St. Petersburg.(International)(A Life for the Tsar)(Opera Review)

The 200th anniversary of Mikhail Glinka's birth has received little attention outside Russia, but the Mariinsky Theater, as part of the Stars of the White Nights Festival, honored the man hailed as the country's first great composer with a new production of A Life for the Tsar (1836), the first of his two operas. Like Ruslan and Lyudmila, A Life for the Tsar is long, dramatically unwieldy and very Russian in character. But those qualities haven't prevented other Russian operas from finding favor in the West, and Glinka's operas have the additional appeal of Italianate lyricism and a dramaturgical style indebted to French grand opera.

In relentlessly extolling the benefits of monarchy, however, A Life for the Tsar has a propagandist element that outdoes even Soviet works. The "life" in question is that of the peasant Ivan Susanin, who saves the incipient Romanov dynasty by leading the Polish enemy not to the tsar's whereabouts, as they expect, but into the wilderness, sacrificing himself in the process. The absorbing production by Dmitri Chernyakov (also responsible for the Mariinsky's Invisible City of Kitezh, seen in New York in 2003) finds a way to give the opera a different political slant without undercutting the drama Glinka gave us.

Chernyakov, who doubles as designer, emphasizes the tightly-knit nature of Susanin's family by having much of the action take place around the family's dinner table, which also serves as Susanin's work space. Contrasted to the Susanins are ...