The Queen of Spades, Deutsche Oper, 20 March 2024

PIQUE DAME von Pjotr I. Tschaikowskij, Premiere am 9. März 2024 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin,
copyright: Marcus Lieberenz
Countess (Doris Soffel) and Hermann (Martin Muehle)

Hermann – Martin Muehle
Tomsky – Lucio Gallo
Prince Yeletsky – Thomas Lehman
Chekalinsky – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Surin – Kyle Miller
Chaplitsky – Andrew Dickinson
Narumov – Artur Garbas
Master of Ceremonies – Jörg Schörner
The Countess – Doris Soffel
Lisa – Maria Motolygina
Pauline – Karia Tucker
Governess – Nicole Piccolomini
Masha – Arianna Manganello
Children’s commander – Sofia Kaspruk
Little Hermann – Aleksandr Sher
Little Lisa – Alma Kraushaar
Stage piano – Jisu Park
Old servant – Wolfgang Siebner

Director – Sam Brown
Designer – Stuart Nunn
Choreography – Ron Howell
Video – Martin Eidenberger
Lighting – Linus Fellborn
Assistant directors – Constanze Weidknecht, Silke Sense
Dramaturgy – Konstantin Parnian

Children’s Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Christian Lindhorst)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Jeremy Bines)

Statisterie, and Opernballet of the Deutsche Oper

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)  

The late Graham Vick was to have directed this new production of The Queen of Spades for the Deutsche Oper. According to the cast list, Vick laid down the principles for the production, but his successor Sam Brown, charged with bringing the project to completion, alongside designer Stuart Nunn and choreographer (and Vick’s widower) Ron Howell, will necessarily have brought much that his own to the piece. As he says in an interview, ‘I knew that the framework that he’d created provides a lot of room for conceptual freedom. … It may sound dramatic, but Graham’s ideas for PIQUE DAME outside of the equipment died with him. As a director, I have to walk my own path.’ Tempting though it may be to speculate what comes from whom, that is hardly the point. Having noted the situation, it is better to move on to discuss what it is we see and hear.

Chekalinsky (Chance Jonas-O'Toole), Tomsky (Lucio Gallo), Surin (Kyle Miller)

Layering of memory is a particular strength. Tchaikovsky – and his brother and librettist, Modest, as well of course as Pushkin – play with memories of the eighteenth century. That is doubled by the Countess’s memories of her ‘own’, earlier eighteenth century, Mme de Pompadour and all. The Grétry air is another case in point. In this production, without being merely indeterminate or arbitrary, which would defeat the point, further nesting occurs, for instance in the silent film excerpts (from a Russian adaptation of 1916), but also in the dressing and undressing of particular characters at different points, as well as in broader designs. Spanning three centuries – the nineteenth may not be overtly depicted on stage, but it is always present – is not an easy trick to bring off, but it is meaningfully accomplished here. Moreover, it is with us from the start, the opening scene with children’s chorus pointing to much of what is to come. A maltreated child, a social outsider even then, is abused by children and adults alike, only to have a little girl briefly come to him and show a little kindness. It prefigures what is to come, but perhaps it is also a memory. In this opera, though, it is always too late. The cards dealt by fate can never be changed, despite – or because of – their entirely random nature in what is no game of skill. 

Hermann, Countess

The cast acts out this game and propels it with great skill, heightening and extending its outlines in much the same way the production does. Martin Muehle’s Hermann is tireless, anguish-ridden, obsessive, perhaps a little on the Verdian side of Tchaikovsky, but I am not sure it behoves me, as one who speaks no Russian, to be too fussy here. It was above all his journey of catastrophe, and no one could doubt that Muehle grasped his fate and followed it. But it is not only his journey; part of the problem is surely that the characters are heading in different, mutually opposed and uncomprehending directions. Maria Motolygina’s Lisa, unable to escape from her childhood and clearly presented as such, was by the same token beautifully, often heartrendingly sung, her final scene powerful indeed. As expected, Doris Soffel’s Countess stole the show: not only a sterling performance, that ‘ancient’ air included, but one showing her sexual drives to be as strong as ever, perhaps even more so. Perhaps if she too had questioned her obsessions, she might have been happier—but is there any meaning in that ‘perhaps’? Thomas Lehman’s Yeletsky was finely sung indeed, as, in smaller roles, were Karia Tucker’s Pauline, Andrew Dickinson’s Chaplitsky, Chance Jonas-O’Toole’s Chekalinsky, Kyle Miller’s Surin, and many more, up to and including the chorus. Lucio Gallo’s virile, contemptuously masculine Tomsky showed how this singer can still absolutely hold the stage. Raunchy masked-ball choreography from Howell and excellent performances from the dancers not only returned to several questions already posed, but also asked a good number of their own.

Sebastian Weigle’s conducting had its moments, especially during the third act. (The opera was essentially given in scenes rather than acts, the interval given, as is often the case, following the arrival of Catherine the Great in the middle of the second act.) Then it became more idiomatic, conjuring up from the excellent Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper more of a Tchaikovskian sound than had previously been the case. We should not be too essentialist about such matters, but much previously had sounded rather on the Germanic side, albeit with distinctly odd balances, strings in particular notably subdued. A lack of dramatic sweep, without anything obvious put in its place, proved frustrating. 

Catherine the Great (Doris Soffel)

Singing and production continued, though, to offer considerable compensation. Soffel’s reappearance as Catherine the Great suggested she and the Countess were one and the same, her mocking laughter at the end of that third scene echoing the Countess’s ghostly reappearance (dressed as Lisa) to name the three cards. Was this all, then, just Hermann’s fevered imagination? And if so, to put it bluntly, what is the point? What we saw was not so cut and dried as that. Indeed, one of the projector quotations between scenes, from Dostoevsky, considering the nature of fantasy, how it must come close to reality, made that clear. 

If the scales here are tilted towards fantasy rather than reality, more so than any other production I can recall and than I have tended to think of it, then this remains a single production, concentrating fruitfully on a particular standpoint; another will be free to do something else. And it is only limited by it to the extent that almost any standpoint will limit: it enabled and heighted a strong sense of fate, from which not only Hermann, but also Lisa and indeed the Countess wish to escape, yet ultimately knew they cannot—and do not. 

There is, I think, something psychoanalytical to the approach. Certainly everything appears to be built on misunderstandings or downright lies: untruths, at any rate. What Hermann wants does not really exists; what Lisa wants does not really exist; what the Countess has wanted all her life has probably never existed at all. That holds for others too, not least Yeletsky. For all his apparent good fortune, he loses Lisa, and there is no sense of triumph in his final victory over Hermann. That it ends with a third and final death, all three ultimate protagonists departed, seems fitting in a sense that goes beyond Romantic death wish. Perhaps it is here, then, that the fantastic twist properly resumes, bidding us continue to question what we have seen and heard.

The Queen of Spades, Royal Opera, 13 January 2019

Royal Opera House

Tchaikovsky (Vladimir Stoyanov)
Images: ROH/Catherine Ashmore

Herman – Aleksandrs Antonenko

Count Tomsky, Zlatogor – John Lundgren

Prince Yeletsky, Tchaikovsky – Vladimir Stoyanov

The Countess – Felicity Palmer

Lisa – Eva-Maria Westbroek

Pauline, Milovzor – Anna Goryachova

Chekalinsky – Alexander Kravets

Surin – Tigran Martirossian

Chaplitsky – Konu Kim

Narumov – Michael Mofidian

Governess – Louise Winter

Master of Ceremonies – Harry Nicoll

Masha – Renata Skarelyte

Prilepa – Jacquelyn Stucker

Stefan Herheim (director)

Philipp Fürhofer (designs)

Bernd Purkrabek (lighting)

Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)

Members of the Tiffin Children’s Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding) and Extra Chorus

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Antonio Pappano (conductor)

London has not done badly in recent years by The Queen of Spades, both ENO and Opera Holland Park having offered productions, the latter considerably more successful than the former. (A less recent yet hardly distant visit from Opera North is also better forgotten.) In addition – fresher in and more germane to my own thoughts – Salzburg presented a fine new staging, typically misunderstood by most, from Hans Neuenfels last summer. Covent Garden, however, has not seen the opera since 2002, so it was about time. Stefan Herheim’s much lauded production, first seen in Amsterdam in 2016, may now be seen courtesy of the Dutch National Opera’s co-producer, the Royal Opera.

Countess (Felicity Palmer)

I go back a good few years with Herheim’s work. My first encounter quite bowled me over: his Entführung aus dem Serail for Salzburg in 2006, preserved on DVD in the Festival’s box of the complete Mozart operas. If I were bowled over then, growing acquaintance with his Bayreuth Parsifal over three different years of that festival (click here for my final encounter, in 2012) proved something beyond bowling over; indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that it marked a turning-point in my understanding of opera as a critical, recreative genre. Not for nothing did a picture from the production feature on the cover of my book, After Wagner, which devoted a chapter to that production and another half-chapter to discussion of Herheim’s Berlin Lohengrin. Since then, the director’s work has continued to occupy my thoughts both in my formal academic and less academic writing; Herheim’s Meistersinger is, for instance, discussed in a chapter on modernist operatic culture I wrote for a recent book, edited by Björn Heile and Charles Wilson, on modernism in music. Why mention that? Partly to situate myself – we all do that, nowadays, do we not, both when staging and watching opera? – but also to situate the doubts I began to have, not entirely dissimilar to those I initially entertained concerning Herheim’s Glyndebourne Pelléas this summer.

Herman (Aleksandrs Antonenko)

Whilst neither of these productions struck me at the time as representing Herheim at his very best, certainly not at his most groundbreaking – perhaps my problem and mine alone – I have nevertheless continued to think, to deconstruct, and perhaps more important, to piece together, but also how one needed to see and, crucially as ever with Herheim, to hear the entirety of the production, not simply to rely upon what one thought before the interval. Much came together by the close, whether onstage or in one’s mind; indeed, one was prompted to ask whether the two were, if not one and the same, at least inseparable even from the analytical standpoint. Just as with more overtly confrontational theatre work, for instance from such different directors as Peter Konwitschny and Calixto Bieito, this is not theatre for the mere spectator. Herheim’s theatricality in a more conventional sense sometimes leads others to think his theatre conventional, even crowd-pleasing. Perhaps in some senses it is, or can be. That, however, is not its point. Like Wagner, or indeed Tchaikovsky, his work continues to have much to tell those angry and unreceptive from what we might tentatively term the musicodramatic ‘left’ and ‘right’ – without collapsing into centrist quicksand. There is something synthetic, in interesting and not always expected senses, to this art – as indeed there surely is to much opera ‘itself’, whatever that might mean.

Identity is a complex thing. How do we identify with the voices or voices on stage, back stage, in the pit, even in the audience (beyond yesterday’s highly aggravating coughing, chattering, air conducting and the rest, and perhaps even including those irritant voices)? A staple, not without reason, of Tchaikovsky criticism has been discussion of the relationship, even identity, between the composer and his operatic characters. Gerald Abraham, for instance, claimed that ‘some opera composers, notably Tchaikovsky, have been able to identify themselves only with characters that are essentially or partially self-projections’. Herheim’s concept takes this as its starting-point. Titles inform us initially of the composer’s death and the story behind it, namely Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and nineteenth-century society’s retribution for that ‘deviance’. The curtain opens and we see a desperate, pathetic Tchaikovsky seeking love from an officer he had paid only to gratify. The contempt with which he is treated sparks a flurry of writing and self-poisoning by cholera. Delirium ensues, the writing – or is it the performance? – continues, drawing upon the woman in the painting above and Tchaikovsky’s own ill-fated marriage: are the two women, indeed the three once Liza appears on stage, to be identified? It draws also upon the composer and that guardsman. The former seems to become – although are we ever entirely sure? – Prince Yeletsky, but also a host of tormenting chorus members. Who after all, torments a repressed gay man more than his interior daemons? The latter seems to become Herman, a thrill-seeker with a death wish of his own. Whose wish fulfilment is whose? And what to make of the surrealist vision immediately before the interval, when, following a (largely unsuccessful) attempt to have the audience rise to sing the Tsarist national anthem, Herman or the soldier appears in mocking travesty as Catherine herself, the ultimate, albeit surrealist queen scorning our sordid, all-too-real queen. Who, then, we might ask, is the Queen of Spades herself?

Yeletsky, who does not appear in Pushkin, is perhaps the most appropriate candidate for identity with the composer; more important, he is perhaps the most intriguing. Who is he? What is he for? Or what might we make him be, and be for? When Herman curses the prince’s luck, can we believe in this as anything more than Tchaikovsky’s fantasy? Probably, but it requires theatre – a production team and performers who communicate as well as think – to do so. Tchaikovsky-Yeletsky plays with our expectations. Who is he now? Who was he then? Frantically, he not so much writes as plays at writing, at conducting, at ‘tickling the ivories’. For the hammy gestures are those unmistakeably – at least as the drama continues – of a biopic composer. It might be Ken Russell; it might be someone else; it might be us air-conducting at home or, as yesterday, all around me in the theatre. As dramaturge Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach notes in the programme, Tchaikovsky’s autograph is ‘sketched out in a nervous, volatile, rushed script with innumerable changes and cuts. It offers compelling testimony of the feverish élan that seized Tchaikovsky in his execution of this story.’ Is this helpless, hapless caricature not precisely what one’s delirious state – who is ‘one’? – might viciously summon up in performing, in watching, in listening to Tchaikovsky’s romanticisation of the Pushkin story Dostoevsky proclaimed ‘the pinnacle of the art of the fantastic’? Ambiguous angels speak of and with such and other fantasies.

Lisa (Eva-Maria Westbroek)

Time plays tricks with us, or does it? Are we in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, or is the setting as well as the drama – whatever this might mean – more a dream, a fantasy, than anything else? (Is there anything else?) The same set, more or less, manages through brilliant tricks of lighting (Bernd Purkrabek) to furnish both a dark, oppressive late-nineteenth-century library and a fantastical recreation of a Mozartian world that never was: like the score, like the action. And like the music box which, before a note of the score has been heard, mocks the composer at the guardsman’s behest with an endlessly repeating opening line, later to be subsumed into score and plot, of ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’. Birds achieve their freedom, their invention, the composer’s humiliation, in the pastoral divertissement. But has not the man who would so insistently conduct (direct?) proceedings, who scatters those very nineteenth-century album leaves across the stage to anyone who would read from them, created this torment, this gilded cage, this wedding in which he participates and which he haunts?

Contrast between public and private is of course key to the work. Here, if not heard with the knowing confidence with which it had been communicated by Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg, we still heard enough of that from Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House to relate score and action, libretto and staging, those and many other relationships in ways both suggested by the onstage delirium and our own. In what might well be understood as Tchaikovsky’s closest journey towards surrealism – itself a form of hyper-realism? – our critical faculties needed to be sharp, to permit themselves to be sharpened, not least since they needed to turn upon themselves, to lacerate what we might most unthinkingly or even thoughtfully treasure. Who killed whom ultimately, when the chorus continued to play at taking the fateful drink? What did it mean to play roles, and how much did we as ‘spectators’ engage? For it was those attending the theatre, the ‘entertainment’, who surely condemned Tchaikovsky, Herman, Lisa, even opera itself once again to death.

Pappano, as is his wont, tended to stop and start, to rush certain passages, if not so distractingly as in Wagner. The sound he summoned from the orchestra was, at its best, very much a ‘Tchaikovsky sound’ such as we fancy we know and love, to match the image of the ‘tormented composer’ we know and murderously love. Choral singing was excellent, often outstanding, testament to the results William Spaulding is achieving in his (relatively) new role as chorus director. Aleksandrs Antonenko and Eva-Maria Westbroek left much to be desired vocally in the first act, tuning awry beyond the limits of the merely feverish. They improved, however, the palpable honesty of the latter’s portrayal of Lisa working its own magic. Antonenko surely needs to work on his acting – especially in a production such as this: no match for the extraordinary Brandon Jovanovich in Salzburg last year. Vladimir Stoyanov, tireless in the acting role as Tchaikovsky, showed that he could sing beautifully too as Yeletsky. Felicity Palmer predictably – yet no less creditably for that – offered a spellbinding star turn as the Countess. Smaller roles tended to be very well sung, even if at times, the ensemble lacked an ideal sense of company and coherence. Perhaps that will come as the run progresses. Theatre, after all, is often about theatre; it certainly is here. Let it, let us, do with identity what we will – and vice versa.

Opolais/Gewandhaus/Nelsons - Dzenītis, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler, 9 October 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Andris Dzenītis: Māra (United Kingdom premiere)

Tchaikovsky: The Queen of Spades, op.68: ‘I am worn out with grief’

Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin, op.24: Polonaise and Letter Scene

Mahler: Symphony no.1 in D major

Kristine Opolais (soprano)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

After the relative disappointment of the first of these two Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts, that disappointment relating to Andris Nelsons’s conducting rather than the orchestra itself, there came a second chance. I wish I could say that I had responded more warmly. There were, as before, sections of the concert to which I could – and did. However, Nelsons’s Mahler ultimately proved no more convincing than it had before, the final movement of the First Symphony as vulgar and uncomprehending a display as I have heard for a long time. An audience that once again seemed to value excellence of orchestral execution and sheer volume of sound rather than formal, interpretative coherence clearly felt otherwise. Again I thought of Beecham: ‘the English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’. Perhaps Nelsons qualifies as an Englishman too, at least when it comes to Mahler.

