Political satire and fantastical fairy tale rolled into one, Le Coq d’or seems an opera tailor-made for Barrie Kosky. He rises to the challenge with dark wit spiced with surreal burlesque – a chorus line of dancing horse heads in stockings and suspenders, anyone? Classic Kosky. A co-production with Festival d’Aix (where it should have premiered last summer) and Komische Oper Berlin, its first performance took place last night at the Opéra de Lyon, thus becoming the final new production of Serge Dorny’s reign as Intendent before taking up the reins at Bayerische Staatsoper.
Composed by Rimsky-Korsakov, based on Pushkin, the opera tells the fable of a lazy tsar who is paranoid about invasion but paralysed by inertia and indecision. The opera was a thinly veiled commentary on Tsar Nicholas II’s disastrous campaign in the Russo-Japanese War, Rimsky poking fun at a political leader. Unsurprisingly it fell foul of the censors and wasn’t premiered until a year after Rimsky’s death.
Directors can take their pick of political leaders to parody. Boris Yeltsin, for example, was the obvious target in Dmitry Bertman’s staging at Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Kosky doesn’t seem to have a particular leader in mind, nor indeed does he set Rimsky’s opera in Russia. Instead, Tsar Dodon rules over a grassy wasteland dominated by a dead tree. Gloriously sung by Dmitry Ulyanov, his solid bass resonant, Dodon is a slob, dressed in grubby underwear, his golden crown the only symbol of kingship. Everyone, it seems, has designs on that crown, from his sons – oleaginous suits – to his vampish housekeeper, Amelfa. General Polkan is represented by a horse’s head (with a dance troupe as soldiers).
Manipulator-in-chief is the Astrologer, here sporting a Rimsky-esque long white beard and a sober black dress. It’s a stratospheric tenor role but Andrei Popov coped valiantly with its demands. When he scatters feathers from his handbag, the “golden cockerel” manifests itself atop the tree, a semi-naked man with metallic talons, its crowing sung off-stage by fine soprano Maria Nazarova. Dodon’s charger is a skeletal steed wheeled in by the Astrologer, a Heath Robinson contraption whose legs go through the motions of a gallop while he remains stationary – political commentary for you to apply to your incompetent leader of choice.