Lise Davidson sings tonight. Powerful. I’m surprised the roof of the Metropolitan Opera survived the evening, held up maybe only through some restraint on her part. It is her debut here and the up and coming soprano has the deepest capacity I’ve ever heard. Her throat must be forged of brass and crystal. No waver. This must be what people heard when they reference singers like the great Birgit Nilsson.
With Yannick conducting too this feels like a very special night.
The staging of The Queen of Spades opens with a great depth of field illusion that takes me away. There is a mansion in the distance on a spring day with kids running around and young boys practicing to be soldiers while the people lament that it is a nice day, but things aren’t as good as they used to be in “the good ole days.” My grandpa used to have a book titled, “The good ol’ days, weren’t so great.” It showed some of the famous strifes of the past compared to what we count as strife today.
A memorable visual came during an extended ballet scene with dogs and kids singing and kids wearing sheep disguises… then a boy dressed as cupid who atop a pile of people raises his arm with the bow timed perfectly with an orchestral cadence.
There is a stereotype of an opera singer singing an amazing parodic aria. The entire opera is punctuated with show stealing moments including every time Lise sings. On the flip side of the fun and the supernatural there is a very real social reprimand that pervades the plot; the desperation that leads to gambling, not as a pastime but as a last hope. Recently in the United States on-line gambling is becoming legal in the States and trying it myself briefly with some promos I can see it is going to really hurt a lot of lives. The Atlantic magazine wrote an interesting article about gambling relating the time of this opera to our time now:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/world-our-casino/620791/
The queen of spades is based on a story by Pushkin.
So what is The Queen of Spades all about? It begins with a countess who years before became wealthy with a winning secret combination to cards in Paris. She was also known as the Venus of Moscow, but now old is about to have her daughter Lisa married to prince yeletsky, but another man named Hermann has been following her and is obsessed and in love and she falls for him too. To compete with Yeletsky, Hermann is determined to learn the secret combination from the countess. Obsession, guilt, and jealousy all conspire against a happy ending.
Notes on the production
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Composer…………………………… Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Lisa…………………………………….… Lise Davidsen
Hermann……………………….…….. Yusif Eyvazov
Prince Yeletsky………………..…… Igor Golovatenko
Countess………………………….….. Larissa Diadkova
Conductor…………………………… Vasily Petrenko
Metropolitan Opera
12/14/19