It’s Boris Godunov, but not as we know it. Gone is the grandeur and melodrama, the uprising, the fountains, dancing and the female lead. Even the music is different. As you may have guessed, this is the original 1869 version, rejected by the Russian Imperial Theatres. To make the piece acceptable, Mussorgsky had to abandon his pioneering aesthetic and turn it into a ‘grand opera’, although the result was still highly distinctive and earned him his posthumous prestige.

The Royal Opera production of 2016 reveals the austere beauty, coherence and symmetry of the original version. The Pushkin play is serious and demanding, and the 1869 opera matches this, conceding nothing to the middlebrow operatic culture of the time. The opera benefits greatly from its preservation of Pushkin’s rich text, but the subtleties are all but lost in the subtitles. Even then, pearls of historical wisdom and Shakespearean bitter wit chime powerfully with events in the world today.

Richard Jones’s two-storey staging presents the people and rulers as two separate strata, united only in their misery. Above, there is intrigue, manipulation, fear and murder. Below, the people are oppressed, duped and starved. This economical but eloquent production is full of symbolism: the spinning top, which becomes a symbol of infanticide, rhymes with the shape of the bell, and the bell rhymes with Boris’s crown. There are three redheads: the murdered Dmitry, the would-be Pretender, Grigory, and Boris’s own son Fyodor. The careful treatment of the symbols also fits well with the parallels in the structure of the opera, which has three crowd choruses, two scenes with the bells, two tales of miracles, three Boris soliloquies and so on.

The 1869 opera is a sombre contest between low male voices. Ain Anger stands out as a superb Pimen, both in the resonant beauty of his voice and in his wonderfully expressive and natural inflections. John Tomlinson as Varlaam is an engaging, consummate singer-actor, ably carrying the opera’s only comedic interlude (the Inn scene). By comparison, Bryn Terfel’s Boris may seem underpowered, but this is actually a result of the 1869 version’s characterisation of the title-role: the familiar later version gives Boris greater range and depth. Nevertheless, it is Boris who must deliver the opera’s tragic ending; and while Terfel is dramatically convincing, he is not compelling, even if we make due allowances for the 1869 score.

There was some inspired casting in David Butt Philip as Grigory, who was absolutely persuasive in the role even though there is less music for him than in the later version. Kostas Smoriginas as Shchelkalov and Andrew Tortise as the Holy Fool both acquit themselves admirably, as do the only women, Vlada Borovko as Xenia and Rebecca de Pont Davies – the latter a delightfully sour Hostess. Once we attune ourselves to the different nature of 1869 version, we realise that it is an ensemble piece, and as such, this production is an unqualified success.

The chorus generally make a strong impression as part of the overall ensemble under the expert leadership of Antonio Pappano, prompting us to overlook a little instability in the first scene (some stilted declamation and a tendency to lag slightly behind the orchestra). This production accentuates the fakeness of the crowd’s performance, but at the cost of the humanity that Mussorgsky wanted to give the common people. Pappano manages to pull out some truly powerful moments from the notoriously ungrateful orchestration.

In all, I am very grateful that we have a well-made recording of this production, which allows us at last to see the 1869 version as an independent work of art that makes sense in its own terms, a testimony to Mussorgsky’s genius – unruly but brilliant. The production offers us a Boris that is universal rather than Russian, more modernist than Romantic, austere rather than lush. I believe you will find it as illuminating as I did, so long as you can leave behind the preconceptions formed by the familiar, later version.