The Queen of Spades

In the middle of a casino, a man takes aim at the defenceless old lady and shoots, but somehow ends up hitting himself and dying a long, slow and melodic death. This may not seem to make any sense now, but in the context of opera it is relatively sane. I tried as best I could to discern the plot, with help from the program notes and the nice Russian couple in the box next door. Tchaikovsky's musical marathon, clocking in at almost 4 hours, is essentially about the problems associated with gambling addiction. It is the all too familiar story of boy meets girl, boy wants to marry girl, boy needs money to do so, boy becomes obsessed with winning combination of three cards that girls grandmother learnt from the Count Saint-Germain while she was in a Paris, boy shoots grandmother, grandmother's ghost tells boy secret of the three cards, boy goes mad, girl commits suicide, boy wins lots of money but then shoots grandmother's ghost and ends up killing himself. Its based on a book by Pushkin and apparently is studied by many Russian children while they are at school. The title comes from the fact that the Grandmother posed as the Queen of Spades for a painting and it is the queen that appears as the last card at the end, instead of the ace that Hermann, the protagonist, needs. Funnily enough, the game they are playing is called Faro, just like the place from which I started out a month ago.

My parents and I had eaten that afternoon at Leningrad, a classy restaurant in the North of the city, beyond the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was populated by a mix of businessmen in suits with ties and "businessmen" wearing tight black vests with shaven heads. The menu was split into two halves, Old Russian Cuisine and New Russian Cuisine. After a delicious meal, mainly from the old side, we had something of a dash across town by metro, which seems to be almost permanently in rush hour. Great throngs of people crowd the bottom of the long, long escalators and everyone is shuffled along at a single pace. We might have made it on time but a slight map reading error means we are wiping our feet at the theatre doors a little after the curtain has gone up. This means we must spend more time with our stewardess, an elderly lady charged with ensuring everyone is in the proper place at the proper time. Her empire consists of boxes 5-10, which includes our seats. First she checks that we have the more expensive foreigner tickets, as the theatre is one institution that holds on firmly to dual pricing. Then she makes us wait for a suitable time to enter, a little way into the first scene. Subsequently, there ensued a long, drawn out, emotionally charged game of musical chairs. It would be impossible to describe the movements of the occupants of boxes six and seven here without the aid of a diagram but suffice to say, it did mean that there really wasn't a dull moment in the four hours, for whenever the opera started to drag the seat related drama, which largely stemnmed from the protaganists vastly differing levels of interest in the performance, could occupy one's full attention.

Just so you that you don't go and kill your girlfriend's grandmother to find out, the three cards are 3, 7 and Ace.