Queen of Spades

With PIQUE DAME, Tchaikovsky transports the audience into a world full of passion, obsession and dark secrets. The opera, premiered in 1890, is based on a novella by Alexander Pushkin and skillfully combines Russian narrative tradition with Western elegance. For Hermann, the tragic anti-hero of the opera, the pursuit of love and happiness in life combine to form an indissoluble mixture of longing and greed that leaves him no time to rest. His belief in three magical cards, which are supposed to bring him wealth and power, leads him to madness - and drags everything close to him into the abyss. Lisa, the granddaughter of a mysterious countess, falls in love with Hermann and becomes a witness and accomplice to his moral decline - and is not spared herself. Tchaikovsky paints the emotional landscapes of his characters with incomparable musical depth and color, and everything oscillates between tender love melancholy and dark drama, from Hermann's poignant arias to the fateful fanfares of the card game. The music drives the disaster relentlessly forward and the countdown takes place at the gambling table, where Peter Carp explores the psyche of Tchaikovsky's characters by exposing them to the unstoppable and overpowering game of life.