PIKOVAYA DAMA [La dama di picche]
Piotr Ilitsch Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)
Opera in three acts in Russian [Sung in Italian]
Libretto: Modest TchaikovskyPremièr at St. Petersburg – 19 December 1890
28†, 31 January - 02, 05, 07 February 1961
Teatro alla Scala, Milano
Conductor: Nino Sanzogno
Chorus master: Norberto Mola
Stage director: Tatiana Pavlova
Scene and costumes: Nicola Benois
Tchekalinksy an officer WALTER GULLINO tenor
Sourin an officer AGOSTINO FERRIN bass
Herman a young officer ANTONIO ANNALORO/GIUSEPPE DI STEFANO
tenor
Count Tomsky IVO VINCO baritone
Prince Yeletsky SESTO BRUSCANTINI baritone
The Countess MARIANNA RADEV mezzo-soprano
Lisa her granddaughter LEYLA GENCER soprano [Role
debut]
Pauline Lisa’s companion ADRIANA LAZZARINI
contralto
Governess AURORA CATTELANI soprano
Mascha Lisa’s maid EDITH MARTELLI soprano
Master of Ceremonies GIUSEPPE BERTINAZZO tenor
Tchaplitsky a gambler ANGELO MERCURIALI tenor
Narumoff a gambler LEONARDO MONREALE bass
Chloe GIULIANA MATTEINI soprano
Daphnis (Pauline) in the interlude ADRINA LAZZARINI mezzo-soprano
Plutus (Tomsky) in the interlude IVO VINCO baritone
Time: End of Eighteenth Century
Place: A country estate; St. Petersburg
† Recording date
Photos © ERIO PICCAGLIANI, Milano
Painting by © NICOLA BENOIS
GENCER ALLA SCALA
LA DAMA PICCHE
STAGIONE 1960 – 1961
https://www.teatroallascala.org/it/archivio/spettacolo.html?guid_=f95288a0-b321-4b77-8420-d6035ef4fb08&id_allest_=6125&id_allest_conc_=&id_evento_=7547&mode=EVENTI
UNKNOWN NEWSPAPER
1961
CORRIERE DELLA SERA
1961.01.29
RADIOCORRIERE.TV
1961 February 05 - 11
LA VANGUARDIA
1961.02.10
MUSICA MAGAZINE
1961 April
OPERA MAGAZINE
1961 April
CONESSIALLAOPERA.IT
2022.02.21
LA DAMA DI PICCHE ALLA SCALA
La dama di picche alla Scala
Il Teatro alla Scala vanta la prima rappresentazione italiana dell’opera: corre il 1906 e Leopoldo Mugnone dirige Emilia Corsi come Liza, Giovanni Zenatello come Hermann e Riccardo Stracciari come Eleckij nella versione ritmica italiana di Bruno Bruni, utilizzata anche nel 1961 da Nino Sanzogno per lo spettacolo di Tatiana Pavlova, protagonisti Leyla Gencer, Giuseppe Di Stefano e Sesto Bruscantini. Per la prima in lingua russa si attende la tournée del “Teatro Bolscioi dell’U.R.S.S.” (così in locandina) del 1964 con Galina Višnevskaja, Zurab Angiaparidze, Vladimir Valajtis e Irina Arkhipova come Polina diretti da Konstantin Simeonov con la regia di Boris Pokrovskij. I complessi scaligeri affrontano la versione russa nel 1990 con uno spettacolo animato da artisti d’eccezione: dirige Seiji Ozawa, la regia è di Andrej Konchalovsky con scene dominate da enormi lampadari di Ezio Frigerio e costumi di Franca Squarciapino, cantano Mirella Freni, Vladimir Atlantov, Lajos Miller e nella parte della Contessa la leggendaria Maureen Forrester, allora sessantenne. Yuri Temirkanov firma l’ultima occorrenza scaligera del titolo nel 2005 al Teatro degli Arcimboldi, con un nuovo spettacolo di Stephen Medcalf con Dagmar Schellenberger, Misha Didyk e una rara apparizione milanese di Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Polina è Julia Gertseva che ritroviamo nel 2022 nei panni della Contessa, e la Contessa è Elena Obraztsova che era stata la Governante nella tournée del Bol’šoj nel 1964.
