TUESDAY July 12, 7:30 p.m. (finishing at approx. 10.15 p.m.)
THE GAMBLER
An opera in four acts
by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Libretto by Sergei Prokofiev after Fyodor Dostoyevsky
First performed in Brussels in 1929
Cast
Production
A 2008 production from the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden
Directed by Dimitri Tcherniakov
Stage design by Dimitri Tcherniakov
Costume design by Dimitri Tcherniakov and Elena Zaitseva
Lighting design by Gleb Filshtinsky
Staatskapelle Berlin and Staatsopernchor Berlin
conducted by Daniel Barenboim
Synopsis
Place: Roulettenburg, a fictional European spa resort
Time: The 1860s
ACT 1
ACT 1
In the Grand Hotel garden, Aleksey, tutor to the General's family, meets Polina, the General's ward, who is in debt to the Marquis. Aleksey loves Polina, and informs her that he observed her directions to pawn her jewelry and gamble with the funds. However, he lost the money. The General, enamoured of the demi-mondaine Blanche, enters with her, the Marquis and Mr Astley. When asked about his losses, Aleksey says he lost his own savings. He is chided that someone of his modest income should not gamble. Astley is impressed and invites Aleksey to tea. The General then receives a telegram from "Babulenka" (literally a diminutive of “grandmother”; she is in fact the General's aunt and Polina's grandmother) in Moscow. The General is hoping that Babulenka will die soon so that he can inherit her money and marry Blanche.
Polina is frustrated that she cannot repay her debts to the Marquis. While Aleksey continues to protest that he loves her, she wonders if he has any other interest than greed. She challenges Aleksey to prove his love, and to see if he would truly do anything for her, by making a pass at a German Baroness sitting in the park. Aleksey does this, to the anger of the Baron.
ACT 2The General reproaches Aleksey for his actions. He is unrepentant, upon which the General dismisses him as his family tutor. The General tries to obtain the help of the Marquis to prevent a scandal. Mr Astley enters, and explains to Aleksey the General's concerns. Blanche had earlier asked the Baron for a loan. The General is keen to avoid any sense of impropriety. Astley further explains that the General cannot propose to Blanche until he receives his share of the inheritance from Babulenka. Aleksey thinks that once Polina receives her own share of the inheritance, the Marquis will attempt to win her over.
The Marquis appears on the General's behalf, to try to mollify Aleksey's behaviour. Aleksey is contemptuous, until the Marquis produces a note from Polina calling on Aleksey to stop behaving like a schoolboy. Aleksey accuses the Marquis of making Polina write the letter and leaves in anger. The Marquis tells the General and Blanche that he was successful in subduing Aleksey.
The General predicts Babulenka's death that same evening, but immediately afterwards, her voice is heard, as she has arrived at the hotel, in good health. She greets Aleksey and Polina with some affection, but at once she sees through the General and the others. She says she has overcome her illness and plans to recuperate, and gamble, at the spa.
ACT 3Babulenka has been losing her money at roulette, and ignores all pleas to stop. The General is despondent and sees his chances with Blanche diminish. After the Marquis tells just how much Babulenka has lost, the General suggests to summon the police but the Marquis dissuades him. Aleksey arrives, and the General and the Marquis ask for his help to halt Babulenka's gambling losses. Prince Nilsky, another potential suitor to Blanche, arrives and further enumerates Babulenka's losses. The General collapses, distraught, and then runs into the casino. Blanche departs with Nilsky. Aleksey wonders of what will happen with Polina's family, after Babulenka's financial losses. Babulenka, exhausted and depleted of funds, wants to go home to Moscow. She asks Polina to come with her, but she declines. The General bewails Babulenka's losses and his own loss of Blanche to Nilsky.
ACT 4In his hotel room, Aleksey finds Polina, who has a letter from the Marquis. The Marquis says he is selling the General's properties mortgaged to him, but will forgive fifty thousand for Polina's sake, and will consider their relationship as over. Polina feels this paying her off as an insult and wishes she had fifty thousand to fling at the Marquis' face. Alexei is deliriously pleased that Polina has turned to him for assistance.
