Talk:Khovanshchina (film)

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Film: Soviet and post-Soviet

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This film is interesting: naturally, it makes cuts in the opera, but it tends to cut what Rimsky-Korsakov does not cut in his version. Thus the people appear in Act I and harass the scribe, Golitsyn meets the Lutheran pastor, Dosifey reveals that he was Prince Myshetsky, and Kuzka sings his drunken song in Act III. OTOH, Shaklovity's denunciation gets shortened to accommodate this.

It also makes the people appear as a more potent force than they are in Musorgsky's opera, but that is unsurprising. One wonders how the scene where the people manipulate the scribe and topple his booth got kept in, as it displays the people at their worst – consider the date this film was produced! Furthermore, the leader of the people(?!) sings Shaklovity's aria (though taking this wonderful exposition of the overarching theme of Khovanshchina away from him is nothing new – Shalyapin sung it as Dosifey, for instance). And of course we get Shostakovich's long ending, where Tsar Peter's Preobrazhensky soldiers recoil in horror at the sight of the pyre (as in Rimsky-Korsakov's version), but then the people repeat the first-act chorus "Akh, ty Rodnaya, Matushka Rus'", followed by a reprise of the Dawn at the opening – thus giving the opera an even more pro-Petrine slant than Rimsky-Korsakov managed. One wonders what Musorgsky would have thought of that, given that he wrote in one of his letters to Stasov: "'We've gone forward'—you lie. 'We haven't moved!' Paper, books have gone forward—we haven't moved." Double sharp (talk) 14:32, 16 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. One could argue that the streltsy count as common people, but if so they behave even worse than the Muscovites portrayed in Act I and IV! Double sharp (talk) 14:45, 16 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]