Théâtre Musical de Paris – Châtelet
Orchestre de Paris and Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg
cond. Kent Nagano; chorus master Andrei Petrenko
recorded Dec. 2002; TDK label
Additional information
Link for the DVD of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or:
Complete cast list:
· Astrologer – Barry Banks
· King Dodon – Albert Schagidullin
· Queen of Shemakha – Olga Trifonova
· The Golden Cockerel – Yuri Maria Saenz
· General Polkan – Ilya Bannik
· Amelfa – Elena Manistina
· Prince Guidon – Ilya Levinsky
· Prince Afron – Andrei Breus
Le Coq d’Or synopsis
with material from Richard Taruskin: ‘Golden Cockerel, The', Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 04 August 2007), http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=opera.007911
Dramatized fable (nebïlitsa v litsakh) in a prologue, three acts and an epilogue by Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov to a libretto by Vladimir Nikolayevich Bel’sky after the eponymous imitation folk tale in verse by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, based in turn on ‘The House of the Weathercock’ and ‘Legend of the Arabian Astrologer’ from The Alhambra by Washington Irving; premiered 1909.
Prince Guidon – tenor
Prince Afron – baritone
General Polkan – bass
Amelfa, royal housekeeper – contralto
Astrologer – tenore-altino/lyric tenor
The Queen of Shemakha – soprano
The Golden Cockerel – soprano
Boyars, guards, footsoldiers, canoneers, servants, the Queen of Shemakha’s slave girls and entourage, crowd
Setting: the imaginary realm of King Dodon
Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera, incorporating (in Act 2) music originally sketched for abandoned projects on The Barber of Baghdad (1895) and Sten’ka Razin (1905), was very quickly composed between October 1906 and September 1907. Then began a protracted battle with the censor, which prevented the work from reaching the stage until after the composer’s death. The portrayal of a slothful autocrat engaged in idiotic warfare struck too close to home in the wake of the humiliating Russo-Japanese War. The composer, who had suffered indignities during the political disturbances of 1905, did in fact harbour a grudge against the Autocracy, and the censor’s sensors were not aroused altogether in vain. Indeed, the autograph full score bore an epigraph, later prudently crossed out, from the role of the Distiller in Rimsky’s own May Night: ‘A fine song, friend! A pity, though, that the head man gets mentioned in it in less than decent words’. The composer refused to alter the libretto, with its reference near the end to ‘a new dawn … without the Tsar’. (The censor’s demands were in any case obtuse, requiring the elimination of lines from the original, long since published Pushkin text.) The only parts of the opera that were performed during Rimsky’s lifetime were the Introduction and Wedding Procession, played at a ‘Russian Symphony Concert’ (alongside Stravinsky’s early vocal suite The Faun and the Shepherdess) under the auspices of the Belyayev publishing house in February 1908, and the Queen of Shemakha’s Hymn to the Sun, sung in concert the next month by the soprano Nadeshda Zabela. Emil Cooper conducted the first stage performance, the next year; the production was designed by Ivan Bilibin, and Nikolay Speransky sang King Dodon, Aureliya Dobrovol’skaya the Queen of Shemakha.
Though the cartoonish mockery of authority is clear enough in a blanket sort of way, the libretto’s symbolism – assuming it exists – has resisted coherent explanation. The envoi, ‘The fable’s false, but contains a hint, a lesson for good young lads!’, addressed to the reader by Pushkin and to Rimsky’s audience by the Astrologer, remains as teasing in the opera as it had been in the tale.
The Golden Cockerel is the only one of Rimsky- Korsakov’s 15 operas to have achieved repertory status beyond
Prologue
The Astrologer, the opera’s framing character and its implied narrator, appears before the curtain to warn the audience that he is about to conjure up a cautionary tale.
Act 1 (King Dodon’s throne room)
The king complains that he is tired of warfare but that his neighbours keep on invading. He asks his assembled councillors, including his two sons, how can he avoid engagements in the future. Prince Guidon answers that he should withdraw the army to the capital, because life is more pleasant there than at the frontier. With no army at the border no one will invade. All think this is a marvellous idea until Commander Polkan points out that defending the capital is riskier than defending the frontier. Prince Afron suggests they disband the army and only mobilize it a month before each attack. This idea too is acclaimed until Polkan, whom everyone resents as a killjoy, points out that the enemy is not likely to give a month’s notice. Everyone, now baffled, longs for the days when the future could be foretold in beans or in wine-dregs (and begin to argue as to which is the better method). At this point, accompanied by the same music as in the Prologue, the Astrologer appears with a magic Golden Cockerel who, placed on a high perch, can warn of any border disturbance, and can also tell the king when it is safe to ‘reign, lying on your side’. Overjoyed, the king promises any reward the Astrologer can name. The latter says he will claim his reward later, but would like the promise in writing, to make it ‘lawful’. The king indignantly refuses (‘Lawful? What’s that? I never heard of such a thing. My whims and orders – that’s the law around here’). Amelfa now brings in the big royal baby’s bed, some treats to eat and his pet parrot, who, interpreted by Amelfa, sings his praises. The Cockerel gives reassurance and everyone falls asleep. To judge by his music, the king sees a vision resembling the Queen of Shemakha in his dreams. All at once the Cockerel sounds the alarm. Polkan awakens the king, who mobilizes two armies, placing one of his sons at the head of each. Again the Cockerel sounds the alarm. Now the king must go into battle himself. Grumbling, he dons his rusty armour (which he has grotesquely outgrown) and goes off to battle, his people seeing him off with huzzahs.
