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      How ‘The Queen of Spades’ Brought Two Tchaikovsky Brothers Together

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      The composer’s brother Modest long wanted to collaborate. They eventually got their chance, to bring Pushkin to the opera stage.In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.”Modest revered his older brother’s talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for “The Queen of Spades,” Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together.Pyotr’s response to the letter was measured but blunt. “Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write ‘The Queen of Spades,’” adding: “I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like ‘The Queen of Spades’ does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.”Then Klenovsky dropped “The Queen of Spades.” Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed.And so “The Queen of Spades,” which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest’s attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr’s shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the “first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.” It’s a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy.When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn’t easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And “The Queen of Spades” is short; Taruskin counts the text at “barely 10,000 words.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Opera Companies Find Savings and Gains Through Collaborations

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      Co-productions can help companies across the globe save money, collaborate artistically and ensure that lesser-known works are seen by more audiences.Simon McBurney’s acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn’t happen.McBurney’s staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions.At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney’s “Khovanshchina” in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. “For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,” he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg’s picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of “Khovanshchina” at the festival, on April 21.“Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it’s over,” he said. “This is an artistic waste and economic waste.”A scene from John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Met, a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.Karen Almond/Met OperaIn recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon’s novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, “La Sonnambula” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Soprano Sonya Yoncheva Has Many Roles, On and Off the Stage

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      Sonya Yoncheva discusses her turn as Lisa in “The Queen of Spades” at the Metropolitan Opera, her summer concerts, her production company and more.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva has established herself as one of today’s most versatile opera stars.Just over a decade ago, in 2014, she caused a splash after jumping in on short notice as Mimi in her first staged performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera. When the Bulgarian native appears as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s tragic love story “The Queen of Spades,” from Friday through June 7, it will be her sixth role debut at the house.Yoncheva, 43, maintains a busy schedule that includes a recent gala at the Opéra Garnier in Paris and her third production as the title character in “Iolanta,” also by Tchaikovsky, at the Vienna State Opera. In Europe this summer, she will perform Handel, Bellini and more.Yoncheva performing in “Iolanta” at the Vienna State Opera.Vienna State Opera / Michael PöhnUnder the auspices of her production company, SY11 Events, she will also appear in August in Sofia, Bulgaria, for outdoor concerts alongside the tenors Vittorio Grigolo, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo. Started in 2020, the enterprise joined forces with the label Naïve for her most recent album, “George,” inspired by the life and work of the French writer George Sand (born Aurore Dupin, she is known in the music world for her tumultuous relationship with Frédéric Chopin).An even less conventional project is the 2023 book “Fifteen Mirrors,” combining personal confessions about select characters and portraits in which Yoncheva poses in different guises.“I understand my work as a process,” she said by phone from outside Geneva, where she lives with her husband, the conductor Domingo Hindoyan, and their two children. “The interpretation takes up maybe an even bigger part than the singing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Luigi Alva, Elegant Tenor With a Lighthearted Touch, Dies at 98

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      A Peruvian-born international star, he made a specialty of roles in operas by Donizetti, Rossini and Mozart, becoming one of their pre-eminent interpreters.Luigi Alva, the Peruvian tenor who was a pre-eminent interpreter of Mozart and Rossini roles that highlighted his light-lyric voice, elegant phrasing and subtle acting during a three-decade career on the world’s opera stages, died on Thursday at his home in Barlassina, Italy, north of Milan. He was 98. His death was confirmed by the Peruvian tenor Ernesto Palacio, a close friend and the intendant of the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy.Mr. Alva did not have the booming, resonant voice needed for dramatic tenor performances in the biggest opera houses. But he triumphed in opera buffa roles — such as Count Almaviva in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and the lovesick Ernesto in Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” — which demanded fine comedic timing and an appreciation for absurd situations without resorting to slapstick or mugging.In more serious roles, such as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” Mr. Alva displayed a warm timbre and gracious line that gained him an enthusiastic following. Few tenors could match his ability to deliver long coloratura passages with a single breath, as Mr. Alva did time and again in “Il mio tesoro,” the famous aria from “Don Giovanni.”“The real trick is not merely to sing the passage, but to make it sound easy,” the critic Alan Rich of The New York Times wrote on the occasion of Mr. Alva’s New York recital debut at Judson Hall in 1961. “And this was the way he sang throughout the evening — beautifully, and with an assurance that was literally breathtaking.”In more serious roles, such as Don Ottavio in “Don Giovanni,” Mr. Alva displayed a warm timbre and gracious line that gained him an enthusiastic following. Here he performed the role in 1963 at La Scala.Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla ScalaWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seven Takes on the Lurid Dance of the Seven Veils in Strauss’s ‘Salome’

