Opera review: Pushkin, Ukraine and the magic squirrel

My lunch companion pulled two Israeli IWI Jericho 541 handguns from his briefcase and plonked them on the bench. “What do you think? Needed in Donbas, you know”.

Bloody Nora! I was headed to see a children’s matinee performance of Rimsky Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, based on Pushkin’s 1831 verse fairy tale, and a casual, pre-performance Georgian cuisine lunch was about to turn into a war zone.

Normal for Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv; where bullet holes from the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution still pockmark walls and lamp posts, and photo-shrines of the 130 (probably a low estimate) fallen demonstrators adorn park railings are mostly topped with crossed Blue/Green and Red/Black flags, of Ukraine and the unofficial paramilitary force, Ukrainian Volunteer Corps.

This flag has form. Originally adopted by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the brutal German occupation in the Second World War, the red represents the blood of Ukrainians, the black, the country’s fertile soil. Now, self-appointed anti-Russian paramilitaries flourish it in the face of what they consider their namby-pamby authorities. To them, Vladimir Putin and the Russians are getting away, literally, with murder. They took Crimea, invaded the eastern province of Donbas and have kept a war simmering there for six years. 13,000 dead.

Attempts to incorporate these soldiers of fortune into official forces in the Donbas conflict zone have been only partially successful. President Volodymyr Zelensky, the television comic who won 73.2% of the vote in the second round of the 2019 election, inflamed the situation by signing the Steinmeier Formula, calling for local polls in the region and allowing it to become autonomous. Ukrainian nationalists turned even more defiant.

This country accepts violence as an everyday fact of life. Twenty-five per cent of the population – 10 million people – were wiped out in the Second World War. Independence in 1991 brought not peace, only a different sort of strife – and corruption. The Orange Revolution of 2005, which brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power, after a rigged election ostensibly won by Viktor Yanukovych was declared invalid, may have been bloodless, yet it involved three months of bitter protests. Yanukovych was eventually elected president in February 2010.

In contrast, the 2014 revolution – to which the West paid shamefully scant attention at the time – was far from bloodless. It lasted over 100 days. The battleground was Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), in the heart of Kyiv. It is a system of wide, elegant boulevards and squares reminiscent of Paris. The issue was the retraction by President Yanukovych of an application to join the European Union. The cult of the EuroMaidan was born.

The President’s alternative tilt towards Moscow was violently opposed and over time peaceful protest turned nasty, verging on open insurrection. Government forces latterly deployed snipers, positioned on government building vantage points and targeting the heads and necks of protestors, according to contemporary medical reports. Yanukovych fled to Russia, Petro Poroshenko was elected president in May 2014.

During the EuroMaidan agents provocateurs, of dubious provenance, mingled with protestors, hurling Molotov cocktails. My lunch companion happily sported a photo, snapped on his mobile phone at the time, of him and his young son, smiling beside a huge stash of wine-bottle fire-bombs. “I was known as the expert”. As well as toting guns this guy mixed a mean cocktail. Served straight up.

Fleeing from lunch to the Taras Schevchenko (famous poet) National Opera House provided little respite. “That’s where Prime Minister Stolypin was assassinated in 1911”, said a helpful fellow opera goer, pointing to a spot three seats away in front of the orchestra pit. Turns out Stolypin had been there with Tsar Nicholas II – wisely cocooned in the Royal Box – to see a performance of – yes, you’ve guessed it – The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Gulp!

The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr Prince Gvidon Saltanovich and of the Beautiful Princess-Swan. That’s not the synopsis. It’s the opera’s proper title. Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky Korsakov composed sixteen operas. Seven fell into the category of legend and fairy tale, of which The Tale of Tsar Saltan is one. The librettist, Volodymyr Belsky, was a St. Petersburg poet. He wrote three other libretti for Rimsky Korsakov; Sadko; The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and The Golden Cockerel. He fled the 1917 revolution for Germany and Austria.

Rimsky Korsakov was a member of a group of St Petersburg composers who cooperated between 1856 -1870. Known as The Mighty Handful or The Mighty Five – Mily Balakarev, César Cui, Modest Mussogorsky, Alexander Borodin, and Rimsky Korsakov – together they opened up a world of sound unfamiliar to western audiences; the Russian east, the exotic, the imagined. It is worth paying attention to Rimsky Korsakov’s operas on that count alone, never mind wallowing in his meticulously crafted, luscious scores.

His music is rooted in Russian folk tradition and highly distinctive. Repeated trumpet flares, introducing the action, are especially haunting. I was as excited as the hordes of children, leaning into the orchestra pit, pointing at instruments recognised and unknown.

Hold the front page! There was going to be a magic squirrel. There are lots of animals in opera; defecating donkeys, distracting dogs, mischievous monkeys, artificial alliterations (‘nuff, ed.), sometimes elephants – Aida. Anything to steal the show and create hazards for the cast.

I have never ever, ever come across a magic squirrel in opera.  A kamikaze Helsinki squirrel, which dived into the bicycle wheel of passing opera singer Esa Ruuttunen, hospitalising him and killing itself in 2006 comes close, but no cigar. True, Rimsky Korsakov did write an opera about a Golden Cockerel, but the bird was just smart, a crowing, annoying sort of self-preener, predicting imminent invasion.  Not quite magical. I could barely contain my excitement.

Magic squirrel turned out to be a bit of a let-down. He sat twitchily – merely a projected cartoon – in his tree in Act II, representing the untold wealth of the Tsar’s son, Prince Hyidon’s, kingdom, casually cracking nuts, out of which poured copious piles of golden kernels. I had been hoping, at the very least, for a furry glove puppet.