Il Teatro alla Scala vanta la prima rappresentazione italiana dell’opera: corre il 1906 e Leopoldo Mugnone dirige Emilia Corsi come Liza, Giovanni Zenatello come Hermann e Riccardo Stracciari come Eleckij nella versione ritmica italiana di Bruno Bruni, utilizzata anche nel 1961 da Nino Sanzogno per lo spettacolo di Tatiana Pavlova, protagonisti Leyla Gencer, Giuseppe Di Stefano e Sesto Bruscantini. Per la prima in lingua russa si attende la tournée del “Teatro Bolscioi dell’U.R.S.S.” (così in locandina) del 1964 con Galina Višnevskaja, Zurab Angiaparidze, Vladimir Valajtis e Irina Arkhipova come Polina diretti da Konstantin Simeonov con la regia di Boris Pokrovskij. I complessi scaligeri affrontano la versione russa nel 1990 con uno spettacolo animato da artisti d’eccezione: dirige Seiji Ozawa, la regia è di Andrej Konchalovsky con scene dominate da enormi lampadari di Ezio Frigerio e costumi di Franca Squarciapino, cantano Mirella Freni, Vladimir Atlantov, Lajos Miller e nella parte della Contessa la leggendaria Maureen Forrester, allora sessantenne. Yuri Temirkanov firma l’ultima occorrenza scaligera del titolo nel 2005 al Teatro degli Arcimboldi, con un nuovo spettacolo di Stephen Medcalf con Dagmar Schellenberger, Misha Didyk e una rara apparizione milanese di Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Polina è Julia Gertseva che ritroviamo nel 2022 nei panni della Contessa, e la Contessa è Elena Obraztsova che era stata la Governante nella tournée del Bol’šoj nel 1964.
COMPLETE RECORDING
1961.01.28
Recording Excerpts [1961.01.28]
Zashem zhe eti slyozy, Zachem
oni? Moi devichi gryozy
Perché son tanto triste
e piango ognor?
Act I Scene II
Uzh polnoch blizitsya...
Ach istomilas' ya gorem
E' mezzanotte presto!
attendo invan
Act III Scene II
To pravda tri karty
znayu ya!
Son condannata! Dunqe e
vero
Act III Scene II
FROM CD BOOKLET
ANDREW PALMER
When his librettist brother Modest first suggested an opera based on Pushkin's novella The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky was not interested. But two years later, after Modest had expanded the chilling short story into a romantic melodrama and the composer's pupil Nikolai Klenovsky had made little headway with his own musical adaptation, he reconsidered.
Unusually, it was not the leading female role of Lisa that most attracted him. He was more fascinated by her grandmother, the eponymous Queen of Spades, whose sinister presence real or imagined - dominates the whole opera. But what convinced him to compose the long, three-act work was his identification with the role of Herman, whose desperate pursuit of love ultimately proven futile. 'I have put my whole being into this work', he wrote to Modest after completing the opera in only forty-four days. 'When I reached Herman's death and the final chorus, I was suddenly overcome by such commiseration with Herman that I started to weep terribly. This eventually turned into a very pleasant sort of hysteria, by which I mean [that] it was very sweet to cry.
'Later I found out why I wept (never before have I spilled any tears over any of my heroes, and I was trying to determine why I suddenly had this desire). It seems that Herman was not simply a means for me to write this or that kind of music, but that he is a real, living, and even likeable person... I think that my warm feelings towards the hero of the opera find a positive reflection in the music.'
