Conductor, GEORGE WALTER
The polonaise in Boris Godunov is a piece of music with an eventful history.
It had no place in the ' original' Boris of 1868-9, but was inserted with the rest of the so-called ' Polish act' in the second version, and was played as a concert piece in April, 1872, two years before the opera itself was staged. Rimsky-Korsakov tells us that Mussorgsky originally scored the polonaise almost entirely for strings, with some curious idea of suggesting Louis XIV's celebrated ' Vingt-quatre violons du roi '.
It was completely unsuccessful in this form and Mussorgsky re-scored it in 1874, before the production of the opera. However, Rimsky-Korsakov still considered his friend's orchestration ineffective ; in 1889 he re-scored the polonaise himself, and this led in turn to his drastic revision of the whole of Mussorgsky's opera, which has since been so bitterly attacked.