The life and work of no great composer is as troubling as that of Modest Mussorgsky.

That life ended horribly at age 42 because of alcoholism, a fate captured by Ilya Repin's portrait, painted the day before Mussorgsky died, showing the composer, wild-eyed and tousle-haired, in all his inebriate dissolution.

The mess of Mussorgsky's life is complemented by the mess of his legacy -- brilliant masterpieces, left behind in an unfinished state somewhat resembling the haunted specter who gazes out despondently from Repin's portrait.

Those works take an unremittingly dark view of human beings as the helpless victims of the impassive forces of history, history that leads nowhere but back to the troubles of the present.

Mussorgsky's early death belongs among the genuine tragedies of the early deaths of Mozart at 35, Schubert at 31, Chopin at 39 and Mahler at 50. Had they lived today, it is entirely possible that most, if not all, of those lives might have been extended by modern medicine.

The exception is Mussorgsky's. For anyone whose mind was so dark, it's hard to imagine any destiny other than that of self-immolation. What's even more depressing is that the music of this most self-consciously Russian of all composers is as depressingly relevant to Russia today as it was in Mussorgsky's lifetime.

This troubling thought was brought to mind after attending a recent performance of the Metropolitan Opera's revival of its 1985 production of Mussorgsky's last "completed" (few of his works can be said to exist in such a finished state) opera, "Khovanshchina."

Like its predecessor, "Boris Godunov," "Khovanshchina" is a historical drama, set in the late 17th century, about 70 years after the action depicted in "Boris."

"The past in the present -- that's my task," Mussorgsky wrote his friend, the critic Vladimir Stassov, of his attempts to come to terms with Russia's dark and troubled past. Although Mussorgsky's death left the opera unfinished and unorchestrated -- the Met uses the Shostakovich orchestration -- he succeeded brilliantly at this task in "Khovanshchina."

Mussorgsky explored the issue that continues haunt Russia today: the conflict between progressives eager to drag their country into the modern world and Russia's fundamentally non-Western, even barbaric, character and traditions.

What the Met's brilliant revival -- conducted energetically by its principal guest conductor, Valery Gergiev, and sung beautifully by a largely Russian cast -- makes clear is that Mussorgsky thought this conflict not only unresolvable, but meaningless.

"Khovanshchina" translates loosely as "the Khovansky mess." And what the opera depicts is indeed a mess of warring factions, each colliding against the others in the tide of history symbolized by the changes wrought by Peter the Great, who never even appears on stage.

There are the Khovansky princes, who lead the Streltsy, the local armed militia, who are in charge of maintaining order in Moscow but who instead carouse, rape, murder and pillage.

There are the "progressive" Westernizers, led by Prince Golitsin and the boyar Shaklovity, who occasionally utter noble sentiments but who actually practice deceit and assassination, albeit on a more sophisticated level that the Khovanskys and their Streltsy.

Finally, there are the "Old Believers," whose spiritual leaders are the Elder Dosifei and the saintly Marfa, who embody the reactionary beliefs hostile to history.

"Khovanshchina" was never publicly staged in Mussorgsky's lifetime. In fact, although it had its premiere in Paris (in Rimsky-Korsakov's performing version) in 1913, it was never staged in Russia until after the Communists came to power.

When "Khovanshchina" came up for consideration, Russia was in a characteristic period of crisis and political reaction. Czar Alexander II, liberator of the serfs, had been killed by a terrorist's bomb in March 1881, the month of Mussorgsky's death; literary committees attached to the imperial theaters were understandably nervous about historical opera on political themes.

"One radical opera by Mussorgsky is enough," the Imperial Opera Committee announced when "Khovanshchina" came to a vote and was rejected in 1883.

But while Mussorgsky may have been a revolutionary musically, his social, political and economic views were another matter. What indeed he actually believed is open to question -- at least in "Khovanshchina."

The characters of this world in the opera, who are actively involved in history -- the Streltsy, the Khovanskys, Golitsin and Shaklovity -- do not engage our sympathy, and we do not care when they fall.

But we do care about the Old Believers -- at least as they are represented by Dosifei and Marfa -- because they harm no one and do not act selfishly. In fact, except for expressions of fraternal love for one another, the Old Believers do nothing -- nothing, that is, except to choose to immolate themselves in the mass suicide that concludes "Khovanshchina." The Old Believers deal with history by deciding to drop out of it.

"Khovanshchina" testifies to Mussorgsky's own passion for, and terror of, human history. In the fall of 1872, just as the plot of "Khovanshchina" was being sketched out, the composer wrote Stassov that he was reading Darwin and was in "bliss."

"While instructing man as to his origin, Darwin knows exactly the kind of animal he has to deal with," Mussorgsky wrote. "Without man being aware of it, he is gripped in a vise."

It is little wonder that Mussorgsky still hadn't completed "Khovanshchina" when he died nine years later.

How could he transmit the ideas that freedom and time are meaningless in a genre -- historical drama -- that insists upon the consequences of human choices and whose form must have a beginning, a middle and an end? Holding such beliefs, who wouldn't have turned to drink?

Here's what's even more unsettling: Ever since his death, the meaning of Mussorgsky's magnificent, messy and unfinished musical works have continued to obsess his countrymen, whether Russia's best and brightest (from Rimsky-Korsakov to Solzhenitsyn) or its worst, including Stalin and his KGB head, Beria.

The best one can wish for Russia is a time when works such as "Khovanshchina" can be retired from the arena of current events and be confined to the opera house.

Great as he is, a Russia in which Mussorgsky is no longer quite so relevant is the Russia for which all of us should hope.

Pub Date: 3/23/99