Tcherniakov tears apart Rimsky's most exquisite fable at the Royal

The natural way in which the Russian and Ukrainian singers share the stage of the Teatro Real to perform The Tale of Tsar Saltan is moving. The opera belongs to Rimsky-Korsakov's repertoire , is based on a Pushkin fable , and is being presented for the first time at the Madrid Coliseum with the insightful and dramatic direction of Dimitri Tcherniakov.

Putin 's war isn't abating, nor does Trump seem in a position to force an armistice, but the ferocity of the conflict has no impact on the performers. There are Ukrainians and Russians in the orchestra pit. And they shared the lead roles in Rimsky's opera, whose plot houses a tale within a tale that subliminally mentions the arbitrariness of war: a bear summons all the creatures of the forest to arms to take revenge on some birds that have mistreated his jute slippers.

It's not the opera's central fable, nor the only allusion to animals. Pushkin left behind a tale that alludes to squirrels, swans, and a bumblebee, whose flight— The Flight of the Bumblebee —is among the best-known works in the universal repertoire, although music lovers and laymen alike don't connect it to The Tale of Tsar Saltan . We've heard it as an isolated episode. We've recognized it in a Disney film. And we've missed the context of a masterful score that distills folk repertoire, Wagnerian doctrine , and the dawn of Impressionism.

This explains the interest that the complete revival of the opera held and holds. Performances are scheduled until May 11. And it's worth attending them because Tcherniakov has conceived a prodigious event based on a daring exegesis. It's not the tale of a tsar who condemns his wife, believing she has given birth to a monster, but rather the anguish of an autistic boy whose disorder leads to his father's repudiation.

He is not a prince, but a teenager who suffers from autism spectrum disorder.

And it's not that the princes and princesses, the magical animals, and the colorful kingdoms disappear from the scene. What happens is that the opera's plot unfolds in the mind and imagination of the protagonist . Tcherniakov manages to stage them with the resources of technology and animation. And he manages to intertwine all the dramatic levels —reality and fiction, story and clinical history—to provoke a magnetism in the audience. We become involved in the "story" because the staging breaks the fourth wall and because the catwalks at the sides of the stage connect the stalls with the stage floor, as if they were inseparable.

The opera 's characters move through them. At first, they do so as if they've escaped from a nineteenth-century comic strip . Then they appear dressed in contemporary civilian clothes. It's an initiatory journey from dream to reality that resonates with Gvidon's anguish . He's not a prince, but a teenager suffering from autism spectrum disorder.

The key to this reading is in the libretto itself, precisely when Tsar Saltan learns that his wife has given birth to a "strange" child. The adjective also identifies different people , human bumblebees, the strange individuals whom society is so suspicious of.

Gvidon is one of them. And he takes center stage at the Teatro Real because Tcherniakov's production keeps him on stage from the first bar to the last. A credit goes to Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov, whose exquisite lyric tenor skills—we heard him perform a fabulous performance of Lensky in "Onegin" in January—are added to the striking theatrical dimension. Volkov is a superb actor , with his tics, introspective anxieties, and mental musings, the pivotal axis of an impeccable and relentless performance that transforms the fairy tale into a terrifying social drama.

It's worth highlighting Svetlana Akseonova's haunting performance as the self-sacrificing mother, just as Nina Minaysan's performance as the Swan Princess is especially commendable. She appears as such in Gvidon's dream and in Rimsky's tale, although Tcherniakov's metamorphosis transforms her into the therapist trying to heal the darkness in her mind. The staging is merciless, but it doesn't overshadow the brilliance of an excellent ensemble cast or distract from the exquisiteness of the score. Israeli maestro Ouri Bronchti unravels it with plasticity and depth. He had never conducted at the Teatro Real before. It was an emergency solution to Karel Mark Chichon's lack of performance, but he meets the challenge with rigor and judgment. He explores the chromatic and rhythmic richness of the beautiful opera. And it symbolically highlights the year of composition - 1900 - precisely because Rimsky-Korsakov 's score looks patrimonially back (Wagner) as it looks forward with the impressionistic stupor of its marine interludes.