The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (74 page)

Libretto by the composer and Modest Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky initially showed little interest in his brother Modest’s idea of adapting Pushkin’s novella for the stage, but by the time he had finished composition (it took him less than two months) he judged the opera ‘a masterpiece’ – a judgment with which posterity generally concurs.
The libretto changes the story’s original ending: Pushkin shows Lisa happily married and Herman confined to a lunatic asylum.

Plot

St Petersburg, late in the eighteenth century.
Herman, a strange, intense and penniless young officer who is a mystery to his friends, loves Lisa, ward of an elderly Countess.
Lisa, however, is engaged to the urbane Prince Yeletsky.
Herman’s friends tell him the story of the Countess: once a great beauty at the court of Versailles, she lost all her money at the gaming tables.
In exchange for a sexual favour, she was told the secret of three cards which would unfailingly trump in any game.
A ghost subsequently warned her that she would die at the hand of a man, crazed by love and desperate to learn her secret.
Herman becomes obsessed with the story, and sees the formula of the three cards as the key to his fortunes and Lisa’s love.
He breaks into her apartment and declares his love to her.
She is entranced by his ardour.

At a ball, Herman’s friends tease him over his growing obsession.
Lisa gives Herman a key to the Countess’s apartments, through which he can enter hers.
Later that night, the Countess disrobes in her bedroom and reminisces alone about her glory days in Versailles.
Herman appears and begs her to reveal the secret of the cards.
Horror-stricken at his intrusion, she dies, thus fulfilling the ghost’s prophecy.
Lisa enters and is appalled to realize that the secret of the cards has become more important to Herman than his love for her.

Back in his room at the barracks, Herman receives an imploring letter from Lisa and a visitation from the ghost of the Countess.
She tells him to marry Lisa and reveals the formula – three, seven, ace.
When he meets the distraught Lisa, he appears insane and can think only of trying out the secret of the three cards.
In despair, Lisa drowns herself.
In the gaming house, Yeletsky consoles himself for the loss of Lisa amid drunken carousing.
Herman enters and feverishly begins to play.
He wins on the three and seven, but when Yeletsky vengefully challenges him to another round, he turns up not the ace, but the queen of spades.
As the ghost of the Countess appears to him again, Herman kills himself.

What to listen for

From the orchestral introduction onwards, the score is woven through with various three-note figures, presumably intended to symbolize the fateful three cards.
Tchaikovsky also offsets the increasingly gloomy and nightmarish drama with episodes of rococo elegance – the centre-piece of the splendid ballroom scene is a dainty pastoral interlude, and Herman’s confrontation with the Countess is all the more chilling for being preceded by her sleepy, mumbled singing of a pretty old eighteenth-century tune (lifted straight from an opera by the composer Grétry).
Note how the tension of this astonishingly powerful episode – surely the most original in all of Tchaikovsky’s theatrical output – is maintained without any descent into musical histrionics: everything is tense, whispered, fragmentary and lightly scored until the very last bars, when the horror of what has happened strikes home to both Herman and Lisa and the orchestra bursts mightily forth.
Equally, the opera ends not with the expected crashing blast of obvious cadences but a short, hauntingly soft chorus of lament.

Herman is an extremely heavy and demanding role for heroic tenor.
The singer also needs the acting skills to manage the descent into madness without appearing ludicrous.
With two highly charged, broadly phrased and uninhibitedly erotic arias, Lisa is a grandly scaled role for a full-voiced soprano.
Yeletsky has a gracious aria in the ballroom scene which also serves as a standard concert item for every Russian baritone; more important to the narrative is the bass Tomsky’s narrative of the story of the three cards, cast in ballad form.
Long after they have otherwise retired, elderly divas relish playing the small but show-stealing role of the Countess, but it is not as easy to sing as it looks, and lies too low for most sopranos with ambitions to do anything more than croak.

In performance

Thirty years ago, this opera was generally staged as a Gothic melodrama, but the fashion now is to read it as a Dostoevskian study of mental decline, obsession and isolation focused on the figure of Herman.
Superb surrealistically tinged productions by Graham Vick at Glyndebourne and Richard Jones for WNO have won enormous critical and popular acclaim, as has Elijah Moshinsky’s handsome but more conventional version at the Met.
Vick used the idea of a blank white wall being gradually covered by the obsessive inky scribbles of a lunatic; Jones made a subtle but convincing updating to mid-twentieth-century Communist Russia, presenting the Countess as a survivor of pre-revolutionary Tsarist society.

Recordings

CD: Gegam Grigorian (Herman); Valery Gergiev (cond.).
Philips 438 141 2

Video: Yuri Marusin (Hermann); Andrew Davis (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Warner 079 2023

Antonin Dvořák

(1841–1904)

Rusalka

Three acts. First performed Prague, 1901.

Libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil

Drawn from various literary stories about water-nymphs and mermaids in tragic contact with earthly human life, this is the only one of Dvořák’s ten operas to have survived in the regular repertory.
Its popularity is greatly enhanced by its hit number, Rusalka’s ‘Song to the Moon’.

Plot

Rusalka the water-nymph has fallen in love with a Prince and wants to become human.
Ignoring the warnings of the Spirit of the Lake, she enlists the help of the witch Ježibaba, who tells her that if she is to be transformed into mortal shape, she must agree to remain dumb, and that both she and the Prince will be damned if he is unfaithful to her.
Rusalka is undeterred and she becomes human.
The Prince is enchanted by her beauty and decides to marry her, but he soon tires of her speechlessness and transfers his attentions to the cunning Foreign Princess who wants the prince for herself.
By this betrayal, Rusalka is condemned to wander for ever as a willo’-the-wisp: Ježibaba offers her the chance of breaking the curse by shedding human blood.
She refuses, but then finds that her sister water-nymphs reject her.
The Prince arrives, begging forgiveness.
Rusalka tells him why she was silent and explains that she can be released by his embrace, although it will cost him his life.
The Prince nobly sacrifices himself, and dies in her arms.
Rusalka returns to the waters.

What to listen for

A score which shows the influence of Wagner’s
Ring,
not only in its use of melodic motifs attached to particular characters and its ‘through-composed’ structure, but in the contrast
between the magical spirit world and the earthier splendours of the prince’s court, marked to great dramatic effect in Act II.
The water spirits are clearly cousins to the Rhinemaidens, and throughout there is a Wagnerian sumptuousness to the orchestral texture and harmony.

One of its few detachable numbers, Rusalka’s haunting ‘Song to the Moon’ occurs in Act I, but her much grander and more openly emotional aria in Act III is equally impressive.
It’s a long role, in which the soprano must compete with Dvořák’s heavy scoring.
Also striking are the one-voiced love duet with the Prince (tenor) at the end of Act I, in which Rusalka’s part is taken by the orchestra, the light relief provided by the Gamekeeper and Kitchen Boy at the Prince’s court who sing a bagpipe song, and the flamboyantly sinister utterances of Ježibaba (contralto).
The Foreign Princess is a fine cameo role for a budding dramatic soprano, with her two short but very striking scenes.

In performance