However, he worried about the physical demands of the role. When Pique Dame was premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in December 1892, Lisa was sung by the Italian soprano Medea Mei-Figner and her equally famous husband Nikolay created the role of Hermann. 'What can we do so that [it] is not too exhausting for poor Figner?', Tchaikovsky wrote to Modest. 'Seven scenes, and he's in every one of them! I'm filled with terror when I think of what I've already written for him and how much still remains to be written... But it's not just Figner - any artist would panic at the thought of being on stage and singing almost the whole time.'
The opera is set in St Petersburg in the late eighteenth century during the reign of Catherine the Great. After a short prelude, the curtain rises on the city's Summer Garden, where children, nurses and governesses are enjoying a fine spring day. Two soldiers, Tchekalinsky and Sourin, remark on the strangeness of the gloomy, impoverished Herman. An army engineer of German extraction, he is obsessed with watching others gambling but never joins in. Herman himself then appears, accompanied by Tomsky, who asks why his friend has become so gloomy of late. Herman admits that he is in love with an aristocratic girl whose name he does not even know because he is unable to approach her.
When Prince Yeletsky, another army officer, strolls into the park Tchekalinsky congratulates him on his recent engagement. This further dampens Herman's already low spirits. When Yeletsky's fiancée Lisa appears, accompanied by her grandmother, the Countess Anna Fedotovna, the two women recognise Herman as the mysterious stranger who has been pursuing them. The reason for his obsession is simple: Lisa is the beauty with whom he has fallen in love.
After Yeletsky and the women have left the park Herman listens to the other officers talking about the countess. Known as the Queen of Spades, she was once the belle of Paris but preferred gambling to love. Indeed, in her youth she sold herself to a wealthy admirer, Count St Germain, receiving in return the secret formula of three cards with which she successfully gambled and won a fortune. Tomsky adds that she told her secret to only two lovers, one of them her husband, because a ghost warned her that she would die if she revealed it to an inquisitive 'third suitor'. Laughing, the men remark that the three magic cards would provide a timely solution for Herman's dilemma. Left alone, he broods over the story he has just heard and vows to win Lisa by discovering the countess’s secret.
The second scene is set in Lisa's room, where she is heard playing the spinet and singing a duet with her friend Pauline. Their friends ask to hear more, and Pauline is persuaded to sing a sad ballad, followed by a brash song in which everyone joins. This provokes the Governess to enter and send home Lisa's friends because of their unladylike behaviour. After asking her maid, Masha, not to close the French windows, Lisa is left alone to reflect on her unhappiness and confusion: aware of her good fortune in being engaged to marry the nobleman Yeletsky, she is forced to admit that more powerful feelings have been stirred up by her glimpse of Herman in the park.
To her shock, Herman appears on the balcony outside her window. Taking out his pistol, he begs her to take pity on him since he is about to kill himself because of her engagement to someone else. Having heard a noise in Lisa's room, the countess approaches to ask why her granddaughter is not in bed. Lisa hides Herman until the Governess has left the room. She then asks Herman to leave but is overcome by passion and falls into his arms.
The first scene of Act Two takes place at a masked ball in the great hall of a large house. As the guests go out into the grounds to watch a firework display, Herman's colleagues decide to play a trick on him because of his continuing obsession with the secret of the three winning cards. Meanwhile, noticing Lisa's sadness, Yeletsky attempts to reassure her of his love. She sends Herman a note asking him to meet her later, and he is further encouraged when Sourin and Tchekalinsky sneak up behind him and, unseen, whisper that he is the third suitor who will learn the countess’s secret. They then disappear back into the crowd, leaving Herman to wonder if he has imagined hearing the voices.
After a musical tableau featuring Tomsky and Pauline, Lisa passes Herman the key to the countess’s room, which will give access to her own. She explains that the old woman will be away the following day, but Herman insists on coming to see her later that same night. Remembering the voices he heard, he believes that fate is about to reveal the countess’s secret to him, and he leaves the ball just as the unexpected arrival of Catherine the Great is announced.
