* So the tendency of modern productions to include both these scenes, though understandable on the basis of the music, contradicts the will of Musorgsky, who physically
ripped out the St Basil's scene from the revised version of the score.
'History is my nocturnal friend', Musorgsky wrote to Stasov in 1873; 'it brings me pleasure and intoxication.'77 It was Moscow that had infected him with the history bug. He loved its 'smell of antiquity' which transported him 'into another world'.78 For Musorgsky, Moscow was a symbol of the Russian land - it represented a huge weight of inertia in the customs and beliefs of old Russia. Beneath the thin veneer of European civilization that Peter had laid down, the common people were still the inhabitants of 'Jericho'. 'Paper, books, they've gone ahead, but the people haven't moved', the composer wrote to Stasov on the bicentennial jubilee of Peter's birth in 1872. 'Public benefactors are inclined to glorify themselves and to fix their glory in documents, but the people groan, and drink to stifle their groans, and groan all the louder: "haven't moved!"'79 This was the pessimistic vision of old Russia that Musorgsky had expressed in the last prophetic words of the Holy Fool in Boris Godunov:
Darkest dark, impenetrable dark Woe, woe to Rus' Weep, weep Russian people Hungry people.
After Godunov he began immediately on Khovanshchina, an opera set amid the political and religious struggles in Moscow from the eve of Peter's coronation in 1682 to his violent suppression of the streltsy musketeers, the last defenders of the Moscow boyars and the Old Belief, who rose up in a series of revolts between 1689 and 1698. More than a thousand musketeers were executed on the Tsar's orders, their mangled bodies displayed as a warning to others, in reprisal for their abortive plot to replace Peter with his sister Sophia, who had ruled as regent in the 1680s when he was still too young to govern by himself. As a punishment for her role in the revolts, Peter forced Sophia to become a nun. The same fate befell his wife, Eudoxia, who had sympathized with the insurrectionaries. The Streltsy revolt and its aftermath marked a crossroads in Russian history, a period when the new dynamic Petrine state clashed with the forces of tradition. The defenders of old Russia were represented in the opera by the hero Prince Khovansky, a Moscow patriarch who was the main leader of
the streltsy musketeers (Khovansbchina means 'Khovansky's rule'); and by the Old Believer Dosifei (a fictional creation named after the last patriarch of the united Orthodox Church in Jerusalem). They are connected by the fictional figure of Marfa, Khovansky's fiancee and a devout adherent to the Old Belief. Marfa's constant prayers and lamentations for Orthodox Russia express the profound sense of loss that lies at the heart of this opera.
The Westernists viewed Khovansbchina as a progressive work, a celebration of the passing from the old Moscow to the European spirit of St Petersburg. Stasov, for example, tried to persuade Musorgsky to devote more of Act III to the Old Believers, because this would strengthen their association with 'that side of ancient Russia' that was 'petty, wretched, dull-brained, superstitious, evil and malevolent'.80 This interpretation was then fixed by Rimsky-Korsakov, who, as the editor of the unfinished score after Musorgsky's death in 1881, moved the prelude ('Dawn over the Moscow River') to the end, so that what in the original version had been a lyrical depiction of the old Moscow now became the sign of Peter's rising sun. All before was night.
