Boris Godunov (opera) Russian State". Among major operas, "Boris Godunov" shares with Giuseppe Verdi's "Don Carlos" (1867) the distinction of having an extremely complex creative history, as well as a great wealth of alternative material. The composer created two versions—the Original Version of 1869, which was rejected for production by the Imperial Theatres, and the Revised Version of 1872, which received its first performance in 1874 in Saint Petersburg. "Boris Godunov" has seldom been performed in either of the two forms left by the composer, frequently being subjected to cuts, recomposition, re-orchestration, transposition of scenes, or conflation of the original and revised versions.
Wozzeck on the compositional direction of "Wozzeck". In a letter to his wife written in June 1918, he wrote, "There is a little bit of me in his character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact, humiliated." His correspondence and notebooks dating from the war years reveal a painful obsession with completing "Wozzeck". Compositional sketches and notes for both Wozzeck and the "" of Three Pieces for Orchestra that Berg made during the war are strewn with disjointed fragments of military ordinances and terminology.