Not Only Opera

Could it have been different?: The Queen of Spades at the ROH

The Queen of Spades
Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Balcony D30, £16; after donation moved Stalls M28 for the second half
1 February 2019
ROH page

The ambivalence I felt towards Stefan Herheim’s production of The Queen of Spades the first time I saw it has resolved on a second exposure into single-minded admiration. Sure, I understand why some dislike, even hate it, and for those who do repeat views probably only make it worse. But for me this is a fabulous piece of stage craft, rich in detail and imagination, entirely successful in the colour and tone it sets out to achieve and, most importantly, a legitimate and sympathetic response to a piece both wonderful and strange.

It’s secured by a superb musical performance. A few initial fluffs and glitches made me worry I had made a mistake in coming to the final performance, conductor Christopher WIllis deputising for Antonio Pappano. But these proved only to be teething problems, and orchestra and chorus quickly recovered the same gutsy glory of sound they had under Pappano. Throughout they respond acutely to the extraordinary impulses of Tchaikovsky’s score, its textural variety, its melancholic song, its idiosyncratic pastiche, what’s more threading consistency through its shifting colours.

We had two cast changes, the leads Aleksandrs Antonenko and Eva-Maria Westbroek both off sick. I again worried about Sergey Polyakov’s Gherman, he apparently, too, suffering from a cold and clearly not at his best; I mourned also the lack of Antonenko’s domineering haughtiness, which I’d found so convincing a part of the production the first time round. But Polyakov improved significantly, ultimately singing with a despairing, bruised beauty that was the ideal aural manifestation of his Gherman: a victim, like so many others, of his own wild-eyed obsession, miles away from Antonenko’s selfish sadism and equally convincing. As Liza Lee Bisset did well, undeniably impressive though sometimes succumbing to a tendency to push her sound out of focus. Of the rest of the strong cast Vladimir Stoyanov as Yeletsky/Tchaikovsky and John Lundgren as Tomsky were superb, while Felicity Palmer astonished, her Countess definitive.

And so to the production. As with their Pelléas for Glyndebourne – as, no doubt, with everything they do – Herheim and his team take a simple story and bury it under layer upon layer of interpretation. Questions as to who exactly is doing what on stage and why are not easy to answer. If you want only to see the story Tchaikovsky wrote you have to ignore a lot of things – and Herheim and co give you a lot to ignore. There is detail, activity, precision everywhere, both in the direction to the actors and in Philipp Fürhofer’s phenomenal designs, the entire company going through myriad minor costume changes, the set mysteriously folding itself over and over into countless halls of mirrors all different but the same.

A couple in front tutted vigorously throughout; a friend asked, why make a complicated opera more complicated? But that’s the thing: it is a complicated opera. Pushkin writes a ghost story that is a masterpiece of simplicity; Tchaikovsky gives us an 18th-century pastorale, magnificent arias for minor characters, dance scenes, court scenes, more, more, more. So far, so opera, you might say – but can you write it off as filler? The magnificence of the music make the opera at once simple and baroque, its dramatic effects both surgical and lavish. It is difficult to pull off, and there are productions that flounder in the material extraneous to Pushkin’s original.

There will be all sorts of reasons why Tchaikovsky wrote The Queen of Spades the way he wrote it, and if Herheim and his dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach had proposed a straightforward parallel between the events of Tchaikovsky’s life and the content of the story that might well have been very annoying. But the laminae of ideas create a surreal world already well suited to the claustrophobic, heightened emotions of the score and furthermore to its strangeness of construction. Did he mean the pastorale as a mockery of the simplicity of choosing right love over wrong? Was it a conscious decision to pastiche The Magic Flute and its celebration of heterosexuality? Was he thinking of Onegin and Tatyana when he married; was he thinking of his marriage when he wrote Liza’s music, or Yeletsky’s aria? Did he see Nadezhda von Meck in the Countess? Did he sympathise with Gherman, or not? How could the opera have been different? Could it have been different?

I will convince no one who hated it. But to have a production that continually asks you to return to the score, to consider it and the decisions the composer made, to see it as a work of art nevertheless the creation of an individual, who was a genius but nevertheless a real person – all this I think is something of a luxury in an opera production, especially when it comes in addition to spectacular stage effects that respond intuitively to the impulse of the music. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but for me a quite wonderful addition.