Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 9 The Queen of Spades

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 29 Pushkin’s novella). An entitled and nihilistic young girl with a dramatized sense of self-destiny, she is disturbed out of a rational engagement to the “ideal on paper” Prince Yeletsky (but who has had a charisma bypass in the flesh). Gherman’s vulgar ambition and animal eroticism give him the stubborn craziness of the “attractive loser.” Ignited by his encounters, Gherman is stirred into bold and passionate action, propelling himself and those around him towards tragedy. While Tchaikovsky’s musical narrative conveys an unnerving sense of emotional turbulence and foreboding, the composer pays tribute to all the elements of nineteenth-century grand opera: sweeping choruses, storm scenes, parties, and melodrama. In designing a space for the eclectic nature of the opera, this production renders the open walkways of St. Petersburg as charred spaces with park benches. These become crucibles for the collision of generations, classes, and brooding elemental forces that foreshadow the human drama. The production design meets Tchaikovsky’s formal shifts, alternating between exterior and interior scenes, with painterly sets and costumes that reference both Pushkin’s setting of the story (the faded glory days of the eighteenth-century Empress Catherine the Great), and a fascist period of the 1930s, with its resonant sense of disaffection, brittle class divisions, restlessness, and looming disaster. One reason for bringing these two periods together is that while Tchaikovsky’s evocative score looks back to earlier works for inspiration, it also looks forward to twentieth-century musical developments and works such as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck , as a psychological exploration of its principal character’s inner world and descent into madness. In Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades , Gherman’s passionate feelings for Lisa mingle with a fascination for the Countess and the secret of her fortune, fuelled by the malevolent Tomsky and his minions (Surin and Chekalinsky) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (center) with Nikolai Figner and Medea Mei-Figner, the married couple who created the roles of Gherman and Lisa. during the Act Two party scene. The manipulative world of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark resonates as Lisa transfers her affections from Yeletsky to Gherman with a letter and a key, staged along the lines of a dance. In place of a ballet in the grand-opera tradition, Tchaikovsky writes a Mozartian pastiche, in a nod to Pushkin’s eighteenth-century setting. This is staged for the party guests in this production as an endearing puppet show that transforms before Gherman’s eyes into the lurid backstory to the Countess’s fortune, as told by Tomsky. Gherman steps into his own psychotic episode and hallucinates riches that may follow, believing that the commotion leading up to the arrival of Empress Catherine the Great is all in his honor. Now possessing Lisa’s key, Gherman breaks into the Countess’s apartments later that night ahead of her return from the party, hiding behind the portrait (a scaled-down version of the front cloth we see during the overture). The Countess returns home and is prepared for bed by her staff, but she dismisses them to reminisce about her youth when she was courted by royalty. She sings in French, quoting from André Grétry’s 1784 opera Richard Coeur-de-Lion . The production draws inspiration for the staging of this scene from the 1984 documentary film Il bacio di Tosca ( Tosca’s Kiss ) about Casa Verdi, the real-life Milanese retirement home for opera singers and other musicians founded by Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. The film movingly captures the human frailty behind the singers’ faded grandeur and reminiscences of former glory days. After the Countess, left alone with her portrait, drifts off to sleep in a bath, the crazed Gherman appears from behind the painting still wearing his party crown. He interrogates the Countess for her secret, precipitating her sudden death. But Gherman’s obsession reaches its climax of madness at the start of Act Three in the barracks, arguably the most beautiful and original scene in the opera. In this production, the Countess’s voice emerges from Gherman’s mind as a ghoulish – or rather, skeletal – hallucination that reveals the secret of the cards. We stage the entire scene from the perspective of the ceiling of the room, looking down on a restless Gherman in bed, and puppetry once again becomes a vehicle for staging psychological disturbance. In Pushkin’s version, the unfortunate Lisa is discarded and left impoverished, used purely as a means to get to the Countess. Pushkin’s sobering naturalism has Lisa ending her days married to a civil servant, bringing up the daughter of a poor relation; the implication is that she visits the misery that was once her own on some other hapless girl. Meanwhile, in the heightened passions of Tchaikovsky’s operatic telling, Lisa’s tragic fate is sealed: having abandoned her life and prospects of marriage to Prince Yeletsky, Lisa now realizes that Gherman’s obsession with cards has overtaken his feelings for her, driving her to suicide. Rather than staging Lisa throwing herself into the river (as written in the opera libretto’s stage directions), the production translates this nineteenth-century convention for more modern sensibilities by highlighting the shocking brutality of her psychological despair.