The Staatsoper Stuttgarts’s brilliant interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s 1890 opera “Pique Dame” 

or “The Queen of Spades” has worldwide appeal to older as well as younger audiences raised in the shadows of Freud, Hitchcock, Film Noir and Mad Max. The direction by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito removes location from the opulent courts of Catherine the Great’s Russia to the seemly, deteriorating underbelly of the Soviet Union of the 1950ies. Every design element in this milieu conceived by Anna Viebrock describes the bleak interiority of a world in decay, walls with peeling paint, deteriorating stucco, crumbling facades, reminiscent of a city once pristine and affluent juxtaposed against the unfinished backstage like facades visible as the stage rotates.  

This revolving stage graphically reveals other elements of the psychic dysfunctionality portrayed in the opera as we voyeuristically observe sexual assignations while also allowing for costume changes and plot development. This is not the worldly court of the Czar, secure with its rules of order and chivalry. Rather, it is the rotting ghetto of prostitutes, crooks, of petty violence and lost souls, of delusion, disassociation and self- destruction. Even the portrayal of the shepherdesses meant to celebrate Lisa’s wedding appears to be acted out and situated in a mental institution which adds to the ghost like, over medicated ambience of their habitat.

From the beginning the set reveals a world through Pushkin’s novel with the usual potential for happy endings, requited love and enduring marriage, only to show the impossibility of these outcomes when the protagonists succumb to the bitter realities of obsession, addiction and pathological depravity. The psychological backdrop of the opera only helps the power of Tchaikovsky’s music to dominate especially in the hands of conductor Oksana Lyniv, who leads the Opera Graz, making an immediate impression in her Stuttgart debut. In Tchaikovsky’s prelude to the opera, she brilliantly balances the sweet, lyrical elements that offer love’s hope with the foreboding anomalies in the emotive percussion and brass sections that annunciate the ultimate conclusion of self- destruction and death. Her volume controls should also be acknowledged, that allowed the soloists to sing without screaming their arias. Lise Davidsen who will be singing this role at the Met later this year, walked the tightrope of schizophrenia as a disconnected lover with a beautiful, lyrical tone preparing us for her ultimate departure. Erin Caves as German, appearing in every scene, builds in strength, clarity and resignation as he succumbs to an unsympathetic fate. The exuberant drinking songs that add a comic relief to the overriding pessimistic philosophy of the libretto were a happy, bright spot with joyful execution underlying the excellence of the ensemble. Petr Sokolov as Yeletsky in his role debut is entirely convincing as the clue less yet rejected lover who ends the opera with sweet revenge.