Roland Petit on Pique Dame
About twenty-five years ago, Mikhail Baryshnikov approached me with the request that I create a ballet for him on the subject of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. Of course, I agreed. It was
decided to use the music of Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same name. I wrote a libretto and we set to work. But, before long, Baryshnikov declared that he refused to dance duets with the old Countess
as, in his opinion, this ran counter to the spirit of the original. I tried to convince him to the contrary and showed him an extract from the tale in which it is said outright that in order to
discover the secret of the three cards, Hermann was willing to ’become her lover’. And this being so, it seemed to me I was quite justified in choreographing a duet for Hermann and the Countess.
Baryshnikov, alas, did not agree, and I was forced to give in.
Having received an invitation to do a new version of Three Cards for the Bolshoi, I reread the Pushkin tale and wrote a new libretto. In so far as concerns the music, I decided to turn again
to the opera, but substituting musical instruments for voices (the voice, after all, is an instrument too!). Nothing, however, came of this idea: the new libretto and the opera score were
incompatible. Then I took another work by Tchaikovsky, his Symphony No. 6, which turned out to be exactly what I was looking for! The music was ideally suited to the libretto. For the production, I
used the Leonard Bernstein recording that lasts a little longer than other performances of the Pathetique. While changing the sequence of some parts of the music, I did not discard a single
bar!
I love The Queen of Spades, but everyone has his own Pushkin — he is absolutely international, translated into many languages. I offer you my Pique Dame. It reminds me of a corrida
during which both parties — bull and toreador — die. The Hermann and Countess duets are the central episodes in my production. They are performed by the marvelous artists Ilze Liepa and Nikolai
Tsiskaridze. Their dance results in a remarkable effect: it will seem to you that Tchaikovsky’s music itself acquires special purity and depth.
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