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      “I’m ready,” Salome sings. And then she dances.Her predatory stepfather has promised her anything she wants if she performs for him. She obliges with the alternately wild and delicate Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the most famous numbers in all opera.The Dance of the Seven VeilsChicago Symphony Orchestra; Fritz Reiner, conductor (Sony)A highlight of Strauss’s “Salome,” which the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast live to movie theaters on Saturday, it is also one of the art form’s greatest challenges. Few sopranos capable of singing the daunting role have much experience with dance, let alone with carrying a sensual nine-minute solo.Is it a seduction? A striptease? A cry for help? Performers have taken this intense, lurid scene in many different directions, bringing out undercurrents of sexual awakening and violence. The Met’s new production inverts the traditional portrayal, uncovering the wounded girl beneath the stereotypical femme fatale.Here are (yes) seven memorable versions from the long history of opera’s boldest dance.Silent SalomeAlla Nazimova.Nazimova ProductionsNot quite 20 years after the opera’s 1905 premiere, a silent film version of “Salome” — really an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play on which the opera is based — embraced the material’s perfumed, verging-on-surreal Orientalism. The actress Alla Nazimova’s Salome is a spoiled, petulant teenager.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Adams’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ Sags at the Metropolitan Opera

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      John Adams’s Shakespeare adaptation has been trimmed since its premiere, but still struggles with setting a flood of dense Elizabethan verse.“Antony and Cleopatra” played a crucial role in the history of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1966, Samuel Barber’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy opened the company’s Lincoln Center home — back when the Met barely did anything from the 20th century, let alone world premieres.Things could hardly be more different now. John Adams’s version of “Antony and Cleopatra” arrived at the Met on Monday at a time when new and recent pieces are frequently on offer, a shock for an art form in which the standard repertory pretty much ended with Puccini. This is the fifth Adams title the company has presented, the kind of sustained commitment to a living composer that would have once been unthinkable.Barber’s “Antony” was a notorious fiasco. Even with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra, the opera was buried beneath a lavish staging, designed to give the theater’s new machinery a workout. Deeply wounded by the blowback, Barber eventually revised the work.Adams, too, has futzed with his “Antony” since its premiere in San Francisco in 2022 and a later production in Barcelona. By now, some 20 minutes have been trimmed from a score that ran nearly three hours at the premiere.But the opera still slumps and sags, for all of the music’s nervously chugging energy and despite an excellent cast led by the eloquently weary Gerald Finley and a bristling Julia Bullock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Inspirations Behind the Met Opera’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

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      On the page, John Adams’s opera “Antony and Cleopatra” is a pretty straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But on the stage, it is something else entirely.The production of “Antony and Cleopatra” that opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday is by Elkhanah Pulitzer, who turns Shakespeare’s play of torn allegiances, thwarted love and ascendant authoritarianism into a study of how people’s public images are constructed. She imagines a world in which celebrities can be tantamount to gods, the way they long have been treated in Hollywood.With all that in mind, Pulitzer developed an aesthetic universe for her production, with the help of the scenic designer Mimi Lien and the costume designer Constance Hoffman, made of three principal elements: Egypt in 30 B.C., Hollywood in the 1930s and celebrity media culture.Bullock, center, in the Met’s production.Karen AlmondYou can see each of those references in the third scene of the opera. Cleopatra has been left behind by Antony after he returned to Rome, and she is lounging by her pool in Alexandria, described by Pulitzer as “a deco gold world with palm leaves and her in a lovely robe drinking martinis.” Then Cleopatra receives the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, which throws her into a rage.Take a closer look at how this moment comes to life through the layers of Pulitzer’s staging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Strauss’s ‘Salome’ Gets a New Staging at the Metropolitan Opera

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      In his company debut, the director Claus Guth takes a psychological approach, surrounding the title character with six versions of her younger self.The first sound in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Salome” isn’t the wriggle of clarinet that begins Strauss’s score. It’s the tinkle of a music box, while a little girl plays with a doll at the lip of the stage. Projected on the curtain behind her is a giant image of herself, slowly twirling.She suddenly gets angry at the toy and begins beating it against the ground. Even before the orchestra squirms in, Claus Guth’s grimly effective staging has made clear its preoccupations: childhood, dancing, violence.Guth, one of Europe’s busiest directors and making his Met debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza van den Heever — simultaneously innocent and hardened, sounding silvery yet secure — this “Salome,” which opened on Tuesday, gives its title character not one youthful double, but six.The group of Salomes, progressing in age from perhaps a kindergartner to the 16-year-old played by van den Heever, is dressed in matching dark frocks, giving hints of “The Shining” and Diane Arbus photographs.Guth, placing the action in a dour black mansion around the turn of the 20th century, has shifted from ancient to modern times Strauss’s 100-minute, one-act adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play. “Salome” depicts, in decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the Symbolists, the biblical princess who was drawn to and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be decapitated by her depraved stepfather, King Herod.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More