Separating Hyperplanes

Monday Morning Music

Matthew Martin 7/14/2014 08:00:00 AM

You may have noticed that I haven't actually been posting music every Monday. That's simply because I've realized that I only write a couple of actual posts a week, so a weekly music post would shift the focus of this blog too far away from economics. But I still plan on posting music every once in a while (this is, after all, an easy way for me to keep track of youtube music that I like).

Today's piece is the death scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov:It's actually surprisingly hard to find a good version of this aria, considering that Boris Godunov is the most-played Russian opera of all time--even more than Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin--and this is the most famous scene from the opera. The version from the Bayeriche Staatsoper is absolute perfection, but has unfortunately been removed from youtube.

Now, Boris Godunov is not in it's original Mussorgsky form. The opera's musical style has always been controversial, prompting several revisions over the centuries, most notably by Rimsky-Korsakov who "fixed" what he believed were "structural flaws" in several of the opera's arias. Lately it has become fashionable to play the restored opera without Rimsky-Korsakov's revisions, though "restored" by no means implies "original." However, I have no clue which version the above video is.