At the Lviv National Opera

The Lviv National Opera opened to the public on 4 October 1900. It has remained open for the last 125 years under nine different governing authorities, including the Habsburg Empire, the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union. One consistent commitment throughout that time has been to preserve and perform Ukrainian operas and ballets, an effort that was redoubled following the full-scale invasion in 2022.

While Lviv has been spared the worst of Russian airstrikes, in the early hours of 5 October it endured a five-hour bombardment, part of a larger attack across the country; of an estimated five hundred drones, nearly one-third were concentrated on Lviv and nearby villages. In the days that followed, President Zelensky criticised the West for ‘zero real reaction’ as the LNO prepared for a week of events to commemorate its anniversary.

Borys Lyatoshynsky’s 1930 opera Zolotyy Obruch was part of the programme.Variously translated as ‘The Golden Hoop’, ‘The Golden Ring’ or ‘The Golden Crown’, the opera is based on Ivan Franko’s 1883 novella Zakhar Berkut. It’s set in the Carpathian village of Tukhlya in the 13th century. The Golden Crown isn’t worn by a ruler, but represents the bond between Tukhlya and its neighbouring villages.

But then princely boyars are given control of the villages by a distant king and they begin to claim public land as private property. Peace is further threatened by an impending Mongol-Tatar invasion. Meanwhile, Maksym and Myroslava – the son of a village elder and the daughter of a boyar – have fallen in love.

The Golden Crown premiered in Odesa in 1930, with subsequent productions that year in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Its popularity was short-lived, however: though foundational to the modern Ukrainian musical language, Lyatoshynsky’s compositional style was censured by the 1932 move towards Socialist Realism. The Soviet authorities pressured him to rewrite the opera to comply with the new artistic order, reframing the story as one of class struggle rather than Ukrainian sovereignty.

Ivan Uryvskyi’s production of The Golden Crown for the LNO is the first for nearly forty years. A countdown clock appears at the start of the overture, ticking down from eight minutes 45 seconds. Uryvskyi’s staging then transposes the establishing village tableau of the opening scene into a lecture hall. The grandmotherly figure of Mavra (mezzo-soprano Olena Skitsko), once seen gathering herbs, is now a professor pointing out the herbs in a glass display case to rows of students in identical brown uniforms. ‘The people of today,’ Franko wrote, ‘brought up in misery and subjugation in the thousand-year-old chains of foreign domination, refuse to believe they are anything but fiction.’

The students repurpose their classroom as Tukhlya and play as villagers. But the framing device doesn’t disappear. When Maksym (tenor Oleksandr Cherevyk) rescues Myroslava (soprano Liudmyla Korsun) from a bear attack, a stuffed bear is wheeled onstage in another glass display case. Crags in a mountain pass are formed from overturned desks.

There’s something choked in Lyatoshynsky’s score, too. It unfurls more as an extended symphonic tone poem than a traditional opera, with the characters’ leitmotifs developing, modulating and colliding in the orchestration. The LNO’s musical director, Ivan Cherednichenko, describes it as a ‘sense of an incredible strain … an attempt to escape from the system’s grip’.

There isn’t much character development in Yakiv Mamontov’s libretto, though it’s full of lines that speak directly to the present moment. When Maksym’s father, Zakhar Berkhut (bass Taras Berezhansky), sings about ‘glorious Kyiv lying in ruins’ at the hands of the Mongol-Tatar horde, it has all the subtlety of an FGM-148 Javelin. So does Maksym’s line to Myroslava’s father, Tugar Wolf (baritone Roman Strakhov): ‘It is the whole community that is furious with you because you stole their lands.’

The tensions reach a head when Tugar kills one of the Tukhlytsi and, fleeing justice, forms a traitorous alliance with Genghis Khan’s army. When Maksym is taken captive by the Mongol-Tatar army (and wheeled onstage in a glass display case), Tugar offers to free him and spare Tukhlya from attack in exchange for access to the mountain pass that would grant access to the neighbouring villages. But Zakhar cannot put his son above the Golden Crown.

Maksym dies sabotaging the attempted invasion. Tugar dies too. Zakhar accepts Myroslava as his daughter, calling for ‘eternal glory and remembrance to those who died for our community’. In the final moments, the countdown clock reappears, reset to eight minutes and 45 seconds: history is cyclical. The day after singing Zakhar Berkut, Berezhansky rejoined the 112th Territorial Defence Brigade.