A Russian city vanishes into legend—opera so hypnotic you'll forget 3 hours passed.
Opera lies at the heart of Rimsky-Korsakov's colourful idiom, but performances are few and far between; this realisation of his penultimate and grandest stage work is a very rare and special experience. Kitezh is known as "the Russian Parsifal", which encapsulates its mystical flavour and steady unfolding of a legend of redemption
Direction
Tcherniakov's staging makes mysticism visceral, not distant.
Score
Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral colors shimmer like nothing else.
Director
Dmitri Tcherniakov
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Kitezh was a genuine Russian legend, a 'new Jerusalem' that sank into Lake Svetloyar to escape invaders—Rimsky-Korsakov turned folk myth into spiritual opera.
Rimsky-Korsakov completed this, his 15th opera, in 1905 while radicalizing politically; the score's beauty masks his own crisis of faith in earthly institutions.
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