Boris Godunov

What's different

Seven scenes grouped into four acts, no Polish act, ending with Boris's death. Tighter and bleaker than the revision, and increasingly staged on its own terms. Rejected by the Imperial Theatres committee in 1871, and not published until Pavel Lamm's 1928 composite edition. The Leningrad premiere that year staged Lamm's edition combined with the Polish act and the Kromy Forest scene from the 1872 revision, Marina and Rangoni included, not the 1869 text alone; a production closer to the 1869 structure followed in Moscow in 1929, and the first staging of the 1869 text by itself was at Sadler's Wells in London in 1935. Major collections, this one included, still date the version to the 1928 Leningrad premiere.

What's different

Prologue and four acts. The Polish act is new, and with it Marina and Rangoni; the scene at St Basil's is replaced by the Kromy forest, so that the opera ends not with Boris's death but with the pretender riding through a countryside in revolt. Chosen as primary: it is Musorgsky's own second thought and the basis of most stagings, though many houses now conflate it with 1869 by restoring St Basil's. The two premiere dates given are the same night in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, not a disagreement.

What's different

Rimsky-Korsakov's reorchestration, with cuts, re-barrings and harmonic smoothing; revised and expanded by him in 1908 for the Diaghilev production in Paris that made the work internationally famous with Chaliapin as Boris. This carried the opera for most of the twentieth century and is still occasionally revived. It reached the stage privately: the St Petersburg Society of Musical Gatherings mounted it rather than the Mariinsky, on private money and with its own chorus, the solo parts going mostly to amateurs with a few Mariinsky professionals among them, Fyodor Stravinsky and Ivan Yershov. The run was four nights, on 28 and 29 November and 3 and 4 December, Rimsky-Korsakov conducting the first and the last and M. A. Goldenblum the two between. A private performance left no full cast list: casting is recorded only for the roles credited here, and the rest of the cast is unrecorded.