Rimsky-Korsakov‘s The Golden Cockerel was long dismissed as a piece of film-flam, an insubstantial orientalist divertissement, that, in order to make work, you had to turn into a garishly pantomime – almost a kiddie show – to distract from its hollow centre and heartless humor. But since the advent of musicologist Richard Taruskin, and many others in his wake, the whole of Russian musical history has been put under a fiercely searching and analytic microscope, and Rimsky’s whole oeuvre has started to be taken much more seriously.
Consider the background to this piece: written as a sudden postlude to a career that the composer had fully intended to finish on a profound note with his spiritual legend The Invisible City of Kitezh. But the slow collapse of Tsarist Russia was already apparent, with the catastrophic Russo-Japanese war and the first revolution of 1905 which culminated with the Tsar’s troops massacring protesters. Rimsky supported the widespread student demonstrations, making an orchestral arrangement of an incendiary folk tune ‘Dubinushka’ (The Little Oak Stick’).The popularity of this displeased the authorities and led them to ban performances of all his music — he was, at this time, the most prominent and respected of all Russian composers. Shortly after, Rimsky commenced work on ‘The Golden Cockerel’ based on Pushkin’s verse fairy-tale of royal ingratitude.
What a relief then to see Laurent Pelly‘s 2016 production from the Monnaie, Brussels, where all oriental gaudiness was replaced by a gilded regal bed on an austere bed of black coal — a brutal stage picture, highlighting Tsar Dodon, lazy and incompetent, surrounded by subservient ninnies and a preposterous pantomime cockerel. The seductions of the Queen of Shemakhan against a bleak vista of barbed wire became sinister and even more cruel than usual. The final Act, with its brutal denouement, was no longer blunted by excessive spectacle, but a stark warning, which, when I saw it in the theatre, made me profoundly uneasy, given that the US had a new president and the UK had perpetrated the disaster that is Brexit. And, most interestingly, the dazzle, opulence and brilliant colors of the score made a disturbing contrast to the stark stage image. Laurent Pelly’s typical light touch, ironic humor, and whimsy are of course much in evidence, which is as it should be, as Rimsky’s opera is a satire disguised as a fairytale; anything more explicit would (in 1907) have led to serious trouble. As it was, there were enough problems with the censor to deprive Rimsky of ever seeing his last work – it premiered in 1909, the year after his death.
Maybe because of this production, there was a little spate of outings in the US, mirroring the new presidency in 2016 — in New York, and most notably, at Santa Fe. And Barrie Kosky’s recent Komische Opera production, with a horrifying decomposing Cockerel continue the trend of taking this opera much more seriously than it has been.
But it was the Pelly, with a first class cast and tight musical direction from Alain Altinoglu, that was the revelation for me. This strange, cynical, heartless, childlike mixture of an opera came into its own as a withering critique of a decadent regime, and one that is terrifyingly topical at this moment.
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Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
