Mussorgsky's comic opera The Fair at Sorochinsky has as confusing a compositional history as its sister opera, the historical tragedy Khovanshchina. And, like Khovanshchina, The Fair at Sorochinsky remained incomplete at his death.

Mussorgsky first mentioned The Fair in a letter to Lubov Karmalina in the summer of 1874: "In the air sounds the command 'draw in the reins' and Khovanshchina will appear (if it is destined to) later, and before it a comic opera, The Fair at Sorochinsky, after Gogol, will be done." Mussorgsky recognized that his aesthetic of "truth in art" would require that he learn how to compose not only an opera using Ukrainian folk tune (Sorochinsky is located in what Russians called "Little Russia," which is now called the Ukraine), but also how to compose music to fit the speech patterns of Ukrainians. Nevertheless, he thought that composing a comic opera would be an appropriate way to relax and stretch between work on two tragic operas: "In a word, my work is well in hand."

As was usual for Mussorgsky's working methods, he did not write the libretto out, but rather outlined the plot and wrote the words as he went along. He also choose not to start with the first of the three projected acts, but rather to start in the central act. While working on The Fair, he decided to return to Khovanshchina and then back to The Fair and so on until the winter of 1881. When he died in March 1881, Mussorgsky left The Fair for the most part unfinished: much of the first act was complete in piano-vocal score, most of the second act was complete in piano-vocal score with the intermezzo of a choral version of St. John's Night on Bald Mountain completed in full score, but most of the third act was only roughed out or simply left as a few themes based on Ukrainian folk songs. Various composers have over time attempted to complete The Fair, among them Lyadov, Cui, and Tcherepnin. The most accepted version is Vissarion Shebalin (1931).

The Fair at Sorochinsky is an extension of the comic songs of the late 1860s (O Darling Savishna!) and the completed first act of The Marriage. The melodies are based in Ukrainian folk tunes and are crafted into a style which might be called heightened recitative which at times becomes lyrical. It is a peasant opera and Mussorgsky's humor is sometimes crude and often broad, but it is always appropriately mirrored in the music. While it is difficult to judge from Shebalin's completion the opera what it would have been if it had it been completed by Mussorgsky, Shebalin's version does hold together as a stage work. One would like to believe that Mussorgsky, had he not been in the final years of his slow death from alcoholism, might have been able to create a wholly successful and wholly characteristic type of Russian comic opera.

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Gopak

Apparently, part of being a member of the group of nationalist Russian composers at the end of the nineteenth century meant editing and orchestrating the music of Mussorgsky. The lethargic Lyadov took up the burden of editing and orchestrating Mussorgsky's comedic masterpiece, the enormously incomplete opera Sorochintsï Fair, and put it down again more than two decades later in 1903. Needless to say, Lyadov's protracted labors did not immediately win Sorochintsï Fair a place in the standard repertoire, and only the brief Gopak that ends Act One is still performed. A cheerful little and lively dance from the end of the opera's first act, Lyadov's Gopak starts with the massive sound of the strings "tuning up" and then launches into a slight and silly orchestral arrangement that has all the charm of late-Romantic Russian orchestral music and none of the charm of Mussorgsky's original.

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Gopak - Gopak (arr.piano)

Mussorgsky wrote two works with the title Gopak, a song for voice and piano from 1866 and a piano transcription of the closing number of Act One of his opera Sorochintsï Fair. The former is one of his first attempts to write in a specifically Russian idiom, to wit, the folk dance the gopak. The latter is a slight and cheerful little piano dance that affects the big open sonorities of peasant strings in its opening. The former is significant as an early example of Mussorgsky's budding slavophilism. The latter is a footnote to comedic masterpiece that was never completed. Interestingly, there is also a transcription of the Gopak for piano by Rachmaninov, which inflates Mussorgsky's piano version to the bursting point.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide