Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
The music of Tchaikovsky has endeared itself to non-Russian audiences, but selectively: mainly his ballets, symphonies and concertos. Russians know and love also a Tchaikovsky with words, and a composer of operas and songs. The two Tchaikovsky operas most often staged both in Russia and elsewhere are both based on words by Pushkin, by common consent Russia’s greatest poet. Russians tend to reverse the order of preference of non-Russians: many consider The Queen of Spades a greater achievement than Eugene Onegin. Certainly it is more ambitious; whereas Onegin is a relatively intimate affair, originally for student, semi-professional performance, with modest staging demands, The Queen of Spades is grand opera, for hefty voices in the main roles, and complete with danced and sung divertissements, a ball and a gambling scene, with many choral opportunities. Above all, the story is tragic and full of telling coups de théâtre. The differences between the two operas have something to do with the sources in Pushkin. The opera Eugene Onegin respects the tone and content of Pushkin’s long narrative poem, whereas in The Queen of Spades the almost elliptical brevity of Pushkin’s story-telling gave scope for the expansion necessary for an opera - ‘insofar’, as Richard Taruskin observes ‘as a study in ugly monomania suggested operatic adaptation at all’.
Russians immediately took to the music drama Tchaikovsky and his brother Modest fashioned from Pushkin’s story, but their opera that has been slow to establish itself outside Russia. Its ‘dark’ subject matter, its phantasmal, even surreal romanticism, seem to appeal to the Russian temperament. Originally Tchaikovsky claimed that the subject did not excite him, but that may have been out of disappointment that his brother Modest was working on adapting it for another composer. When that fell through and Tchaikovsky himself received the commission for an opera on the subject, in late 1889, the deadline for its performance at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg was only 12 months away, Tchaikovsky set to work with frenzied speed. To enable uninterrupted work, he went to Florence, where he composed the opera in 44 days. ‘For God’s sake do not waste time’, he wrote to his brother, ‘otherwise I could run out of text’. When his brother’s words couldn’t keep up with his manic composing Tchaikovsky wrote his own as well as re-working Modest’s.
Tchaikovsky had identified with his opera’s anti-hero, Hermann, and also with Liza, the loving and suffering victim of Hermann’s obsession. He wrote to his brother ‘Either I am terribly mistaken, Modya, or the opera is a masterpiece’. Tchaikovsky’s conviction is reflected in the certainty with which his music conveys the crucial dramatic elements of the opera, and the flexibility and naturalness of the setting of speech and dialogue. Some of the interpolations which interrupt the terse story-telling were required by the director of the Imperial Theatres, Vsevolozhky. They have sometimes been criticised for distracting from the plot. Certainly Tchaikovsky enjoyed composing them, suiting as they do his gift for dance music, and in particular his love of the music of the 18th century, to which he paid tribute with inspired pastiche. Attractive though they be as spectacle and music, these are not the most original aspects of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. What is most original in it derives more directly from Pushkin’s story. Yet closer examination of the texts of the interpolations, and their music as well, suggests they comment on and add in telling ways to the musical realisation of the drama.
At any rate both the theatre director and the composer knew what they were doing. The opera premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in December 1890, conducted by Eduard Nápravnik, with a mixture of public success and critical response mixed yet positive enough to justify its creators’ judgment.
The roles of Hermann and Liza were sung by the married couple Nikolay and Medea Figner (both can be heard with remarkable clarity in excerpts on YouTube, her 1901 recording of the Act 1 solo being especially revealing).
Nikolay Figner in an excerpt from The Queen of Spades. Public Domain
Tchaikovsky’s opera a period piece – his, Pushkin’s or Catherine’s?
