What’s love got to do with it?

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is probably his greatest opera, certainly the one in which his characteristic strengths are on display. Pondering on them inevitably leads one to think about what the operas lack, too, and it turns out be quite a lot. Unlike the finest opera composers, of whom there are regrettably few, he can’t create complete characters: what he is interested in is characteristics, especially — or perhaps only — obsessions, even if the obsession, as with Eugene Onegin, is with not being obsessed with anything, until close to the end.

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Ross Clark

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In The Queen of Spades the anti-hero Herman is doubly obsessed, though Tchaikovsky and his librettist brother Modest didn’t really pull this off, so we aren’t ever really sure whether he is in love with Liza, or whether his only interest throughout is in the cards which will secure his fortune. The music for the scene in which he comes on strongly to Liza and convinces her wouldn’t have convinced me, and it’s no surprise that it isn’t long before it no longer convinces Herman either — he spends the rest of the opera in single-minded and murderous pursuit of the old Countess. If by ‘love-duet’ one means a duet in which the participants succeed in expressing their love for one another, or feel it growing, then Tchaikovsky’s only successful one is in the tone poem Romeo and Juliet, since the feelings intensely rendered there are not specific to one or other of the lovers.

These urgent matters are not explored in the new production by Rodula Gaitanou at Opera Holland Park, but in its straightforward way it is very satisfying, presenting the story as simply as possible in an elegant and practical setting. These fairly cash-strapped companies are brilliant at creating an impression of glamour with very small means, while an oversubsidised Royal Opera spends a fortune in creating unconvincing squalor.