What Tchaikovsky's darkest opera could teach Putin's Russia
Sadly, Jack Furness's production at Garsington of The Queen of Spades has just ended, but was so impressive that the company would be mad to leave it for too long before reviving it. The 10th of Tchaikovsky's 11 operas, it is, along with Eugene Onegin, the only one frequently performed today. Like Onegin, it is based on a story by Pushkin that deals with the dire consequences of obsessive love – and neither opera ends well. Furness's direction contrasts the almost mindless and idle behaviour of the Russian upper classes of the 1770s with the desperately earnest obsession of the less-privileged Herman, the anti-hero and an outsider, for Lisa, the niece of a countess, who is engaged to be married to a prince.
Herman dreams of having enough money to marry Lisa himself, and when he hears that the countess knows the three-card secret of how to win at the gaming table, he determines to get the secret out of her: but she drops dead as he is pestering her to tell him. However, she appears before him as an apparition – or at least he thinks she does, given by this stage we have come to realise he is clearly mad and he has earlier hallucinated about shooting Catherine the Great – and tells him the secret of the cards. He goes to the gaming table and on the first two cards, played as the ghost has told him, he wins a small fortune, which he then stakes on the third card, which he believes is the Ace of Spades: in fact it is the Queen, and he loses to his love rival the Prince, who thus exacts revenge. Herman shoots himself, though does so clumsily and dies slowly.
Tchaikovsky would die within three years, apparently by suicide. The darkness in the opera is not unrelenting, but it is overbearing. Lisa, ironically, wanted Herman for himself, not for any money he might have, so misery is compounded by irony. And moments after Herman's death the gamblers are playing cards again, as if he had never existed. There is a metaphor there for Russia today, and the opera represented a time of cultural magnificence that, in that benighted country, now seems lost forever.
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