Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Tale of Tsar Saltan" at the Opéra National du Rhin has long been eagerly awaited by Alsatian children: The CM2 class of the school in Eschbach au Val spent a year under the guidance of Tania Kuentz dealing with the work of Alexander Pushkin and its transformation into an opera. The result is magnificent dioramas with clay figures, which are shown in the foyer of the Strasbourg Opera: Prince Gwidon and the Magic Swan; Tsarina Militrissa and the evil Base Barbariche (she is always looking for bad tricks); the bumblebee, of course, as thick as a date, after all, "Tsar Saltan" is the Hummeloper par excellence; Chernomor, the leader of the sea warriors, with tangled hair like the Spaghetti Monster; and don't forget: the squirrel that cracks emerald kernels out of golden nuts, because "Tsar Saltan" is also the squirrel opera par excellence.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the feuilleton.

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"The Tale of Tsar Saltan" has been attacked in Strasbourg for weeks by activists of the platform "PromoUkraïna", as has the entire festival "Arsmondo Slave" of the opera house. In times of Russia's criminal war of aggression against Ukraine, no pan-Slavic cultural ideology should be spread and no Russian culture should be cultivated, as Russia is using its culture as a weapon against Ukraine. Strasbourg's artistic director, Alain Perroux, has reacted calmly to this polemic, posting the protests on his house's website, but also his resolute reply: that no pan-Slavic ideology is cultivated here, on the contrary, that one speaks of "Slavic worlds" and also works out the multi-confessionality of the Slavs; that the entire house, including all the Russian artists involved, would have long since shown solidarity with Ukraine and condemned the war.

Does "art is a weapon" apply again?

It must be added that anyone who claims that Russian art should not be cultivated because Russia has turned art into a weapon is doing exactly that – he is making himself mean to Putin and making art a weapon. But those who turn art into a weapon betray the idea of artistic freedom (art is an end and not a means) and thus those "European values" that are now so vehemently called upon to be defended. The frightening thing about the "PromoUkraïna" protests is also that they are directed against an exhibition of the library of banned books collected in Strasbourg and thus against works by authors such as Anna Akhmatova and other victims of Stalinist persecution. Are we experiencing a new 1914 in the mixture of war and art? Or a reactivation of Friedrich Wolf's slogan "Art is a weapon", which was used to indoctrinate the people in the GDR?

The fact that, under this political pressure, Perroux stuck to the program of "Arsmondo slave" and to the long-planned takeover of "Tsar Saltan", a production by Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov, which premiered in Brussels in June 2019, is a plea for artistic freedom and for discourse instead of intellectual warfare.

Tcherniakov's masterful staging is based on the childlike trauma of the destroyed family, the absent father. "There was a war at that time," says Pushkin. Militrissa, a single mother, writes this sentence on the wall. What it means is not illustrated. We only see the consequences: her son Gwidon is speech-impaired and sociopathic. Reality has become such an imposition for him and his mother that both can only cope with it in the form of a fairy tale. They have to alienate what was done to them with the rejection by the father in order to be able to understand it. Distancing, rapture as a psychotherapeutic means of cognition is thus defended against a director's theatre of mere actualization.

Tcherniakov's playable animation

Tcherniakov designed a kind of cave as a stage behind the vestibule of our current prose. This cave lies behind a curtain on which ravishingly animated pencil, charcoal and pastel drawings by Gleb Filshtinsky with the fairy tale plot are projected. At the same time, this projection can be played in the cave by singing real people. Tsar, boyars and barbarians sit in funny foam costumes by Elena Zaytseva, with folklore patterns in scribble optics in the projected art-world space, into which even the disturbed Gwidon flees again and again: shaken by lust to the loss of body control. And so everything is there: swans, bumblebees, squirrels, sea warriors – understood as a necessity in order to cope with the excessive demands of reality.

The Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg under the direction of Aziz Shokhakimov approaches Rimsky-Korsakov's music quite directly, almost harshly. That the composer was a magician of harmony, one hears; that his orchestration is full of finesse disappears behind brittleness. Svetlana Aksenova sings Militrissa not only with the youthful charm of a woman who wins over Tsar Saltan, but also with the tone of everyday motherliness that has learned to cope with some pain. Ante Jerkunica gives Tsar Saltan thoughtful, insecure in the face of his own weakness of character. Julia Muzychenko as the Swan Princess can certainly be said to have fear-relieving qualities of her soprano.

Bodgan Volkov as Gwidon is a heroic tenor vocally, and an event as a young man with a behavioural disorder. Through his playing, he forces the audience into the framework plot in an absolutely convincing way. For the long final applause, the Ukrainian tenor puts his arm around the Russian director and hugs him tightly.