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Tchaikovski, La Dame de Pique: new production, Peter Stein stage director:  Soloists, chorus. ballet and orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, Kirill Petrenko conductor.  Lyon, France. 30.1.2008 (MM)

Suicide loomed large in Tchaikovsky's mind, with the two emotionally charged, self-inflicted deaths in La Dame de Pique.  Suicidal in the opera also would have been the intended duel between the competing lovers, a form of Russian self elimination that had already claimed the life of Pushkin, the creator of the original Pique Dame tale (1834).  In one further case of self destruction the phantasmagoric Pique Dame herself had to know that she was buying death by accepting the secret of the cards.  Tchaikovsky's own suicide was in 1893, three years after the opera's premiere at the Marinsky in St. Petersburg in 1890, and nine days after the premiere of his Symphonie Pathetique (though the Opéra de Lyon's program booklet attributes his death to cholera, the cause condoned by Soviet era sensibilities).

Tchaikovsky's soul is the stuff of sensational speculation, and it is enticing to transpose these speculations onto the tortured soul of Hermann, the hero of Pique Dame, his consuming compulsions tricked by vindictive Russian fate.  In Lyon at the Opéra Nouvel (30/01/08) this famous story was told by director Peter Stein, his collaborators and an excellent array of interpreters, notably his diminutive hero Hermann resembling Pushkin's comparison to Napoleon far more than embodying the handsome Tchaikovsky we see in photographs.

Bulgarian tenor Kostadin Andreev, singing Hermann this evening (and only one other of the total seven performances), attacked the role, physically possessed in staggering and lurching movements, urgently voicing his distress.  In short a theatrically and musically intriguing introduction to the central figure, the fateful lover and tragic victim of Modest and Peter Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame (Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was the librettist who, with Tchaikovsky, had transformed Pushkin's story into a conventional Russian opera of its time).  And tenor Andreev kept us intrigued for the duration, elaborating this character born of Carmen's clumsy Don Jose but quickly evolving into the physically supple and vocally boiling-over lover of the gullible Liza, though the nearly inhuman form of the diabolically possessed gambler was never far beneath the surface. Finally this pathetic, dying young soldier sent us running to the Pushkin tale to find out where he got those 40,000 ducats to bet, a detail left unexplained by the libretto.  The daunting challenges of director Peter Stein's approach to this role were well met by this young, multi-dimensional artist.

Based in theatrically sophisticated Berlin, Peter Stein is a master director, working with precise minimal movements to create and sustain dramatic tension.  Each motion -- a hand touching a cheek or a slow (or fast) walk up or down stage for example -- is charged with dramatic content and made always with absolute complementary musical motivation.   His choruses are a single persona, not crowds, never individuals.  The chorus is in constant, generally geometric and unison movement, its energy enhanced at times by moving scenic elements, always sustaining a physical tension that heightens the sense of intense story telling.

Herr Stein's musical collaborator was Russian born, Vienna trained Kirill Petrenko, willing to support Herr Stein's tensions at the expense of neglecting the indulgent ironic pathos exuded by Tchaikovsky's music.  Mo. Petrenko further agreed to excise Tchaikovsky's entire Pastoral and ballet thereby upsetting the balance of the larger Modest and Piotr Tchaikovsky music-dramatic structure, forcing Tchaikovsky's central scene into a single, fast, dramatic crescendo to the fireworks accompanied mock appearance of Catherine the Great as a huge, self moving puppet.

Designer Ferdinand Wogerbauer's visual language well supports Herr Stein's obvious tensions, with minimal shapes and forced perspectives in cardboard, comic book images like the light bulb lighted lightening bolts, the snowy night cutout for Liza's suicide, even the diamond shaped gambling table concocted platform with Hermann's head dangling, dead, over its downstage point.  Ironic in the truncated Pastoral scene were the black and red blocks of architect Jean Nouvel's theater echoed on the stage.

Tchaikovsky is the master of pastiche, juxtaposing for example in the last scene a sad gambling song, a noisy drinking song and a suicide.  In the third scene he segues an art song duet with a sad Russian ballad followed by a foot stomping folk song and finally a torrid love scene.  Amidst all the seven scenes he inserted a huge pastoral, an eighteenth century intermezzo with ballet starring Daphnis, Chloe and Pluto, as, after all, Pushkin had set his tale in the Russia of Catherine the Great and that is what they did then.  But in place of introducing a bit of the more appropriate Rameau, for example, Tchaikovsky recast Don Giovanni's immortal ball scene, an homage to his beloved Mozart.  In the following scene Tchaikovskian musical philology regained its purity when he resurrected of an aria from Gretry's Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784) for the Pique Dame Countess.  It all works as seamless theater and convincing operatic story telling and this is Tchaikovsky's genius.

Tchaikovsky's insertion of the extended Rococo pastoral motivated the cameo appearance by Catherine herself.  By cutting the pastorale, director Stein eschewed Tchaikovsky's intention (and Pushkin's) to place the story at this earlier time, instead forcing the scenographic crescendo to her apparition in the same bustled silhouette as we had come to associate with the Pique Dame.  Then as one of her apparitions in the nightmare scene we saw Pique Dame herself as a huge, self-moving puppet, like Catherine the Great. 

Others of her phantasmagoric guises of the third act echoed the mock grotesqueries of the Mexican Day of the Dead or the American Halloween (a custom now finding resonance in France as well).  Perhaps there is no Halloween in Russia or Protestant Germany, thus maybe these were not meant to be the really silly apparitions they seemed to be, but were serious grotesqueries, part of designer Wogerbauer's cardboard vocabulary.  Whatever the motivation for the comic book language the powerful pathos and intense ironies of the third act were blatantly destroyed.  The death prayer for the Countess' funeral was overwhelmed with scary images, and the touching choral prayer for Hermann's final peace seeming to be still in the shadow of the waving arms of an inflatable Pique Dame seen only moments before. 

The Hermann of Kostadin Andreev convincingly established the core of Tchaikovsky's melodrama, the Liza of Olga Guryakova eloquently embodied the naiveté of a country girl, with simplicity and elegance of voice from her doomed soul crouched against the edge of the proscenium.  Prince Yeletsky, Andrey Breus as her rejected rich and handsome fiancé, was rich in voice, generous of spirit, and appropriately pallid in the magnetic presence of Hermann.  The Countess of Marianna Tarasova was an ancient, ugly, and selfish creature, a relic of such an ugly and selfish past, propped-up in her chair humming Gretry's old tune.  The Tomski of Nikolai Putilin was strangely old, though on the same high level of all supporting players.

The association of the Pique Dame with Catherine the Great remains shrouded in mysterious recesses of Peter Stein's psyche. 

Michael Milenski

Pictures © Opéra de Lyon

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