Graceful and cunning, innocent and malicious at the same time is the Russian of Alexander Pushkin's verses in his "Tale of Tsar Saltan".

It comes across as light-footed and yet has a fist between the syllables.

When read correctly, the German adaptation by Friedrich von Bodenstedt, which has become a classic, makes children's bellies shake with laughter even in this country with verses like this: "A messenger, a quick one, / Sends them gladly to surprise / their tsar.

But the two / sisters who envy their happiness / with the cousin Babariche / they think of wicked tricks".

And so the sisters, weaver and cook, at Babaricha's instigation, exchange the letter from the young Tsarina Militrissa to Tsar Saltan in the war camp: "Your Tsarina has given birth, / But God knows what you have chosen, / It's not a sprout for your throne,

/ No daughter and no son – / It's not a frog and it's not a mouse: / Looks almost like a beast".

Disaster takes its course, but turns into sheer salvation, as must be the case in fairy tales.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The director Eva-Maria Höckmayr has taken on the opera version of Pushkin's material completed by Nikolaj Rimsky-Korsakov in 1900 at the Hanover State Opera, in narrative and orchestration another brilliant achievement in the field of fairy tale opera, which Rimsky-Korsakov had already perfected as a genre .

Höckmayr begins the game as soon as the audience is admitted: an old magnetic tape is playing;

the characters of the opera, dressed in today's lackluster costumes by Andy Visit, are already sitting around and listening to the original verses of Pushkin, the four-legged trochaea, the rhymes, recited in a melodious pulse by a youthful baritone voice.

And from listening, the imagination creates its images of the spinning room in deep winter, of the legendary city in the island kingdom of Bujan, of the squirrel,

who cracks golden nuts and sorts emerald kernels aside or from the beautiful swan princess.

Julia Rösler's stage gets by with just a few props, with a throne and a hoop skirt, and with a few walls to contain or dissolve boundaries.

That's all.

Play, gesture, turning towards and away, astonished, sad, hateful faces tell the rest, particularly poignantly at the end of the first act, when Militrissa and her son Gwidon are put in a barrel and thrown out to sea: the choir of the Hanover State Opera, rehearsed by Lorenzo Da Rio, frozen in collective horror at the tyranny of the Tsar.

But outrage remains paralyzed by fear.

and with few walls to contain or remove boundaries.

That's all.

Play, gesture, turning towards and away, astonished, sad, hateful faces tell the rest, particularly poignantly at the end of the first act, when Militrissa and her son Gwidon are put in a barrel and thrown out to sea: the choir of the Hanover State Opera, rehearsed by Lorenzo Da Rio, frozen in collective horror at the tyranny of the Tsar.

But outrage remains paralyzed by fear.

and with few walls to contain or remove boundaries.

That's all.

Play, gesture, turning towards and away, astonished, sad, hateful faces tell the rest, particularly poignantly at the end of the first act, when Militrissa and her son Gwidon are put in a barrel and thrown out to sea: the choir of the Hanover State Opera, rehearsed by Lorenzo Da Rio, frozen in collective horror at the tyranny of the Tsar.

But outrage remains paralyzed by fear.

frozen in collective horror at the tyranny of the tsar.

But outrage remains paralyzed by fear.

frozen in collective horror at the tyranny of the tsar.

But outrage remains paralyzed by fear.

Höckmayr pays homage to the power of storytelling and listening, to imagination and - inserted between the individual images of the opera - the beauty of Pushkin's original Russian, as Andrea Breth did more than twenty years ago with her staging of Anton Chekhov's "Onkel Vanya" at the Berliner Schaubühne did.

Deniz Yücel had formulated early on that today, in times of the Russian war against Ukraine, the resistance of the civilized part of humanity should be aimed at Putin and not Pushkin.

And Rimsky-Korsakov, who had lost his post as rector of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1905 because of his support for the revolutionary students, and whose father had already been dismissed as governor of Volhynia by the tsar for treating Jews and Poles too liberally, comes from a family anyway

whose attitude is very sympathetic.

Otherwise the composer drew sharp distinctions between art and politics.

He himself was a supporter of the Enlightenment and anti-clerical, but loved "everything supernatural, fantastic or lying beyond the line of death" in art the most.

His mastery consists in making illusions recognizable as such through exaggerated artificiality, often in glittering orchestration.

More and more directors are discovering - Christof Loy's outstanding staging of the "Night before Christmas" at the Frankfurt Opera has set new standards - the special charm of these fairy tale operas, which combine theater of illusions and epic theater with the greatest technical and intellectual brilliance.

The new first conductor in Hanover, James Hendry, loves the jagged gesture and the imperious pose.

But his reading of the score is captivatingly lyrical: it is comparatively slow and quiet, but never free of tension.

If the choir or one of the soloists occasionally threatens to lose touch, Hendry catches it again confidently within two or three eighths.

The singers feel audibly well.

Laura Berman, who took over as the new director in the middle of the corona pandemic, can be proud of the magnificent ensemble.

Beatriz Miranda as Tkachicha, Ketevan Chuntishvili as Powaricha and Barno Ismatullaeva as Militrissa sing with a youthful delicacy and beauty of tone that cannot be found in the current production of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg - which can easily be viewed on YouTube.

The fact that the generously exuded warmth of Ismatullaeva's soprano in the timbre differs from the almost unearthly silver shine of the soprano Sarah Brady as the swan princess proves that the casting department in Hanover has excellent ears.

the tender,

soft bass by Daniel Miroslaw as Saltan and the blossoming tenor by José Simerilla Romero as Gwidon are just as enjoyable as Yannick Spanier as the good-natured fool and sunny boy Dladla as the visionary old man.

Monika Walerowicz as Barbaricha lets the bass of her alto creak magnificently.

The audience in the jam-packed hall applauded to the point of exuberance.