The second scene is set in the countess’s bedroom later that night. Herman lets himself in and is confronted by a portrait of her as a young woman. Fascinated by her appearance, he reflects on his rashness and realises that his fate is linked to hers: one of them will die because of the other. Hearing her approach, he then hides. Followed by a group of obsequious servants, the old woman reminisces about her youthful triumphs at the French Court before complaining about the recent decline in social manners. Eventually she dismisses her staff and falls asleep.
Herman emerges from his hiding place and stands over the startled Countess, pleading with her to reveal the secret of the three cards. Terrified, she mumbles incoherently until Herman, in desperation, threatens her with his pistol. At this she dies of fright. Lisa rushes in and discovers that the man to whom she gave her heart was interested only in the Countess's secret. She sends him away before falling, sobbing, to the floor.
Act Three contains three scenes, the first of which is set in Herman's quarters at the barracks during the following winter. Still in love with him, Lisa has written a letter requesting that he meet her at midnight by a riverbank. Haunted by his conscience, he recalls with horror how we went to look at the countess’s body lying in her open coffin and saw her wink at him. As the wind howls, he imagines that he hears the chorus chanting at her funeral. Startled by a knock at the window, he watches her ghost appear, announcing that against her will, she must tell him her secret so that he can marry and save Lisa. Dazed, Herman finally learns that the three lucky cards are three, seven and Ace.
The following scene takes place by the canal opposite the Neva Palace, where Lisa is waiting for Herman. It is nearly midnight, and although she is clinging to the hope that he still loves her she feels her youth and happiness evaporating into the darkness. When he eventually appears, he attempts a few words of reassurance but then begins to babble uncontrollably about the dead Countess's appearance and the secret of her three cards. Lisa asks him to go away with her but all he wants is to gamble on cards. No longer even recognizing her, he rushes away into the night. Realising that all is now lost, she throws herself into the icy waters of the canal.
The final scene is set in a gambling house where Herman's colleagues are preparing to bet on card games. Yeletsky has not gambled before but joins the group to cheer himself up: 'Unlucky in love, lucky at cards', he predicts. After Tomsky and Tchekalinsky have led singing, the gambling begins. Herman enters, pale and distraught, and surprises everyone with his intention of joining the game. He bets a large sum on the three and wins; he then does the same on the seven and wins again, laughing maniacally that life is merely a game.
Only Yeletsky is willing to accept his next challenge. Herman confidently bets on the Ace but when he lays his winning card, he sees that it is actually the Queen of Spades. As the Countess's ghost crosses the room, smiling, Herman stabs himself. With his last breath he asks for forgiveness from both Yeletsky and the dead Lisa. The other officers gather around his body and pray for his troubled soul as the curtain falls.
The plot of the opera differs in three key respects from that of Pushkin's novella. Firstly, Herman's desperation to learn the secret of the three cards does not derive only from his greed for money, and he does not use Lisa only as a means to gain access to her grandmother. The introduction of 'love interest' into the story ensures that his motives are mixed, further fuelling his desperation and leading to his eventual loss of reason. Furthermore, Herman's low status as an outsider commoner serving among aristocratic soldiers - is reinforced by establishing a familial link between Lisa and the Countess. This elevates Lisa to the nobility and therefore increases her ability to further Herman's social ambitions if only he can acquire the necessary wealth to attract her.
Secondly, in the original story Lisa does not kill herself. Convinced that audiences would want to know what happened to her after she abandoned Herman, Tchaikovsky also believed that an all-male final act would be monotonous. He therefore asked Modest to insert the penultimate scene that features Lisa and Herman by the canal. Thirdly, after Pushkin's Herman leaves the gambling table for the final, disastrous time he is sent to a lunatic asylum where he spends the rest of his life muttering, 'Three, seven, ace... Three, seven, queen!'. Tchaikovsky rightly created a more spectacular and 'operatic' finale, tragic rather than pathetic, in which Herman kills himself.
