Boris Godunov

Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov is a five hour Russian opera about this bad guy Boris who kills the Tsar-in-training, the Tsarevich, and who then makes himself Tsar, and then spends the rest of the opera feeling guilty and a bit haunted about killing the Tsarevich. In the process Boris works hard to impoverish the already impoverished Russian people. Meanwhile, this guy Grigory (who is a trifle delusional) is claiming to be the dead Tsarevich, Dimitri, and is assembling an army to unseat Boris. Boris dies of advanced pangs of guilt (not about the Russian peasants but about his murder of the real Dimitri) and the fake Dimitri marches on Moscow, chaos reigns and the Court Holy Fool is left to lament Russia's "bleak, uncertain" fate.