His taste in new music seems odd too. Try as I might, I could not make anything much of Andris Dzenītis’s Māra – although, as ever, with a new work, that may well just have been my fault. Its first performance had been given by the same forces in Leipzig five days earlier; this performance certainly sounded committed and incisive. The title apparently refers to a notion of divine omnipotence: according to the programme note, ‘the entire physical, visible, audible and tangible world, the materialisation of all spiritual power’. Dzenītis can certainly write for an orchestra in a ‘traditional’, more or less Franco-Russian way: the quarter of an hour or so piece proved ‘colourful’, ‘ritualistic’, ‘pictorial’, ‘dramatic’, and so on, in predictable, generic fashion. Certain passages grabbed the attention: repeated pitches redolent of Morse Code, repeated figures that briefly offered something intriguingly hypnotic. What it all added up to, though, I could not say. ‘Eclectic’ would be one way of putting it, so too ‘at least twice as long as it need have been’. A solo bass clarinet solo at the close may or may not have held some programmatic meaning. According to the note, the piece allowed ‘runes to become visible in the score’. Perhaps they were audible too; I am afraid I have no idea.

Tchaikovsky made much more sense to me, Kristine Opolais on superlative form. In Liza’s third-act arioso from The Queen of Spades and the Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin, she truly brought to life her characters, without context, scenery, or titles. One knew and felt what Liza and Tatiana meant, what their plight was – and could have taken dictation, verbal or musical, from her. Hers were fully gestural performances too, very much those of a classic singing actress. The Gewandhaus Orchestra ‘spoke’ splendidly too: this, after all, is an orchestra that plays for the Leipzig Opera as well as the concert hall (and the Thomaskirche). If only Nelsons and/or Opolais had not indulged in quite so extreme gear changes towards the end of the Letter Scene, and if only he had not driven the Polonaise so hard, these would have been ideal performances. No one, however, would have been seriously disappointed.

The first movement of the Mahler symphony opened with great promise: opening string harmonics (and their later repetition) spot on, without sounding clinical, woodwind full of colour and character, offstage brass as well balanced as I can recall. There was first-rate audience bronchial interjection too, for which many thanks. Later on, an overall freshness of spirit was apt, winning, invigorating. Antiphonally placed first and second violins worked a magic that was little short of revelatory, whilst the tender tone of the Leipzig horn consort was simply to die for. Soon, however, Nelsons began to mould the music excessively, leaving one longing for the ideal of a Kubelík. (Few are the occasions when that conductor proves anything but ideal!) Climaxes grew more and more brash, in quite un-Mahlerian fashion, once again suggestive of a conductor more at home with Shostakovich. Formal coherence had soon gone quite out of the window too.

The Ländler likewise opened well: as vigorous, as earthy as I have heard, the Leipzig strings digging deep indeed. As it progressed, however, it seemed too determined by rhythm, too little by harmony: this should not be a zero-sum game. There was alienation in the Trio, if not quite enough, the material often sounding oddly close to Bruckner. Irony does not seem Nelsons’s strong suit. Nor was it so in the third movement, its weird echoes of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream apparently in spite of the conductor rather than on his account. There was no gainsaying, however, the excellence of the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s soloists here. It was a pity that Nelsons pulled around the Klezmer and other contrasting material so wildly; soon it made no sense at all, a mere succession of moments. One could hardly have wanted a louder, more emphatic opening to the finale; many of us indeed might have wished for something less ear-splitting. Such, however, was to be the order of the day, with extreme contrast that had the audience ‘excited’ in its seats. I felt merely bludgeoned. Had there been something in the way of formal coherence, it would not have been quite so bad; in its absence, this glorious movement felt interminable. Bizarre tempo changes added further frustration. What a waste of a great orchestra.

Salzburg Festival (5) – The Queen of Spades, 25 August 2018

Grosses Festspielhaus

Vladislav Sulimsky (Count Tomski / Plutus), Stanislav Trofimov (Surin), Alexander Kravetz (Chekalinsky), Igor Golovatenko (Prince Yeletsky), Gleb Peryazev (Narumov), Pavel Petrov (Chaplitski), Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Ruth Walz

Hermann – Brandon Jovanovich

Count Tomsky, Plutus – Vladislav Sulimsky

Prince Yeletsky – Igor Golovatenko

The Countess – Hanna Schwarz

Lisa – Evgenia Muraveva

Pauline, Daphnis – Oksana Volkova

Chekalinsky – Alexander Kravets

Surin – Stanislav Trofimov

Chaplitsky – Pavel Petrov

Narumov – Gleb Peryazev

Governess – Margarita Nekrasova

Master of Ceremonies – Oleg Zalytskiy

Masha – Vasilisa Berzhanskaya

Chloë, Prilepa – Yulia Suleimanova

Sheep – Imola Kacso, Márton Gláser, Joan Aguila Cuevas

Hans Neuenfels (director)
Christian Schmidt (set designs)