Rarely pleased with his own works, Tchaikovsky considered Pique Dame a fine opera and valued it above all his others, including the more popular Eugene Onegin. The first production was a success, and after the opera was seen in Kiev, Moscow, Odessa and Prague, Gustav Mahler conducted German-language performances in Vienna and at the Metropolitan in New York.
Like the La Scala premiere of 1906, the 1961 performance from the same theatre that is featured on these CDs was sung in Italian. Appearing as Herman was Antonio Annaloro (1920-1996), one of a number of accomplished Italian tenors who were eclipsed by the enormous success of Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco and Giuseppe di Stefano in the 1940s and 1950s. Largely ignored by the recording companies and the world's most prestigious opera houses, these less starry singers nevertheless helped to keep the tradition of Italian singing alive in the smaller theatres of Europe.
Annaloro completed his vocal studies in Rome and made his debut in 1942 as Arnold in Rossini's Guglielmo Tell. His next appearance, two years later, was as Des Grieux in Manon Lescaut. He remained in Italy for most of his career but in 1950 sang in La Traviata in Cairo with Virginia Zeani, who remembers him as 'a very great voice'. In addition to the standard Italian repertoire, he sang a number of contemporary roles: he took part in the Italian premiere of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel and also created roles in operas by Ghedini, Mannino and Pizzetti.
As a stage performer the Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer (born 1924), who sang Lisa, had much in common with her more famous contemporary, Callas. Both singers were trained in bel canto and had agile voices that were ideally suited to the dramatic coloratura repertoire, and both were inclined to emphasise dramatic power - in a wide variety of musical styles rather than vocal beauty. Unlike Callas, however, Gencer was heard mostly in Italy even though she built up a loyal and enthusiastic fan-base throughout the rest of Europe and North America.
She began her operatic career in the chorus of the Turkish State Theatre and made her solo debut as Santuzza in Ankara in 1950. Three years later she sang the same role for her Italian debut in Naples, returning the following year for performances of Madama Butterfly and Eugene Onegin. In January 1957 she sang Madame Lidoine in the premiere of Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmelites at La Scala, where she became a favourite and appeared in nineteen roles over fifteen seasons between 1957 and 1983.
Best known as a Donizetti interpreter, particularly of Anna Bolena, Caterina Cornaro, Elisabetta (Roberto Devereux), Lucrezia Borgia and Maria Stuarda, her repertoire totalled seventy-two roles that also included Aida, Alceste, Donna Anna, Elisabeth de Valois, the First Woman of Canterbury in the premiere of Pizzetti's L'Assassinio nella Cattedrale, Francesca da Rimini, Lady Macbeth, Norma and Monteverdi's Ottavia. She retired from the operatic stage in 1985 but continued to sing in concerts and recitals for a further seven years. The Rumanian mezzo-soprano Marianna Radev (1911-1973), who sang the countess had a wide operatic repertoire that included Lyubov in Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa. Her discography is small but includes award- winning studio recordings of Rossini's Stabat Mater and Verdi's Requiem.
Yeletsky was sung by the Italian baritone Sesto Bruscantini (born 1919), who studied law before beginning musical studies with Luigi Ricci in Rome. He made his operatic debut in a bass role, Don Geronimo in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto, in Milan in 1949, and subsequently built up a repertoire of more than a hundred parts, many of them Italian buffo roles. In the early 1950s he sang regularly at Glyndebourne and Salzburg, and during this period married the soprano Sena Jurinac.
Unusually, it was not the leading female role of Lisa that most attracted him. He was more fascinated by her grandmother, the eponymous Queen of Spades, whose sinister presence real or imagined - dominates the whole opera. But what convinced him to compose the long, three-act work was his identification with the role of Herman, whose desperate pursuit of love ultimately proven futile. 'I have put my whole being into this work', he wrote to Modest after completing the opera in only forty-four days. 'When I reached Herman's death and the final chorus, I was suddenly overcome by such commiseration with Herman that I started to weep terribly. This eventually turned into a very pleasant sort of hysteria, by which I mean [that] it was very sweet to cry.
