Based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 short story, Tchaikovsky’s penultimate operatic work is a musically idiosyncratic mixture of his recognizable orchestral style with elements of pastiche. Not renowned as a composer of opera, Tchaikovsky had hit a bullseye with a previous Pushkin adaptation, Eugene Onegin in 1879. Admitting an irresistible attraction to operatic form in spite of his inability to master it, the maestro used the folk origins of Pushkin’s verse novel to present a series of interlinked scenes rather than a fully realized grand opera. The Queen of Spades followed in 1890, and was again a success (though others in between were not). More formally rigorous than Onegin yet not entirely traditional, it offered a mixture of traditional themes and motifs with moments of surprise and even self parody.
The opera departs from Pushkin’s original story quite significantly. In both versions Hermann, a young soldier, is haunted by the rumor of a mysterious secret of an unbeatable......
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