The case of женитьба the two versions of Musorgsky’s opera fragment

The composer’s two completed but very much differing versions of Boris Godunov still pose many serious questions to both performers and analysts alike. Few people know that Musorgsky also completely revised his operatic fragment The Marriage that immediately preceded Boris, and furthermore hardly a trace exists in musicological literature of the fact that The Child composed at that time, which later became the first item of the song cycle The Nursery (with the title of With Nurse), was also the subject of a revision. What connection there is between the versions of these three works and how Musorgsky’s operatic style developed in 1868 are questions to which the present article seeks the answer