Reinhard von der Thannen (costumes)

Stefan Bolliger (lighting)

Nicolas Humbert, Martin Otter (video)

Teresa Rotemberg (choreography)

Yvonne Gebauer (dramaturgy)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (chorus master: Wolfgang Götz)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberfer)

Angelika Prokopp Summer Academy (stage music)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Mariss Jansons (conductor)

© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

The Queen of Spades is a curious work. I do not mean that in a negative sense; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with curiosity and often much right with it. How we consider the opera will doubtless – and rightly – remain a matter of debate. There is rarely ‘one way’: how boring it would be, if there were. Or, as Schoenberg once put it, only the middle road does not lead to Rome. What, however, seems to me crucial is to remember what one would have thought a very obvious point, namely that this is an opera. It is not a musical ‘version’, or ‘translation’, or anything else, of Pushkin. Of course it has roots in Pushkin’s story, just as Elektra does in Sophocles; it is, however, a free-standing piece of work, in which music plays the most important role of all.

Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann), Alexander Kravets (Chekalinsky), Stanislav Trofimov (Surin)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

In his New Grove article on the opera, Richard Taruskin writes, in characteristically combative style: ‘For these deeds the Tchaikovsky brothers have been castigated many times over by guardians of literature, second-guessed by a Soviet production team under Meyerhold (their attempted “repushkinization” of the opera was shown at the Leningrad Malïy Theatre in 1935), and rebuked by puritanical but unimaginative critics who cannot hear the music to which the cannily adulterated libretto gave rise. What critics have been slow to recognize is precisely what the composer meant when he wrote with such uncharacteristic confidence about his originality: Tchaikovsky’s penultimate opera is the first and possibly the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.’ My only real cavil lies with the ‘but’; whoever heard of an imaginative puritan? Otherwise, although one may or may not agree with every word, therein lies the basis of an understanding.

Hans Neuenfels differs from Taruskin in a number of ways. He is also doing something different: mounting a production, not writing an essay or encyclopædia article. He is quite clear, though, as we learn both from an interview in the programme booklet and, more important, from the staging itself, that the ‘great achievement’ of Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, ‘was to turn the material into an opera libretto. This means that he augmented the story, adapting the narrative in a way that gives rise to a musical setting.’ A contrast between public and private is not particular to this opera, nor is a concentration on development by – or even juxtaposition of – scenes; one might say that Eugene Onegin does the same, more successfully and/or conventionally, according to taste. But a sense of listening to the music, of drawing us in to listen to it too, is strongly apparent both in the designs, from longstanding Neuenfels collaborators, Christian Schmidt and Reinhard von der Thannen, and in the action they frame, interpret, even incite.

Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

Place is crucial. The Countess’s room is surprisingly spare, brilliant in its whiteness, most likely not at all as one had expected. Why? It is certainly elegant, part of a visual style to which we might have become accustomed through stagings such as Neuenfels’s celebrated Bayreuth Lohengrin. There is surely an element of kinship there; after all, there is an experimental basis to the action of both works, both productions: failed, tragic experiments in both cases, although that failure seems questioned by Neuenfels too. Perhaps there is something in that, but I think the point is more specific. As Neuenfels explains, ‘This is connected with the climax of the opera, when it reaches a point of maximum clarity. It’s the clearest scene and at the same time it’s blank. Although it appears to be the vaguest scene, it’s the most realistic one. It also has the palpable consequences. Things will be decided there.’ So it seemed – and, equally important, so it sounded.

Evgenia Muraveva (Lisa)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

It would be difficult, perhaps even in the wrong sense absurd(ist), to rid oneself entirely of Fate here. It is surely, however, a good thing to interrogate or at least to examine, rather than meekly to accept so amorphous and, frankly, unhelpful a concept. When the Countess’s face reappears on huge video screen above the action in the final scene, when she winks – knowingly, of course, but to what end? Is her ‘role’ meaningful or a red herring? – we are free, within limits, to make what we want of it. Hermann’s decision, perhaps even society’s decision, has been made. That is as much a beginning as a close. Her lust for the young stranger in her room was clear; maybe he actually gave her there what he wanted. We continue to think – as she continues to appear. Is she, however, noticed any more? Was she ever? Hermann’s dismissal of Lisa, cruel, heart-rending (from her standpoint) is very much in that line. We need not commend it; it would be odd to do so, although there is perhaps something almost of Crime and Punishment to the ‘act’. There is no denying, however, his purpose, born out of an extreme loneliness, alienation, and disaffection. The blackness of much of the space on stage, within which stark, sharp costumed action takes place renders that visually clear: a visual clarity born within libretto, music, and performance. When Lisa, clad in white, finally crosses the threshold to join her silhouette, it is both her tragedy and Hermann’s dismissal of her. This scarlet Nutcracker-prince will once again enact his own tragedy.

© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

The other side to that, at least an other side to that, is in the Imperial Russia of the story. Mixing periods, stitching them together is too often a recipe for an ‘anything goes’ post-modernism unworthy of the name: nowhere more so than in middle-of-the-road, would-be fashionable opera stagings. Here, however, the stylised – nothing is real? everything is surreal/hyper-real…? – evocations of a late-nineteenth century looking back to the eighteenth (Mozart and Catherine the Great) and forward to our own time prove tight and yet also allusive and elusive enough for the question never to arise. Details stick, point one in the right direction, without detracting from the wide open space, musical as much as scenic, of the broader ‘picture’. Take the unforgettable image, during the Mozartian pastiche of a pastoral wedding entertainment, of sheep flunkeys knitting their own wool: societal cannibalism of a degenerate aristocracy, or rather, more tellingly still, of its immediate underlings. It is, after all, neither Yeletsky nor Tomsky who ‘loses’; it is Hermann. Or is it? Time, the one thing he does not have here, will tell. Or the arrival of Catherine the Great: a brittle, black madonna: manipulated or manipulative? Why choose? Her crowd of followers, bowing and scraping, is also her crowd of creators. Just as it has been of the river: men and women in boaters and swimwear transformed into the Neva itself. Scenery, like Fate, is constructed in dialectical materialism. So too is the ‘drama’ itself.

© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

Or is it? In one sense, presuming one assents to those broadly Marxist terms, yes, of course. It would be meaningless to claim that it were not, even if it were ‘mere’ ideology. That applies to the music as much as the libretto, the performance as much as the staging. Yet, for all but the most vulgar of Marxists – and surely even for them – there is relative autonomy too. There is grit to the oyster. This is, we remember, an opera; it is neither Pushkin nor a treatise. The blazing, yet far from soft-edged Romanticism – a problematic word, I know, yet let us leave that on one side for now – we heard from Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic added its own level of complexity, or perhaps better, laid the foundation for most of that which came on top. Public and private, Fate and autonomy, cynicism and love: these and so much else found their roots in the bubbling cauldron of Tchaikovsky’s score in its own mediated nineteenth-to-twenty-first-century presentation and reinvention. Dynamic and tempo contrasts took us further to the edge than anything merely seen – and rightly so. This is, we remembered once again, an opera.

 Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann),
Hanna Schwarz (Countess)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Ruth Walz

Which brings us, last yet anything but least, to the singers, above all to the towering performance of Brandon Jovanovich as Hermann. His clarity and strength of purpose, portraying yet never fatally (as opposed to fatefully!) partaking in doubt, offered an object lesson in tortured heroism and anti-heroism. One both believed in him and did not, rooted for him and did not: everything, it seemed, that the Tchaikovskys asked of him. Evgenia Muraveva’s Lisa, sweetly, intelligently sung, with collegiate agency such as to mark her out yet not to overpower, was equally well-judged: no easy thing in such circumstances. Hanna Schwarz truly captured the essence, an essence at least, of the Countess, nowhere more so than in the hushed, nostalgic intimacy, finely balanced between ‘she still has it’ and ‘soon she might not’ of the Grétry air, ‘Je crains de lui parler la nuit’.  Igor Golovatenko and Vladislav Sulimsky made the most of their role as Yeletsky and Tomsky respectively: again contributing to, furthering the drama, vocally excelling, without a hint of grandstanding. The same might be said of the rest of a tightly-knit cast and of the chorus, from whom more often than not one might have taken dictation. They had clearly been well prepared by Ernst Raffelsberger, well directed by Neuenfels and his team, but granted agency too, individually and en masse. Is that not what opera in general and this opera in particular should be? It is certainly, I think, what we in the audience too should be aiming for too. In that, as in much else, work, performances, and production should be accounted a great success.