Pushkin’s story The Queen of Spades is set in the present, which means not long before 1833, when he wrote it as a ‘real’ story, told to him by someone he knew. The setting of the opera, however, is ‘St.Petersburg at the close of the 18thcentury’. As the Empress Catherine the Great features in the opera, this means it must pre-date her death in 1796. The change is usually explained as the pretext for including the divertissement interpolated in the ‘Masquerade ball in a rich house’, the first scene of Act 2. This divertissement ‘à la Mozart’ is a pastoral play, a pastiche of the French intermède or operatic divertissement. The age of Catherine the Great is the time of Mozart, and the music of this divertissement is, among other things, one of Tchaikovsky’s tributes to that composer, whom he idolised. As he was composing The Queen of Spades Tchaikovsky wrote ‘at times I thought I was living in the 18th century, and that there was nothing beyond Mozart’.
But Tchaikovsky’s quotations from Mozart are probably coincidental. For example, the pastoral duet sometimes supposed to quote Mozart’s Piano Concerto K.503 is more obviously a variant on the song ‘Plaisir d’amour’ by Jean-Paul-Egide Martini (1741-1816). The real setting of Tchaikovsky’s opera, Richard Taruskin suggests, is the 19th century fairyland known as ‘the 18th century’. This is fiction for the musical stage, and it is pedantic to subject it to historical investigation, which nevertheless reveals some interesting anachronisms.
In Pushkin’s tale, Tomsky, telling the story of his grandmother, says she was in Paris ‘about sixty years ago’ – i.e. in the 1770s. But if it had to be 60 years before Catherine’s time, that takes us back to the 1730s. So in the opera the Countess mentions meeting the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress, who died in 1764. The Count de St. Germain, who gives her the secret of the three cards, can just about sneak into either period, living from 1712 to 1784. 1784 is the year of Grétry’s opera Richard Coeur de Lion, an aria from which the Countess remembers from her youthful heyday in Paris, and sings as she prepares for sleep. This really is an anachronism, but as ‘old music’ Tchaikovsky inclusion of Grétry’s aria serves its purpose. Besides, its words can be heard as a premonition – for the audience the old lady’s song seems unknowingly to address the concealed Hermann (and ‘I fear to speak to him at night’ comes true: she is scared to death, and she says nothing).
The Polonaise by Josef Kozlowski (1757-1821), on the other hand, used in the ballroom scene, is exactly right for the ‘new’ period setting of the opera, and the words associated salute Catherine the Great, and date from a 1791 feast in her honour.
Boris Gasparov, in his book Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture (2005), has argued that the musical and dramatic anachronisms in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, whether deliberate or not, contribute to the artistic purpose and effect. He argues that the music in this opera does not merely provide the sonic background appropriate to the various temporal environments. Rather, thematic recurrence in various such environments gives the story ‘stereoscopic temporality, as if it were happening in different historical epochs and stylistic environments simultaneously’.
Pushkin’s story – reality and illusion
Pushkin seems to want to make his readers guess whether the story of his novella The Queen of Spades (1833-4) is based on reality or not, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. At the core of the story is the secret of the three winning cards, a secret Hermann believes, from the story he overhears Tomsky telling, is held by the elderly Countess.
Pushkin told a friend that there is a true story behind the plot. The prototype of the Countess was Princess Natalia Petrovna Golitsyna (1741-1837), the mother of the Moscow governor-general. In her youth she had been a maid of honour of Catherine the Great, and had indeed lived in Paris in the 1780s. It was her grandson who told Pushkin that he once had lost money in gambling and came to ask his grandmother to help. She did not give him any money, but told him about three winning cards. ‘Do try’, said the grandmother. The grandson did try and did win. The rest of the story, said Pushkin, is all fiction. The real ‘countess’, as opposed to the fictional one, far from being a ‘Muscovite Venus’ celebrated for her beauty, was nicknamed ‘Princess Moustache’.
At the climax of Pushkin’s story, Hermann finds that the card he has played believing it to be an ace, is the queen of spades. She seems to him to be winking at him and grinning. ‘The extraordinary likeness stunned him…“The old woman!” he cried out in horror’.
