Tchaikovsky on Fate, the Future of Russia, and Gambling Addiction

with Simon Morrison Magic cards; alcohol abuse; the decay and decline of Imperial Russia; a ghost, a winking corpse, and a sudden suicide; the rational tripping over in the irrational, the future folding into the present and the past. These are just some of the ingredients of Tchaikovsky’s great supernatural opera The Queen of Spades , a work of beautiful strangeness that has never lost its power to fascinate. This lecture dives deeply into its history, explaining what it’s all about, and how faro, the card game at the heart of the plot, is played.