work in various memoirs and Meyerhold’s rehearsal transcripts, guided this production. “This is an original creation based on some of his ideas,” Tim Vasen, the production’s director, said, referring to Meyerhold. “It’s an amazing collaboration with someone who’s not in the room.”

Since Meyerhold often worked with architects, Mr. Morrison asked Princeton’s Architecture School to design the set. Graduate students came up with rows of floor-to-ceiling bungee cords made out of stretchy surgical tubing (3,750 feet in all) set along grooves that run across the stage. The cords can be arranged to suggest trees in a forest, pulled and snapped like bows and arrows during a battle scene or wrapped around a character’s body to evoke emotions like anger or frustration. The set is remarkably flexible, though it did prevent the choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, from using pointe steps, because the dancers’ toe shoes kept getting stuck in the grooves.

SIGA LEYENDO AQUI.