The Golden Cockerel ( ) is an opera in three acts, with short prologue and even shorter epilogue, composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, his last opera he completed before his death in 1908. Its libretto written by Vladimir Belsky derives from Alexander Pushkin's 1834 poem The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. The opera was completed in 1907 and premiered in 1909 in Moscow, after the composer's death. Outside Russia it has often been performed in French as Le coq d'or. Composition history Rimsky-Korsakov had considered his previous opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1907) to be his final artistic statement in the medium, and, indeed, this work has been called a "summation of the nationalistic operatic tradition of Glinka and The Five." However, the political situation in Russia at the time inspired him to take up the pen to compose a "razor-sharp satire of the autocracy, of Russian imperialism, and of the Russo-Japanese war." Also, Rimsky-Korsakov's previous works inspired by Alexander Pushkin's poems, especially Tsar Saltan (1899-1900), had proved to be very successful. The work on The Golden Cockerel was started in 1906 and finished by September 1907. By the end of February 1908 the director of Imperial Theatres Vladimir Telyakovskiy passed the score to the censorship agency in order to get an approval for the Bolshoi Theatre. It was returned unedited, yet suddenly taken back the next day. This time many changes were requested to be made to the libretto as well as the original Pushkin's text. Rimsky-Korsakov suspected someone's denunciation and resisted any changes. He continued the work on orchestration while fighting with progressive illness. In June 1908 Telyakovskiy informed him that the Moscow Governor-General Sergei Gershelman was highly against the opera. In his last letter Rimsky-Korsakov asked his friend and music publisher Boris Jurgenson to contact Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi and suggest him to stage The Golden Cockerel in Paris. He died two days later and thus never witnessed the premiere of his last opera. Performance history The premiere took place on 7 October (O.S. 24 September) 1909, at Moscow's Solodovnikov Theatre in a performance by the Zimin Opera. Emil Cooper conducted; set designs were by Ivan Bilibin. The opera was given at the city's Bolshoi Theatre a month later, on 6 November, conducted by Vyacheslav Suk and with set designs by Konstantin Korovin. London and Paris premieres occurred in 1914; in Paris