BORIS GODUNOV opera

BORIS GODUNOV

opera by Modest Mussorgski

State Opera Budapest
WORLD PREMIERE April 2024

Conductor                                                                                                     Alan Buribayev
Director                                                                                                  András Almási-Tóth
Stage and Lightdesign                                                                             Sebastian Hannak
Costumes                                                                                                Krisztina Lisztopad  Video                                                                                                        Zsombor Czeglédi Choreography                                                                                                   Eszter Lázár




Mussorgskis Masterpiece of a "Volksoper", an opera for the people, after a novel by Pushkin tells the story of a people beeing left without a leader. Oppressed and apathetic they are herded into a courtyard and ordered to beg Boris Godunov to consent to become their new leader, the tsar.
The opera is about the mysteries surrounding his rise to the throne, and the uprising of the man who claimed to be the true heir to the throne. Mussorgsky spread a wide thematic arc in his choral opera with which he attempted to awaken an awareness of his own time through the indirect route of a historic story. As an artist of the 19th century, he was driven by the psychology of the masses. Thus the main role falls primarily to the  people, rejoicing, starving, demanding and questioning the action that unfolds.
I chose to create a huge empty golden space at the beginning, where we see the act of crowning the new tsar in front of the masses. At the end, when the people leave, an enourmous house on the turning stage appears from the very back of the stage, slowly approaching towards the auditorium. Two sides of the house are of a detailed historic architecture, the other two sides are the bare steel construction of it. It houses the private room of the tsar and the representative part of the palace. Beeing inside as well as outside of the center of power, we see different angles and a society constantly in motion, always sourrounded by the bigger golden room that cannot be escaped. Three huge LED screens inside the house enable us to show luminating still images to horrorlike black and white footage, symbolising the madness into which the tsar Boris falls towards the end.


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