Interest in gambling is booming, even as many Americans are shunning more artistic endeavors, like the ballet and theater. So why not roll the dice on gambling-themed operas? Sounds like a winner, as the San Francisco Opera has found out.
From metromix.com:
The marketing campaign for San Francisco Opera’s summer season invites audiences to enjoy “The Gamble of Love.” Artistically, the company has taken a bit of a gamble, too — and it mostly pays off.The monthlong season, which runs through July 10, offers three works in rotation which, despite the advertising slogan, have little in common, except that none of them is a surefire box-office favorite — Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” and Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers.” This past weekend, they were performed on three consecutive nights, and though the house was never full, the audiences were enthusiastic.
The highlight was a searing production of the Tchaikovsky, a dark tale of obsession and delusion adapted from a Pushkin short story. The main character, Gherman — superbly sung by the young tenor Misha Dydyk, is so determined to wrest the secret of three winning cards from an aged Countess that he seduces her granddaughter Lisa to gain access to their home and then frightens the old woman to death. The ghost of the Countess appears and tells him the cards — Three, Seven, Ace. He bets all his money, but the final card turns out to be the Queen of Spades. The opera ends with Gherman committing suicide.
The production, created for the Welsh National Opera by Richard Jones and John Macfarlane, is hallucinatory in its intensity, as befits Tchaikovsky’s haunting score. Among the brilliant stage effects is a scene in Gherman’s bedroom in which the audience’s sense of disorientation is heightened by seeming to view him from above — his bed is propped upright against the back of the set. The final scene in a gambling hall is also striking, dominated by an enormous round card table that slopes ominously toward the front of the stage.
The gambling theme carries over to Mozart’s bittersweet “Cosi fan tutte,” whose plot revolves around a wager. The cynical Don Alfonso bets his two young friends, Ferrando and Guglielmo, that their sweethearts will not remain faithful if put to the test.
This is great, but we really need some original operatic treatments of actual gambling history. Horseracing might be out, because of the difficulties of working with live animals, but there are probably already stories set in Venice’s Ridotto that could be adapted to opera.
The real treat, of course, would be operatic versions of more recent events. I know that someone has to be working on Bugsy: The Opera. Even though the whole story is fiction (as people who read Suburban Xanadu know, he didn’t “build” the Flamingo so much as hijack it, and he was no visionary) it would make a nice tragic opera.