Pimpinone, or The Unequal Marriage

Concert performance of the opera

Opera in three acts, 7 scenes

Libretto by Modest Thcaikovsky based on a short story of the same name by Alexander Pushkin

For nearly two years Tchaikovsky resisted the suggestion of the director of the Imperial Theatres, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, to write an opera based on the subject of Pushkin’s tale The Queen of Spades, but, having started work, he finished it all in under two months. His correspondence with his brother, the author of the libretto, Modest Tchaikovsky, and remarks in his diary paint a picture of a nervous obsession with the composition: to such an extent that he wrote down the first part of the opera upside down in his music book.

Upon completion of the work, the composer was at great pains to stress that he wrote The Queen of Spades «with love». The theatre expert Vadim Gajewski characterises Tchaikovsky’s penultimate opera as «an operatic symphony of the night», anticipating Andrei Bely’s Petersburg – an unreal city of mirages, dreams and phantoms. In this atmosphere the story of a typical lyrical hero of the composer unfolds – a dreamer and a poet. Only in the case of Herman, the poet is a dark, novel figure of the approaching fin de siècle, singing in a gambling den in triumphant delirium the celebrated aria: «What is our life? A game!»

Age category: 6+