About the work
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's final opera „The Golden Cockerel" was premiered in 1909 — posthumously, after his death in 1908 — in Moscow. Vladimir Belsky's libretto is based on Pushkin's tale of the same name (1834) and is a biting political satire on the absolutist tsarist regime, which is why censorship long held the work back.
Plot
The lazy old Tsar Dodon rules over a threatened kingdom. A mysterious Astrologer gives him a golden cockerel that crows whenever danger threatens — Dodon can now sleep peacefully. As the cockerel crows the first few times, Dodon sends his sons into battle; both perish. Dodon himself takes the field and encounters the mysteriously beautiful Queen of Shemakha, whose seductive arts make him her husband. They return home as a bridal couple. But the Astrologer now demands his reward: the Queen herself. Enraged, Dodon strikes him dead — the cockerel swoops down from its perch and kills Dodon with a single blow. Queen and cockerel vanish, and the kingdom dissolves into chaos. In an epilogue the Astrologer reappears to announce that the whole thing was merely a fairy tale.
Cultural significance
The Golden Cockerel is Rimsky-Korsakov's boldest opera and the high point of his fairy-tale series. The orientalist sonorities (the Queen of Shemakha's Hymn to the Sun) and the ironically distorted folk choruses are regarded as pioneering for Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The anti-authoritarian satire — Tsar Dodon as a caricature of Nicholas II — made the work a target of Russian censorship. Diaghilev's 1914 Paris production as a semi-staged ballet-opera established the work in the West.