The epigraph with which Pushkin prefaced the story reads ‘The Queen of Spades stands for secret hostility’ and he gives the source for this maxim as ‘The Latest Fortune-telling manual’. In this epigraph Pushkin pokes fun at the general public’s fondness for thrillers, ghost stories, and the like. Yet there is something sinister in his acknowledgment of Russian superstition and belief in the occult. The reference to the fortune-telling manual adds to the idea that the whole story could be a piece of conversational gossip.
A Pushkin passion
Pushkin was no stranger to the card table, where he had staked and lost the copyright to more than one of his works. He commented to a friend ‘the passion for playing is the strongest of passions’. Another of the epigraphs Pushkin put in the story, a poem about gamblers, is quoted verbatim in the final scene of the opera:
On a cold winter day
They would gather and play,
Smoking.
And many a stake
Those youngsters would make,
Joking.
Of the stakes that they won
They chalked up every one
Paying.
And so, many a day
They would squander away,
Playing.
The immediate acclaim for Pushkin’s story outside Russia had something to do with its affinity with the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) – its blend of the natural and supernatural, the suggestion of demonic forces, and the portrayal of obsession. Pushkin’s evasive way of telling the story leaves us guessing. What is the secret hostility? Is it obsession that brings undone the anti-hero, or is it fate? There is a pervasive irony in Pushkin– not to be found in Hoffmann - beginning with the oddness that Hermann is fascinated with gambling, he who never plays himself. Tomsky explains that Hermann is prudent because he is German, and therefore economical – a stereotype familiar to Russians of Pushkin’s time. Tomsky is prompted to tell the story of his grandmother, who likewise never gambles. But she did – once – and Hermann, overhearing her story, has his imagination stirred. A chance event leads him to obsession and ultimate madness.
Pushkin is deliberately mystifying about when Hermann’s madness begins, and whether it is reality or hallucinations that determine his actions and fate.
Was the story true of Tomsky’s grandmother and was she really in possesion of the secret of the cards, given her by the Count St. Germain? He is a real historical figure, linked to mysticism, occultism, and secret societies.
Although based on Pushkin’s story the opera makes many departures from it. The greatest differences concern Liza. As Lizaveta Ivanova, in Pushkin’s story, she is not the Countess’ granddaughter, but her orphan ward, all too eager to greet in Hermann a possible escape from humiliating dependence. Hermann’s interest in her is feigned, and is entirely a way to gain the old lady’s secret. But in the opera Liza throws away a brilliant engagement with Prince Yeletsky (the librettist’s invention) in a sudden passion for an enigmatic stranger, Hermann. The romantic intrigue ends in a double suicide. Liza jumps into the Winter Canal when she realises Hermann’s obsession with the three cards is no longer obsession with her. Liza’s assignation with Hermann has become emblematic of The Queen of Spades, and tourists in St. Petersburg will be shown where Liza jumped to her death. This ‘canal scene’ belongs entirely to the brothers Tchaikovsky’s libretto, as does Hermann’s suicide. Pushkin ends his story by telling us that Lizavyeta has married ‘a very pleasant young man’, whereas Hermann, out of his mind, is in an asylum, repeating endlessly ‘Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!’.
There can be little doubt that the idea of his main characters acting out their suicidal tendencies struck a deep chord in Tchaikovsky’s own persona. The canal scene was his own idea, and for reasons more important than the need for a female voice in an otherwise all-male act. The tendency is towards melodrama more Romantic in character than Pushkin’s tale, but what is opera but melodrama? Memorable musical ideas match Hermann’s obsession, notably the three-note motif for the three cards. Tchaikovsky plays for all its operatic worth the Gothic spookiness parodied by Pushkin. Tomsky’s narrative, in the opera, adds to Pushkin’s version the idea that the THIRD man who seeks from the Countess the secret of the cards will be fatal for her.
If many people regard this an essential feature of The Queen of Spades, that is a tribute to how much the story has become fixed in mind by Tchaikovsky’s inspired opera.
First published for a Sydney Symphony concert performance conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy in 2012. Some of the ideas here are based on a conversation with Ashkenazy.