'Later I found out why I wept (never before have I spilled any tears over any of my heroes, and I was trying to determine why I suddenly had this desire). It seems that Herman was not simply a means for me to write this or that kind of music, but that he is a real, living, and even likeable person... I think that my warm feelings towards the hero of the opera find a positive reflection in the music.'
However, he worried about the physical demands of the role. When Pique Dame was premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in December 1892, Lisa was sung by the Italian soprano Medea Mei-Figner and her equally famous husband Nikolay created the role of Hermann. 'What can we do so that [it] is not too exhausting for poor Figner?', Tchaikovsky wrote to Modest. 'Seven scenes, and he's in every one of them! I'm filled with terror when I think of what I've already written for him and how much still remains to be written... But it's not just Figner - any artist would panic at the thought of being on stage and singing almost the whole time.'
The opera is set in St Petersburg in the late eighteenth century during the reign of Catherine the Great. After a short prelude, the curtain rises on the city's Summer Garden, where children, nurses and governesses are enjoying a fine spring day. Two soldiers, Tchekalinsky and Sourin, remark on the strangeness of the gloomy, impoverished Herman. An army engineer of German extraction, he is obsessed with watching others gambling but never joins in. Herman himself then appears, accompanied by Tomsky, who asks why his friend has become so gloomy of late. Herman admits that he is in love with an aristocratic girl whose name he does not even know because he is unable to approach her.
When Prince Yeletsky, another army officer, strolls into the park Tchekalinsky congratulates him on his recent engagement. This further dampens Herman's already low spirits. When Yeletsky's fiancée Lisa appears, accompanied by her grandmother, the Countess Anna Fedotovna, the two women recognise Herman as the mysterious stranger who has been pursuing them. The reason for his obsession is simple: Lisa is the beauty with whom he has fallen in love.
After Yeletsky and the women have left the park Herman listens to the other officers talking about the countess. Known as the Queen of Spades, she was once the belle of Paris but preferred gambling to love. Indeed, in her youth she sold herself to a wealthy admirer, Count St Germain, receiving in return the secret formula of three cards with which she successfully gambled and won a fortune. Tomsky adds that she told her secret to only two lovers, one of them her husband, because a ghost warned her that she would die if she revealed it to an inquisitive 'third suitor'. Laughing, the men remark that the three magic cards would provide a timely solution for Herman's dilemma. Left alone, he broods over the story he has just heard and vows to win Lisa by discovering the countess’s secret.
The second scene is set in Lisa's room, where she is heard playing the spinet and singing a duet with her friend Pauline. Their friends ask to hear more, and Pauline is persuaded to sing a sad ballad, followed by a brash song in which everyone joins. This provokes the Governess to enter and send home Lisa's friends because of their unladylike behaviour. After asking her maid, Masha, not to close the French windows, Lisa is left alone to reflect on her unhappiness and confusion: aware of her good fortune in being engaged to marry the nobleman Yeletsky, she is forced to admit that more powerful feelings have been stirred up by her glimpse of Herman in the park.
To her shock, Herman appears on the balcony outside her window. Taking out his pistol, he begs her to take pity on him since he is about to kill himself because of her engagement to someone else. Having heard a noise in Lisa's room, the countess approaches to ask why her granddaughter is not in bed. Lisa hides Herman until the Governess has left the room. She then asks Herman to leave but is overcome by passion and falls into his arms.
The first scene of Act Two takes place at a masked ball in the great hall of a large house. As the guests go out into the grounds to watch a firework display, Herman's colleagues decide to play a trick on him because of his continuing obsession with the secret of the three winning cards. Meanwhile, noticing Lisa's sadness, Yeletsky attempts to reassure her of his love. She sends Herman a note asking him to meet her later, and he is further encouraged when Sourin and Tchekalinsky sneak up behind him and, unseen, whisper that he is the third suitor who will learn the countess’s secret. They then disappear back into the crowd, leaving Herman to wonder if he has imagined hearing the voices.
