The slow crumbling of a ruler's power is a spectacle of particular charm.

“Boris Godunow” by Modest Mussorgsky, the original version completed in 1870 and subsequently revised several times, offers the best object lesson, whereby the special thing about it is that Tsar Boris, who came to power through the assassination of the legitimate heir to the throne, was not the result of external machinations, but brought down by his pangs of conscience.

Mussorgsky based his libretto on Pushkin's drama of the same name, which in turn was inspired by Shakespeare's "Macbeth".

Pushkin consistently shifts his ghostly apparitions into the interior of the psyche, and Mussorgsky also adheres to this.

Godunov's self-tormenting doubts about power, which culminate in phantasmagorias of the dead Tsarevich and, in the face of death, lead him to see his sinful actions, form the gripping highlights of the opera.

And these nocturnal states of the soul, which no light of reason illuminates and which no emancipation can overcome, led George Steiner to come to the conclusion in his classic book "The Death of Tragedy" that "Boris Godunov" was the most important tragedy of the nineteenth century be.

The fact that the whole thing takes place in a picture-perfect, "dark" Russia contributes to the unbroken power of fascination of the work, especially from a Western perspective.

Milan's La Scala has now opened its new season with Mussorgsky's opera, traditionally on the day of St. Ambrose, the city's patron saint.

And as always, there was a lot of pomp with the President, in whose presence the anthem was sung in the theater and who, surrounded by international political celebrities, attended the performance.

The police presence was considerable.

The night before, notorious do-gooders had smeared paint on the entrance facade of La Scala.

On the day of the performance itself, a group of demonstrators protested against Russian propaganda and the war in Ukraine with blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.

The Ukrainian consul in Milan had tried to persuade the theater management to give up the Russian opera.

But she stuck to her decision.

Since the Italian premiere of "Boris Godunow" in 1909, the Teatro alla Scala can look back on a long tradition of performances with a total of twenty-six productions.

In their quest for some sort of Russian authenticity, the one from 1979, directed by Yuri Lubimov, then director of Moscow's Taganka Theater, and set by David Borovsky, stands out in particular, where the action took place in front of a monumental iconostasis and Claudio Abbado conducted the so-called original version of 1873.

A Western romanticism about Russia played a role in this – it was the time when the Italian left was experiencing its zenith, contacts with the Soviet Union were flourishing and Luigi Nono telegraphed his friend Abbado in revolutionary exuberance: “I want to be with you in beautiful Moscow.”