About the work
Modest Mussorgsky's five-act historical opera was left unfinished at his death in 1881 and has been performed in multiple competing editions. Rimsky-Korsakov's 1886 version long dominated productions but has been supplanted by Dmitri Shostakovich's 1959 edition, generally considered more faithful to Mussorgsky's intentions. Set during the Moscow rebellions of 1682, the opera examines the destruction of pre-Petrine Russia and the rise of Peter the Great.
Plot
In late seventeenth-century Moscow, multiple factions struggle for power as the young Peter (Tsar Peter I) consolidates his rule. Prince Ivan Khovansky leads the conservative Streltsy rebellion and represents the old boyar power; his son Andrey is in love with the Old Believer Marfa, whose religious community faces elimination. The scheming Prince Golitsyn plots alongside. Across five acts of political conspiracy, religious mysticism, personal tragedy, and historical doom, all resist the modernisation Peter represents. In the final scene, the Old Believers—rather than submit to reform—set themselves and their chapel on fire in a collective act of martyrdom.
Cultural significance
Chowanschtschina is one of the most ambitious Russian operas and the supreme musical portrait of a society collapsing into its own contradictions. The Dawn over Moscow prelude is among Mussorgsky's most sublime compositions. The self-immolation of the Old Believers, with its hymn Save us, Merciful Christ, is a moment of theatrical and spiritual terror unmatched in the repertoire. Productions by Andrei Tarkovsky at Covent Garden (1982) and Dmitri Tcherniakov have drawn out the opera's tragic vision of Russian historical fate.