It took three years to persuade Tchaikovsky to compose an opera based on The Queen of Spades for the Imperial Theatres. It took him 44 days to compose the music. 128 years have passed since the premiere, but the directors are still trying to solve the riddles and the contradictions of The Queen of Spades – possibly the most mysterious Russian opera. When does the action take place, if the guests at the ball expected the arrival of Catherine II and, before that listened to the romances of the verses written in Pushkin’s time? How to explain the dramatic changes in the musical language: from a lingering love duet in the spirit of Wagner, Tchaikovsky’s contemporary, – to a pastorales resembling the work of Mozart? Finally, what were the three cards – did the insane Herman invent them himself?
The director Aleksei Stepanyuk repeatedly staged The Queen of Spades in various theatres and admits that every time he is willing to look for the answers to these questions. For the Ural Opera, he and the St.Petersburg artist Igor Ivanov made a replica of the famous production of the Mariinsky Theatre, where the conductor and the director was maestro Yuri Temirkanov.
The Ekaterinburg performance is compared, by the directors, with a leisurely walk through the halls of the Hermitage – and you can compare it with a trip to St. Petersburg. It has the splendour of palace interiors and the mystical nocturnal atmosphere of ‘the most deliberate and distracted city’, and the pathos of speeches and actions of this city’s inhabitants: Tchaikovsky, unlike Pushkin, removed all irony from The Queen of Spades in relation to what is happening and made the listeners genuinely empathize with the characters.
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