Never think that opera is so rarified an entertainment that it doesn’t deal with the realities of life. It does. And Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, which has just opened at Covent Garden in a production by the “happening” Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, is a case in point.
Essentially this is a piece of Gothic horror fantasy complete with ghost. But at the same time it’s about a man destroyed by gambling, a persistent theme in classic Russian literature (the story here is by Pushkin): gambling as a self-annihilating, all-encompassing addiction.
