Premiere! Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades

“Tchaikovsky’s best”, “the gem of the operas”, “a masterpiece” – that is how the public and critics described The Queen of the Spades. The opera was written in Florence in the winter of 1890 in a very short period of time. The vocal score was composed in 44 days and the orchestra score took just 3 months. The librettist, the composer’s brother Modest Tchaikovsky, made quite a few changes in Pushkin’s original story. The action was transferred from Alexander I’s epoch to the time of Catherine II; Lisa became the Countess’ granddaughter and heiress instead of just a dependent. Pushkin described Hermann, the son of a Russified German, as a reserved and ambitious person obsessed with the idea of wealth. Tomsky referred to him as a calculating person. To achieve his goal Hermann was ready to become a lover of the 87-year-old Countess. In the opera, Herman is the character’s first name, not his surname, specifically spelled with one “n”. In Latin it means “true”, “only begotten”, “faithful”. This change is very symbolic as in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades Herman is sincerely in love with Lisa and equally passionate about gambling. Having learned the three cards that would ensure his capital prize, Herman would gain happiness with his beloved Lisa. Probably it was the librettist who set an example to stage directors in treating the original story rather loosely. Interpretations of this opera have been different and, at times, quite unexpected.

Music historian Arnold Alshvang said, “Tchaikovsky’s opera is a complicated artistic phenomenon: the composer managed to achieve a perfect combination of the inner and outer sides of life”.

Stage director Yuri Alexandrov develops this idea in his Novaya Opera production:
“This production represents Russian history over the last hundred years. The fundamental theme of the production is the 400th Anniversary of the House of Romanov, which is a special date for every Russian… I thought that we should peel Herman off his sweet tenor “sugar coat”. He is an archetype of a Russian, who suffers, climbs up the social ladder and in the end destroys everything and dies to resurrect”.