The Golden Cockerel
The Golden Cockerel (Russian: Золотой петушок, romanized: Zolotoy petushok ) is an opera in three acts, with short prologue and even shorter epilogue, composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the last opera he completed before his death in 1908. Its libretto written by Vladimir Belsky derives from Alexander Pushkin's 1834 poem The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. The opera was completed in 1907 and premiered in 1909 in Moscow, after the composer's death. Outside Russia it has often been performed in French as Le coq d'or.
The Golden Cockerel
Le coq d'or
- Russian
- French
Pushkin's "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel" (1834)
Composition history[edit]
Rimsky-Korsakov had considered his previous opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1907) to be his final artistic statement in the medium, and, indeed, this work has been called a "summation of the nationalistic operatic tradition of Glinka and The Five."[1] However, the political situation in Russia at the time inspired him to take up the pen to compose a "razor-sharp satire of the autocracy, of Russian imperialism, and of the Russo-Japanese war."[2] Also, Rimsky-Korsakov's previous works inspired by Alexander Pushkin's poems, especially Tsar Saltan (1899-1900), had proved to be very successful.
The work on The Golden Cockerel was started in 1906 and finished by September 1907. By the end of February 1908 the director of Imperial Theatres Vladimir Telyakovskiy passed the score to the censorship agency in order to get an approval for the Bolshoi Theatre. It was returned unedited, yet suddenly taken back the next day. This time many changes were requested to be made to the libretto as well as the original Pushkin's text. Rimsky-Korsakov suspected someone's denunciation and resisted any changes. He continued the work on orchestration while fighting with progressive illness. In June 1908 Telyakovskiy informed him that the Moscow Governor-General Sergei Gershelman was highly against the opera. In his last letter Rimsky-Korsakov asked his friend and music publisher Boris Jurgenson to contact Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi and suggest him to stage The Golden Cockerel in Paris. He died two days later and thus never witnessed the premiere of his last opera.[3]
Note on names:
Rimsky-Korsakov made the following concert arrangement:
After his death, A. Glazunov and M. Shteynberg (Steinberg) compiled the following orchestral suite:
Efrem Zimbalist wrote Concert Phantasy on 'Le coq d'or' for violin and piano based on themes from the suite.
Inspiration for other works[edit]
Marina Frolova-Walker points to The Golden Cockerel as the fore-runner of the anti-psychologistic and absurdist ideas which would culminate in such 20th century 'anti-operas' as Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (1921) and Shostakovich's The Nose (1930). In this, his last opera, Rimsky-Korsakov had laid "the foundation for modernist opera in Russia and beyond."[1]
In 1978–79 the English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji wrote "Il gallo d’oro" da Rimsky-Korsakov: variazioni frivole con una fuga anarchica, eretica e perversa.