ABSTRACT
Pushkin’s Herman does not care in the least for Liza who is the poor ward of an imperious Countess. His sole goal is to tear from the Countess the secret of the three cards – three, seven, ace – that can win him a fortune at the gaming tables. Herman, in the libretto, wants to know the secret to be socially worthy of Liza who is no mere ward but the grand-daughter and heiress of the Countess. Modest invents a rival for Herman in Prince Yeletsky, Liza’s fiancé. Count Tomsky, who in Pushkin is the Countess’s grandson, changes roles and becomes her peer and Yeletsky’s friend. As in Pushkin, Tomsky tells how the Countess was an inveterate gambler during her youth in Paris. She had lost a fortune, but had won it back thanks to the secret of the three cards learned from the dissolute Count Saint-Germain in return for her sexual favours. It was predicted that the third person to seek the secret from her would cause her death. While Dodin is obliged by the musical composition to follow Modest’s plot, he is nevertheless especially attentive to the tragic undertow of Pyotr’s score which draws the opera back into Pushkin’s dark world. Dodin thus recovers through the music Pushkin’s tragedy of insanity, which Modest had rejected for the glittering success bestowed by the Imperial Theatres of St Petersburg, where The Queen of Spades was first performed in 1890.