Act 2 (A mountain gorge)
Looking in vain for the battle, the king stumbles upon the bodies of his two sons, whose armies have apparently fought each other to total destruction. He spies a tent which, he reasons, must contain the enemy. Before he can attack it out comes the gorgeous Queen of Shemakha, who sings her famous Hymn to the Sun, ‘Otvet’ mne, zorkoye svetilo’ (‘Answer me, bright orb’); she then brazenly announces that she has come to subdue King Dodon, not by force of arms but by her voluptuous charms. At her command, Dodon sends Polkan away, removing his only protection from the evil queen’s wiles. The rest of the act is given over to the conquest, which begins with the queen’s description of her unclothed body, and ends with a wild dance that exhausts the king and makes him her slave. (In his stern performance note, Rimsky-Korsakov directs that the dance should only look strenuous; ‘it must not interfere with the singers’ breathing’.) Having exacted Dodon’s promise to banish Polkan (he goes even further and orders his loyal commander beheaded), the queen ‘agrees’ to come back with him and become his consort.
Act 3 (The capital)
The crowd is wondering when the army will return. The royal wedding procession approaches; all hail the king and the new queen. Suddenly the Astrologer’s music is heard; he materializes and claims his reward – the queen! The king naturally reneges on his promise and has the Astrologer forcibly removed. The Astrologer resists. Dodon strikes him on the head and kills him; at this the sky darkens. The queen laughs it all off, but when the king tries to embrace her she repulses him with taunts. They dismount and begin to ascend the steps to the palace, but the Cockerel swoops down from its perch and pecks the king on the head, killing him. When light returns, both the Cockerel and the Queen of Shemakha have vanished. The terrified crowd laments.
Epilogue
The Astrologer reappears before the curtain, reminding the audience that what they have seen is only a fairy tale and that the bloody dénouement should therefore not upset them. He leaves with the cryptic assurance that only he and the Queen of Shemakha were real people – ‘all the rest were dream, delusion, pale shade, empty air … ’.
The opera opens with a brash trumpet phrase (later to be identified as the Golden Cockerel’s cry) which must remind anyone who knows it of the tag with which all the scenes of The Tale of Tsar Saltan begin. The trumpet is now muted, yet played fortissimo and doubled, which turns the timbre into a musical cartoon, reminiscent of the garish colours and crude draughtsmanship of lubki. That vein of parody is characteristic of the opera throughout. It is a study in calculated tawdriness and triviality – again anticipating Stravinsky, this time the composer of Petrushka. The orchestra is full of gaudy sonorities, some of them, like the Astrologer’s glockenspiel, functioning as ‘leit-timbres’.
Two of the three traditional melodies quoted in the score are of the paltriest sort imaginable. When the Queen of Shemakha forces King Dodon to sing her a love song in Act 2, he does so to the tune of ‘Chizhik, chizhik, gde tï bïl?’ (‘Birdie, birdie, where’ve you been?’), the Russian equivalent of ‘Pat-a-cake’ or ‘Ring a ring of roses’. The triumphant Wedding Procession in Act 3 reaches its climax with a snatch of ‘Svetit mesyats’ (‘The moon shines brightly’), a veritable roadhouse number. (The remaining folk tune, the aptly named ‘Uzh tï, sizen’kiy petun’ (‘Oh you little grey-blue cock’) is associated with Amelfa in Act 1.) The chorus that greets the bridal couple is harmonized in a wicked burlesque of the ‘folk harmonizations’ that ethnomusicologists like Yevgeniya Linyova, armed with phonographs, had been touting as the ‘authentic’ Russian idiom of the future. (The chorus proves that Rimsky had seen her work, and that he disapproved of it.) The casting of the eunuch Astrologer as a weird tenore altino (for which, according to the composer’s performance note, a high tenor with a strong falsetto register may substitute) is the ultimate lubok coloration. When he claims the Queen of Shemakha, improbably, for a bride, his voice shoots up to an e″.
The Queen of Shemakha’s Lakmé-ish coloratura music is a reductio ad absurdum of the stereotyped ‘oriental’ idiom associated with many works by the Five (or ‘mighty Kuchka’), and also of the sequence-driven chromaticism (now extended to encompass retrogrades and inversions) long associated with fantastic characters in Rimsky-Korsakov’s earlier operas. Even in the act of parody, Rimsky advanced the ‘artificial’ harmonic idiom in spots to the point of virtual atonality, making The Golden Cockerel a locus classicus of early modernism (its most direct issue again being early Stravinsky: compare the title characters’ music in The Firebird or The Nightingale). But, as King Dodon says in Act 3, ‘to everything there is a limit’. There was a line, firmly drawn in Professor Rimsky-Korsakov’s imagination, that he would not and could not cross. ‘There you are, decadents, have a feast’, he remarked with nervous testiness in a letter to a friend, ‘but still and all, pornographic clowns, to decadence I have not descended!’. What kept him ‘above’ it was precisely the reliance on mechanistic sequences that many analysts and critics now deplore.
Where the fantastic mode had been rigorously segregated in earlier Rimsky-Korsakov from the folkish or diatonic, in The Golden Cockerel the two are interwoven to an unprecedented degree, realizing the notion of nebïlitsa as embodied in the opera’s subtitle – a story in which everything is unreal. The actual cry of the cock, given a ‘fantastic’ harmonization when it appears as such, also furnishes the background figuration for the saccharine lullaby music in Act 1, and immediately thereafter, for a folkish chorus.