The Queen of Spades, Opera Holland Park, 2 August 2016

Holland Park Theatre

Herman – Peter Wedd

Lisa – Natalya Romaniw
Countess – Rosalind Plowright
Count Tomsky – Richard Burkhard
Prince Yeletsky – Grant Doyle
Polina – Laura Woods
Masha – Daisy Brown
Chekalinsky – Aled Hall
Surin – Simon Wilding
Governess – Laura Zigmantaite
Chaplitsky – Oliver Brignall
Narumov – Henry Grant Kerswell
Master of Ceremonies – Timothy Langston

Rodula Gaitanou (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (designs)
Simon Corder (lighting)
Jamie Neale (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Philip Voldman)

City of London Sinfonia
Peter Robinson (conductor)
 

The Queen of Spades has been doing rather well in and around London of late. I have only seen two stagings recently before this, but know of quite a few others. Of those: Opera North offered a rare lapse at the Barbican, about which the less said, the better; ENO, last year, offered strong vocal performances but a truly catastrophic production. All in all, then, Holland Park, as so often, came off best.

 

Rodula Gaitanou’s production tells the story well, and offers some probing beneath the surface – although not so much when contrasted with reports of Stefan Herheim’s recent staging in Amsterdam. (By the same token, however, OHP does a great deal with more limited resources; it would in any case be unreasonable or downright absurd to expect every opera production to be an event on the level of a Herheim production.) I did wonder whether the sight of two men beneath an arch in the penultimate scene was intended as an oblique reference to Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, but, given the darkness, it was a bit difficult to tell. Perhaps that is the point. There is, in the late-nineteenth-century updating – time of composition, I presume – some sense of pitting a self-consciously beautiful society against more human desires, noble and base alike. Cordelia Chisholm’s designs will certainly delight those who wish to see ‘traditional’ productions, doubtless ignoring the fact that the opera is not set when it ‘should’ be.

The Countess seems to rule the roost in a fashion beyond what one might expect; this is, perhaps, an ageing society, unable to accept the need to change. If I felt that some of those points might have been pushed a little harder, there is something to be said for not doing so either. We all have particular tastes, and have no right to insist that everything should be as we should have done it; indeed, we should be willing to learn from things done differently – and done well. I found that, on reflection, the production had more to offer than I had initially thought; there is certainly much to be said for relative subtlety. (Just as there is much to be said, from time to time, for agitprop!)

 

It was, perhaps inevitably, Rosalind Plowright’s Countess who made the strongest dramatic impression. Although she does not have very much to sing during the first act – here, Tchaikovsky’s three acts were condensed into two – she held the stage just by entering, let alone by painfully, agonisingly, walking across it with her sticks. (I thought a little of my first encounter with Waltraud Meier in the theatre: as Ortrud as Covent Garden. The character has little to sing at all in the first act of Lohengrin, but I could not keep my eyes off her.) And the insight into her interior life, above all to her past, was moving, evoking an historical canvas far wider than we were explicitly or even implicitly told. Natalya Romaniw did not disappoint as Lisa, although I felt that her character came more into its own following the interval; a freer, more daring performance to be seen and heard. Again, perhaps that was the point. Peter Wedd’s Herman was, I am afraid, harder to like. The character seemed less impetuous than annoying, somewhat generalised, even wooden acting meaning that it was difficult to feel much chemistry between him and his beloved. As melodrama there was something to be said for such a performance, but there was much that it lacked; a fine vocal performance might have compensated, but that was not to be either. Grant Doyle’s Yeletsky, however, was very fine indeed: darkly conflicted, and beguiling of line.

 

Other, ‘smaller’ roles were all taken well, Richard Burkhard’s Tomsky, Daisy Brown’s Masha, and Laura Zigmantaite’s Governess particularly catching my ear – without that reflecting negatively upon any of the other singers. It was the Opera Holland Park Chorus, though, which so often stole the show. Expertly trained, not just musically but in its Russian too (insofar as I could tell!), by Philip Voldman, and responding well to detailed direction, choreography (Jamie Neale) included, the chorus members performed equally well as individuals (highly impressive waiters, for instance, in the first scene) and corporately. We shall doubtless see and hear more from many of them.

 

Ideally, we should have heard a larger orchestra than the Holland Park pit can accommodate. There were certainly times when the lack of a greater body of strings detracted from Tchaikovsky’s Romanticism. However, there is a good deal of (neo-)Classicism to the score too; that often thrived under Peter Robinson’s direction. The Mozart pastiche music – which, of course, never quite sounds like Mozart, but gives us a good idea of Tchaikovsky’s limited understanding of Mozart – came off particularly well, but so did the obsessive qualities of the score. The City of London Sinfonia woodwind were on particularly good form, and the strings performed creditably indeed, given their limitation in number. Opera Holland Park’s productions tend to evoke above all a splendid sense of company, of an evening that is considerably more than the sum of its parts; this was no exception.