<i>Boris Godunov</i> (1869) and <i>Eugene Onegin</i> (1878): Non-operas in Seven Lyrical Scenes, Dramatic Glue Optional

There was no love lost between Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881) and Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). 1 Although each grudgingly recognized the other's talent, they had little tolerance for each other's musical works and despised the respective aesthetics undergirding them.An autodidact and the most radical member of the New Russian School (colloquially, the moguchaya kuchka -the Mighty Handful), Musorgsky wanted his operas to 'be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its subtlest shadings', insisting that the 'sound of human speech, as the outward manifestation of thoughts and feelings, should, without forcing or exaggeration, become music -truthful, accurate, and yet (read: which means) artistic, highly artistic'. 2 To accomplish this, he obsessed with naturalistic declamation, devising varieties of solo and choral recitative with which he saturated his scores, rejected operatic formal conventions in favour of formlessness that would accommodate musical speech, and developed a highly idiosyncratic musical language.His Boris Godunov, in its original conception of 1869, became a perfect 'opra dialogu, a "numberless" recitative opera based not only 1 This essay uses the standard English spellings of the composers' surnames.In Musorgsky's case, this means foregoing the doubled 's' inherited from the German transliteration, which still appears in the DVD's title.2 Musorgsky in a letter to Lyudmila Shestakova, 30