The Golden Cockerel was Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera, and the censors understood it at once: it did not reach the stage until 1909, a year after the composer’s death. Based on Pushkin’s verse tale, it dresses a satire on autocracy as a fairy tale — an ageing tsar beset by enemies, two sons unfit to rule, and a gift from an astrologer, a golden bird that will crow at every danger. The bird keeps the kingdom safe for exactly as long as it takes for the price to fall due.

Maxim Didenko reads the opera as a parable about authoritarian systems and the virtual powers of the present: about technology that promises salvation, about utopias that fail, about a people left with neither a ruler nor an answer.