After a musical tableau featuring Tomsky and Pauline, Lisa passes Herman the key to the countess’s room, which will give access to her own. She explains that the old woman will be away the following day, but Herman insists on coming to see her later that same night. Remembering the voices he heard, he believes that fate is about to reveal the countess’s secret to him, and he leaves the ball just as the unexpected arrival of Catherine the Great is announced.
The second scene is set in the countess’s bedroom later that night. Herman lets himself in and is confronted by a portrait of her as a young woman. Fascinated by her appearance, he reflects on his rashness and realises that his fate is linked to hers: one of them will die because of the other. Hearing her approach, he then hides. Followed by a group of obsequious servants, the old woman reminisces about her youthful triumphs at the French Court before complaining about the recent decline in social manners. Eventually she dismisses her staff and falls asleep.
Herman emerges from his hiding place and stands over the startled Countess, pleading with her to reveal the secret of the three cards. Terrified, she mumbles incoherently until Herman, in desperation, threatens her with his pistol. At this she dies of fright. Lisa rushes in and discovers that the man to whom she gave her heart was interested only in the Countess's secret. She sends him away before falling, sobbing, to the floor.
Act Three contains three scenes, the first of which is set in Herman's quarters at the barracks during the following winter. Still in love with him, Lisa has written a letter requesting that he meet her at midnight by a riverbank. Haunted by his conscience, he recalls with horror how we went to look at the countess’s body lying in her open coffin and saw her wink at him. As the wind howls, he imagines that he hears the chorus chanting at her funeral. Startled by a knock at the window, he watches her ghost appear, announcing that against her will, she must tell him her secret so that he can marry and save Lisa. Dazed, Herman finally learns that the three lucky cards are three, seven and Ace.
The following scene takes place by the canal opposite the Neva Palace, where Lisa is waiting for Herman. It is nearly midnight, and although she is clinging to the hope that he still loves her she feels her youth and happiness evaporating into the darkness. When he eventually appears, he attempts a few words of reassurance but then begins to babble uncontrollably about the dead Countess's appearance and the secret of her three cards. Lisa asks him to go away with her but all he wants is to gamble on cards. No longer even recognizing her, he rushes away into the night. Realising that all is now lost, she throws herself into the icy waters of the canal.
The final scene is set in a gambling house where Herman's colleagues are preparing to bet on card games. Yeletsky has not gambled before but joins the group to cheer himself up: 'Unlucky in love, lucky at cards', he predicts. After Tomsky and Tchekalinsky have led singing, the gambling begins. Herman enters, pale and distraught, and surprises everyone with his intention of joining the game. He bets a large sum on the three and wins; he then does the same on the seven and wins again, laughing maniacally that life is merely a game.
Only Yeletsky is willing to accept his next challenge. Herman confidently bets on the Ace but when he lays his winning card, he sees that it is actually the Queen of Spades. As the Countess's ghost crosses the room, smiling, Herman stabs himself. With his last breath he asks for forgiveness from both Yeletsky and the dead Lisa. The other officers gather around his body and pray for his troubled soul as the curtain falls.
The plot of the opera differs in three key respects from that of Pushkin's novella. Firstly, Herman's desperation to learn the secret of the three cards does not derive only from his greed for money, and he does not use Lisa only as a means to gain access to her grandmother. The introduction of 'love interest' into the story ensures that his motives are mixed, further fuelling his desperation and leading to his eventual loss of reason. Furthermore, Herman's low status as an outsider commoner serving among aristocratic soldiers - is reinforced by establishing a familial link between Lisa and the Countess. This elevates Lisa to the nobility and therefore increases her ability to further Herman's social ambitions if only he can acquire the necessary wealth to attract her.