Rushing to the casino, Aleksey has a run of good luck, winning 20 times in a row and breaking the bank. The other patrons talk about Aleksey's run. He returns to his room, yet he continues to hear the voices of the croupiers and the other gamblers. He then becomes aware of Polina who has been waiting for him. He offers her funds to pay the Marquis back. She refuses and asks whether he really loves her. When Aleksey gives her the money, she tosses it back in his face and runs out. The opera ends with Aleksey alone in the room, recalling obsessively his success at the tables.
Click here to view a subtitled excerpt from this production: the climactic gambling scene in Act 4
Misha Didyk as Aleksey and Kristine Opolais as Polina
From Julia Spinola's notes on this production:
A rare stroke of luck
Prokofiev wrote The Gambler in a state of almost drunken frenzy, completing the score of his Dostoyevsky-based opera in the space of a breathless five and a half months in 1916, when he was only twenty-five. If we may believe his self-aggrandizing autobiography, he also completed the orchestration at breathtaking speed, instrumenting as many as eighteen pages a day while staying in the Finnish resort of Kuokkala in the summer of 1916. It is no wonder, then, that some of his enthusiasm found its way into the work, which almost literally bubbles with vitality, drawing its listeners into its sway.
The musical picture of this radically anti-lyrical opera, the libretto of which was for the most part written by the composer himself on the basis of Dostoyevsky’s novella, is characterized by its restless forward momentum. Barenboim gives the kaleidoscopic score such an electric charge that its eccentricities are relentlessly ratcheted up. Prokofiev’s claim that the work contains no eccentricities and that his only aim was simplicity is a classic understatement The Berlin production reveals that the oft-cited notion of anti-psychological objectivity is no more than an academic cliché that does not help to bring us any closer to the work’s novel musical language. As Barenboim makes clear to electrifying effect the carefully polished gestures of Prokofiev’s orchestral writing conceal an unerringly physiognomic, vivid art of characterization. This art has about as much to do with objectivity as protruding springs have to do with the definition of a mattress.
It is to the credit of the exceptionally gifted young Russian director, Dmitri Tcherniakov, that he was able to bring out this aspect of the work in a whole series of witty points, and in this he was no doubt helped by the fact that he also designed the sets and costumes for this co-production with La Scala. The labyrinthine relationships between the various gamblers, many of whom are tied to each other in complex mutual dependencies in the imaginary German spa town of Roulettenburg, are reflected in the sets, with their no less complex, interlocking and impenetrable designs depicting a modern impersonal hotel painted in a hideous cobalt blue and comprising a revolving glass door, a lobby and cell-like rooms with metallic window frames. Here no one is what he or she claims to be. Worse, no one knows any longer who he or she really is. The Marquis is a cheat, the General a gambler who, heavily in debt wallows in self-pity. His stepdaughter, Polina, has been taken in by the Marquis, while she in tarn humiliates and ridicules Alaksey, the tutor to the General’s children and, as in Dostoevsky’s short story, the work’s protagonist.
Blanche is a hussy forever poking her pretty little nose into places where she smells the most money. And in his desperate search for a sense of identity, Aleksey disappears behind the most disparate masks: one mask is that of the infatuated lover who is tricked and rejected by Polina, while another is that of a ruler who holds absolute sway over the gaming tables and the casino’s bank and whose luck never runs out Even the General’s rich aunt Babulenka, who initially seems so dependable and whose fortune is coveted by all the others, loses her composure in Roulettenburg and bankrupts herself at the gaming table.
The act of total self-abandonment is one that Prokofiev’s music traces — initially imperceptibly but nonetheless systematically — from the opening bar of the opera to its close, and it is a process that Tcherniakov’s virtuosic handling of the characters likewise replicates right down to the very last gesture. Opera productions in which music and staging are so closely in tune are a rare stroke of luck.
- Julia Spinola (translation: Stewart Spence)
NEXT MEETING: TUE AUG 30, 7.30 pm
Luisa Miller
Verdi's “melodramma tragico” , based on a play by Schiller, is one of the few works he wrote before 1850 which still have a place in the international repertoire. This 2012 production, from Malmö Opera in Sweden, has been widely acclaimed for its strong cast and staging.