Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 9 The Queen of Spades

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 Staging obsession and collision in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades By Benjamin Davis, Revival Director passionate nature of the opera’s central character, Gherman, an antihero with whom the composer himself empathized. From Tchaikovsky’s own riveting letters, we know that he twice refused to set Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 short story to music but, once committed, threw himself into completing his own heightened version, making significant changes that transform both the plot and its characters. Among the opera’s many treasures Gherman, in particular, emerges as one of the greatest dramatic-tenor roles ever written. The overture, giving us a flavor of what is to come, is played in this production in front of a painted cloth of the old Countess in her youth, once courted for her beauty as the “Venus of Moscow” by the powerful and wealthy of European high society. The painting also suggests the card face of the Queen of Spades: an overarching metaphor for Fate, becoming the object of Gherman’s obsession and eventual undoing. At first, the low-ranking soldier Gherman’s music is romantic and self-absorbed, possessed as he is by the idea of his love for a young noble-looking woman he has seen from afar; he is also unusual as an onlooker, rather than a player at cards. The bored and “up to no good” Tomsky quizzes Gherman, observing him in a chance encounter in the park and throughout Gherman’s duet with Prince Yeletsky (who is Tchaikovsky’s very personal invention and not in Pushkin’s story). This sets up a dramatically ironic rivalry where both men sing about their feelings for the same girl: Yeletsky is elated by the prospect of his marriage to Lisa, Gherman tormented by his own frustrated passion and lack of prospects. The quintet follows, where Gherman meets both Lisa and her grandmother, the Countess, for the first time. The production conceives of the five main characters (Gherman, Lisa, Prince Yeletsky, the Countess, Tomsky) like five chemical elements. Tomsky – a voyeuristic and self-loathing figure, like a character out of a work by Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus – acts as a catalyst bringing each of the other four individuals into further contact, stirring powerful feelings and imaginations that overtake their grasp on reality. From the moment the suggestible Gherman hears Tomsky’s lurid ballad about the Countess and her secret of the mystical “three cards,” Gherman’s imagination and music become increasingly driven, in the first instance to win Lisa’s affections. In Tchaikovsky’s version of the story, Lisa is the Countess’s granddaughter rather than merely her ward (as in Tchaikovsky drafted his operatic masterpiece The Queen of Spades at the height of his creative powers and international success. He also composed it at breakneck speed, while in Italy for the summer of 1890. The opera received its first performance later that year at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre and was a tremendous hit with the public. But the composer had suffered enormously in private, believing that some dark force of fate was dominating his life. The award-winning production presented this season at Lyric takes us inside the increasingly obsessive mind and Vladimir Galouzine as Gherman in the Lyric premiere of The Queen of Spades , 2000|01 season. Dan Rest