El pasado en el presente. Las representaciones sobre la acción de Pedro el Grande y las tareas de la modernización cultural rusa en Khovanshchina de Modest Musorgsky y Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia evaluated the figure of Peter the Great and his modernizing policies, addressing the case of Modest Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina. On one hand, the article intends to rescue the intervention of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, as intelligent fundamentally involving the unfinished work of his colleague. On the other hand, and from the resources used by the composers, it is argued that through Khovanshchina they presented positively the modernizing action of Peter the Great. At the same time, they stimulated the modernization tasks of its time. Combining tools of musicology and intellectual history, the work also seeks to revise the category of intelligent, remarkably limited writers, considering Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov more than just composers, and the opera as an aesthetic device that seeks to intervene in discussions and social policies of its day.