And, what’s so special about golden kernels anyway? We already have fusty European central bankers, the squirrels of Frankfurt. They call their flood of golden Euro kernels quantitative easing. Is it reassuring to learn that churning out unearned wealth was already à la mode, squirrel-style, in 19^th century Russian fairy tales? Maybe not.

Then, of course, there is the bee. The opera is best known to the public for the tune, The Flight of the Bumble Bee, probably the apogee of programme music-writing. The music IS a bee. Not a mosquito, a gnat, even a west of Scotland midge. Listen. It’s a bee. Unmistakeable.

The bee comes to be of relevance thus. Tsar Saltan wishes to take to himself a wife and chooses the youngest – and fairest – of three sisters. The elder sisters are furious and, when the Tsar is not looking, launch the now Tsarita and her infant son, Prince Hyidon, to sea in a barrel.

They land on the mysterious Buyan Island. Even more mysteriously, the young Prince has ripened in the barrel into a handsome young man. He fashions himself a bow and arrow from handy debris, just in time to save a beautiful swan from being done away with by an evil kite.

Turns out the swan, Lebid, is not a swan at all, but the beautiful Princess Tsarivna, who gives the Prince the kingdom – and is in love with him.

Well, what a chance to stuff one to the evil aunties back home. Prince Hyidon turns himself into a bumble bee, as one would, and flies back to sting the aunties in the eye, gaining revenge and creating one of our favourite “Hundred Best Tunes” at a stroke.

Portraying the bumble bee convincingly requires some care. A previous production at the St. Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre used the cartoon trick, and a minuscule bee, leaving some doubt about what was going on – everyone waving and slapping at themselves, for no apparent cause.

No missing the stinger in Kyiv. Our bee was a ballet dancer in a yellow and black hooped fat suit, sporting a leather flying helmet and goggles. A sort of Biggles Bee. He leapt around the stage, confronted the ghastly aunties, flapping his arms in time to the music until the climax – triumphantly poking them in the eye with his finger.

The children loved it. I loved it. By this stage, no decorum left. I was cheering Biggles on along with the youngest of them. The kids were truly engaged. This was great stuff for recruiting the next generation of opera-goers.

At the interval I asked a mum and dad how their two boys – of about four and six – were coping. Mother, rather formally, in almost perfect English: “They enjoy opera very much, thank you. Of course, they know the story. The tales of Pushkin are familiar to them at school”. Hang on! In Ukraine primary schools kids learn Pushkin? “Why not”?

Because it’s difficult to teach, that’s why not – and easier to let the little darlings brawl expressively in an orgy of self-discovery on the classroom floor – “finding themselves,” and the transgender toilet. I couldn’t bear to admit that to this charming lady, so mumbled something about Shakespeare being highly popular in Primary 1 in Britain.

Producing a compelling Tsar Saltan demands great attention to details of setting and costume. It has to be steeped in tradition, or it is pointless. Can’t be set in a Donbas dugout. Kyiv Opera excelled, in a production which glittered with every colour of the rainbow, the characters swathed in lavishly traditional dress.

There was artful attention to detail. The transformation of Lebid, from swan to Princess involved the shedding of wings and the wearing of a sheer, pale turquoise ballgown. On her shoulders – if you looked ever so carefully – were still visible, vestigial, wings, The bow the Prince fashions from driftwood to kill the evil kite, is picked up casually from behind a rock. It was a real “drifty” looking piece of wood. In the Mariinsky production, he happened across what looked like ready-made longbow limbs fresh from the local “Bows ‘R Us”.

Because it was a children’s performance, towards the end of Act 1 characters mingled with the audience, parading through the aisles of the stalls, while six trumpeters appeared in boxes on each side, blazing fanfares, creating surround-sound stereo.

The baton was competently wielded by Tatyana Kalinichenko, a graduate of the Cheykovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine, whose ensemble, New Era Orchestra, does ground-breaking work, bringing the music of many modern western composers to Ukraine audiences for the first time. Singing from a local cast of principals and chorus was of excellent quality.

The hand of history, when it is not otherwise occupied with the shoulder of the Northern Ireland Agreement, sits heavily on ancient Kyiv, a focal point of regional tensions. A crossroads of the Silk Road, over centuries Tartars, Cossacks, Mongols, Goths, Huns, Poles, Swedes, Germans, Hungarians, the Soviet Union, and a stag party from Ruislip, have built it up – only to burn it down, time and time again.

Golden-domed St Michael’s Monastery dates all the way back to … wait for it, 1992, rebuilt after independence. The Soviets knocked down the original 12^th century masterpiece, to make way for a new administrative centre for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1934.

It would be impossible to see any opera, let alone a Pushkin-based masterpiece, in this great city without engaging with its turbulent past. One thousand years of history is set and context. Onstage, Tsar Saltan was sung in Russian. The surtitles were in Ukrainian. That, really, says it all.

Addendum:

Sir Roger Scruton, the enfant terrible conservative philosopher, has died. He is less known for his philosophical views on music than controversial political themes. Yet, music fascinated Sir Roger. The Aesthetics of Music, published in 1999, a 508-page masterpiece on why music has mattered to every well understood human civilisation, is testament to that.

Sir Roger, amidst the closely argued chapters, puts an unerring finger on why that fascination should be. “Music is to the ear what colour is to the eye”. For a philosopher who believed that truth could be revealed only by carefully observing the world around him, this was a simple, but brilliant, observation.

And for those put off by the daunting tome, that one-liner will probably do nicely. Warning: I have dug out a neglected copy, shall re-read it in Sir Roger’s memory – and if you, dear reader, are really unlucky, may even review it.