This was Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera. Appropriately, I guess, it's based on a Pushkin poem. It's another fairy/folktale kind of thing--the most mysterious I've seen yet.
So we start with a magician or astrologer who tells us that even though the story is remote, it has an important moral for us to learn. Then, we go to the court of this Tsar (the fact that he's a tsar makes you assume Russia, but a lot of the music has a vaguely "Arabic" sounding theme). He's not happy because he worries the tsardom will be attacked, and his bumbling idiot sons are no help. Fortunately(?), the magician gives the tsar a golden cockerel which will tell whether the land is safe or not (the cockerel is an actual singing role for a soprano). In return, the tsar promises him his heart's desire, to be named later.
So the cockerel convinces them that there will be war, so they decide to preëmptively attack their neighbor. The idiot sons manage to get themselves killed, but the tsar falls in love with the beautiful tsaritsa of the enemy kingdom. There's a lot of abstruse singing. The two decide to get married. There's a very spectacular ceremony back at the court, but then the magician appears and says that he wants the tsaritsa, and will not be convinced otherwise. The tsar tries to kill him, but is himself killed in an unclear way (the wikipedia description says the cockerel does it, but that wasn't clear in the production I saw). The entire court disappears and the magician reveals the shocking (?) truth (?): that the whole thing was an illusion, and only he and the tsaritsa were real people.
Well, if you can pick the moral out of this, you're welcome to it. The music's frequently glorious, though (especially the wedding celebration holy shit), so what else do you need? Well, maybe you would like characters with more of an internal existence, but it's a fairy tale, so it's all good. It wasn't performed 'til after Rimsky-Korsakov's death because the censors didn't like it: supposedly, the stuff with the ill-advised military action was a satire of Russian policies of the time, or at least that's how they saw it. Of course, it was based on a poem from years before, which doesn't preclude that per se, but I dunno.
I have never seen a Mariinsky Theatre production that failed to deliver on the spectacle, and this one continues the tradition. It's also the only one I've seen that includes weird, contemporary touches, however, so some may kvetch based on that. The biggest one here is the cockerel itself: here, she's a modern-day tourist with a chicken-shaped backpack, first seen taking selfies in front of ancient ruins. This works fine, and the body of the thing itself is basically in fairie tale mode, although there is a certain amount of action that's just confusing. Well, it's fine, as are the singers. My favorite is Andrei Popov as the magician; it's possible that he doesn't quitehave the voice for the role, but he makes up for it with stage presence: all very deliberate movements in a very dapper suit. It was wondering why his name sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized it was because he likewise stood out as the holy fool in Boris Godunov. Nice. I'm glad he's gotten to perform at the Met.
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