Secondly, in the original story Lisa does not kill herself. Convinced that audiences would want to know what happened to her after she abandoned Herman, Tchaikovsky also believed that an all-male final act would be monotonous. He therefore asked Modest to insert the penultimate scene that features Lisa and Herman by the canal. Thirdly, after Pushkin's Herman leaves the gambling table for the final, disastrous time he is sent to a lunatic asylum where he spends the rest of his life muttering, 'Three, seven, ace... Three, seven, queen!'. Tchaikovsky rightly created a more spectacular and 'operatic' finale, tragic rather than pathetic, in which Herman kills himself.
Rarely pleased with his own works, Tchaikovsky considered Pique Dame a fine opera and valued it above all his others, including the more popular Eugene Onegin. The first production was a success, and after the opera was seen in Kiev, Moscow, Odessa and Prague, Gustav Mahler conducted German-language performances in Vienna and at the Metropolitan in New York.
Like the La Scala premiere of 1906, the 1961 performance from the same theatre that is featured on these CDs was sung in Italian. Appearing as Herman was Antonio Annaloro (1920-1996), one of a number of accomplished Italian tenors who were eclipsed by the enormous success of Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco and Giuseppe di Stefano in the 1940s and 1950s. Largely ignored by the recording companies and the world's most prestigious opera houses, these less starry singers nevertheless helped to keep the tradition of Italian singing alive in the smaller theatres of Europe.
Annaloro completed his vocal studies in Rome and made his debut in 1942 as Arnold in Rossini's Guglielmo Tell. His next appearance, two years later, was as Des Grieux in Manon Lescaut. He remained in Italy for most of his career but in 1950 sang in La Traviata in Cairo with Virginia Zeani, who remembers him as 'a very great voice'. In addition to the standard Italian repertoire, he sang a number of contemporary roles: he took part in the Italian premiere of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel and also created roles in operas by Ghedini, Mannino and Pizzetti.
As a stage performer the Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer (born 1924), who sang Lisa, had much in common with her more famous contemporary, Callas. Both singers were trained in bel canto and had agile voices that were ideally suited to the dramatic coloratura repertoire, and both were inclined to emphasise dramatic power - in a wide variety of musical styles rather than vocal beauty. Unlike Callas, however, Gencer was heard mostly in Italy even though she built up a loyal and enthusiastic fan-base throughout the rest of Europe and North America.
She began her operatic career in the chorus of the Turkish State Theatre and made her solo debut as Santuzza in Ankara in 1950. Three years later she sang the same role for her Italian debut in Naples, returning the following year for performances of Madama Butterfly and Eugene Onegin. In January 1957 she sang Madame Lidoine in the premiere of Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmelites at La Scala, where she became a favourite and appeared in nineteen roles over fifteen seasons between 1957 and 1983.
Best known as a Donizetti interpreter, particularly of Anna Bolena, Caterina Cornaro, Elisabetta (Roberto Devereux), Lucrezia Borgia and Maria Stuarda, her repertoire totalled seventy-two roles that also included Aida, Alceste, Donna Anna, Elisabeth de Valois, the First Woman of Canterbury in the premiere of Pizzetti's L'Assassinio nella Cattedrale, Francesca da Rimini, Lady Macbeth, Norma and Monteverdi's Ottavia. She retired from the operatic stage in 1985 but continued to sing in concerts and recitals for a further seven years. The Rumanian mezzo-soprano Marianna Radev (1911-1973), who sang the countess had a wide operatic repertoire that included Lyubov in Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa. Her discography is small but includes award- winning studio recordings of Rossini's Stabat Mater and Verdi's Requiem.
Yeletsky was sung by the Italian baritone Sesto Bruscantini (born 1919), who studied law before beginning musical studies with Luigi Ricci in Rome. He made his operatic debut in a bass role, Don Geronimo in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto, in Milan in 1949, and subsequently built up a repertoire of more than a hundred parts, many of them Italian buffo roles. In the early 1950s he sang regularly at Glyndebourne and Salzburg, and during this period married the soprano Sena Jurinac.
