Complete Songs: Voice and Piano (Vocal Collection) Review

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Complete Songs: Voice and Piano (Vocal Collection) ReviewHere is a invaluable resource for one of the world's most original and idiosyncratic composers, a composer who wrote for singers to impact on the listener; for singers of all ranges.
Mussorgsky's songs are dramatic and comic but they are operas, musical dramas, within their short spans, as all songs should be, and are never boring. They put themselves over ... almost.
The Complete Songs of Mussorgsky is a beautiful volume just to look at and to hold. It looks great on the shelves but there is an impediment to using it to show the world that there is a rival to Schubert in the world of song, an impediment to dismantling the unfortunate belief that the Art Song is a crashing bore.
The impediment is that, although the text is the Cyrillic original with a transliteration below it, there is no singing translation matching the music note for note. Mussorgsky's music is wedded to Russian speech patterns and is therefore difficult to translate syllable for syllable.
A poetic translation is at the back of the book so a student of the songs could set to and work out a singing translation, needed if Mussogsky's satiric punch is to hit home in songs like The Peep Show, and The Seminarian.
For those unschooled in Russian but who claim to prefer the original language in performance, I recommend they hear Chaliapin sing The Song of the Flea in Russian, then listen to Peter Dawson in English then come back to Chaliapin's to appreciate his and Mussorgsky's genius.

However, The Winds are Howling, Sunless, Songs and Dances of Death and The Nursery are all here at one's fingertips, as is an aria from Mussorgsky's abandoned opera Salammbo, The Song of the Balearic Islander. So how could I complain?
Many years ago Boris Christoff recorded Mussorgsky's complete songs. When I find a copy I'll be listening with this treasure of a book, although I'll be flipping the pages back and forth from the music to the translated text.
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