For opera fans, Boris Godunov means a single thing: one of the juiciest roles basses have to sing. The legendary Russian Fyodor Chaliapin set the standard in 1908 when heintroduced Modest Mussorgsky's ...

Richard Jones’ stark and disturbing staging of Boris Godunov returns to The Royal Opera this January, ten years after the production’s debut. Dark, brooding and unflinchingly psychological, Modest ...

Bass René Pape, the world’s reigning Boris, reprises his portrayal of the tortured tsar caught between ambition and paranoia. Conductor Sebastian Weigle leads Mussorgsky’s Russian masterwork in its ...

The Paris Opera’s new production of Mussorgsky’s tale of a ruthless leader haunted by guilt over his bloody path to power boasts a universality of Shakespearean dimensions. Almost from the beginning, ...

Modest Mussorgsky died of alcoholism at the relatively youthful—even for nineteenth-century Russia—age of forty-two, leaving his magnum opus unfinished. Boris Godunov, an adaptation of an 1826 play by ...

Mussorgsky was inspired to compose his masterpiece Boris Godunov after reading Pushkin’s Shakespeare-inspired play of the same name. It features one of the most dramatically rewarding bass-baritone ...