“Who does Crimea belong to?” asked a Ukrainian-language sign held by a protestor outside the Vienna State Opera on a balmy June evening. Moments later, despite a small demonstration that diffident Viennese passersby and members of the sold-out audience seemed content to ignore, the superstar soprano Anna Netrebko made her much-anticipated debut in one of the Russian repertoire’s most challenging dramatic soprano roles, Liza, in Tchaikovsky’s penultimate opera, The Queen of Spades (1890).
Netrebko has come to the part relatively late in her career. After having sung excerpts in concert performance, she was scheduled to perform her first Liza in New York earlier this season. That engagement disappeared, however, after the Metropolitan Opera severed ties with Netrebko in 2022 over her alleged support for Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine. The real story is actually the opposite: Netrebko has repeatedly stated that she opposes the war—a stance so bold in her home country, where any criticism of the war, and indeed even calling the conflict a war, is illegal, that she is no longer welcome to perform there either. Nevertheless, the Met stuck to its guns and most opera companies in the Anglosphere followed suit. This past February, however, Palm Beach Opera boldly broke the taboo by featuring Netrebko as the recital soloist at its annual gala. The Met’s general manager Peter Gelb called that engagement an “unfortunate decision,” but next season she will return to London’s Royal Opera in Puccini’s Tosca and Turandot.
Netrebko has faced sporadic cancellations elsewhere, but in most of the European continent she has continued to enjoy a celebrated career, perhaps singing even better because of her travails. Here in Austria, where she is a citizen, the Vienna State Opera has had no problem casting her in leading roles while the financially strapped Met struggles to fill its seats without her.
If the offstage drama were not intense enough, Netrebko was cast opposite her ex-husband, the Azerbaijani tenor Yusif Eyvazov, with whom Netrebko continues to work professionally and, judging by their rapport during curtain calls, with great affection. One can only guess how much passion they poured into their roles, which must radiate both blinding love and cruel estrangement, but they are certainly the most exciting singing duo before the public today. Netrebko floated marvelous, well-rounded middle-register notes all evening, while Eyvazov captured the ironic highs of a heroic voice assigned to an antiheroic role.
Loosely based on an 1834 novella by Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades tells the ghostly tale of Gherman, a poor officer smitten by Liza, who is engaged to the rich and handsome Prince Yeletsky. Reasoning that he must acquire a great fortune to be worthy of her, Gherman becomes obsessed with learning three magic cards known to her grandmother, identified only as the Old Countess. When he approaches the elderly matron late at night, he frightens her to death, leading Liza to suspect that the cards were all he really cared about. Later the Old Countess’s ghost haunts him and claims to reveal the cards. Thus fortified in his gambling obsession, Gherman misses a chance to reassure Liza, driving her to suicide. In a tense finale, Gherman plays the cards as spectrally revealed, the last of which turns out to be wrong. Ruined, he takes his own life as the assembled company sings an Orthodox Christian funeral dirge.
For such a marquee occasion, it was rather surprising that Vienna, now perhaps the world’s leading opera house, chose not to stage a new production. Tchaikovsky’s opera has been in the repertoire here since 1902, when it was championed by Gustav Mahler, then the house’s chief conductor (Mahler also conducted the first Met performance of the opera in 1910). For whatever reason, Netrebko has now sung Liza for the first time in the Bulgarian-German director Vera Nemirova’s production, which premiered in Vienna in 2007. In Nemirova’s version, offering a grim bite of modernity, the story unfolds not in the splendorous surroundings of imperial St. Petersburg, but in a gloomy twentieth-century institution whose dark walls and dirty windows enclose some sort of broken-down, multipurpose community center. As the scenes roll by, the same set, by Johannes Leiacker, serves as an orphanage for the children’s cadet corps that opens the opera, a grim habitation for Liza and her grandmother, the site of a grand ball that in this production descends into a trashy fashion show, a funeral parlor, and, for the finale, a raucous gambling den. A modern take on an old classic is not intrinsically wrong, but creating more than one set would not have been an undue extravagance.
Fortunately, Netrebko and Eyvazov overcame this prison of human depravity with their superb vocals, in which they were joined by other Russian singers performing outside their troubled country. The most celebrated among them, the mezzo-soprano Elena Zaremba, was well-known in heavier parts on the stage of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater in decades past. Here she delivered a studied Old Countess, retaining a hint of seductive power tempered by the wisdom of world weariness. The stentorian baritone Alexey Markov, who appeared as Prince Yeletsky in the Met production that Netrebko missed earlier this season, sang with conviction here as Count Tomsky, a comrade of Gherman’s, who narrates the tale of the three cards. The role of Yeletsky went to the talented newcomer Boris Pinkhasovich, who captured the flawless music but feckless character in steady tones.
The conductor Timur Zangiev led a captivatingly stormy and impassioned performance that never shirked technical correctness. Zangiev hails from North Ossetia, a region in the former Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic currently claimed and occupied by Russia, whose citizenship he holds. A musical prodigy, he first conducted an orchestra—the Vladikavkaz Philharmonic—at age seven. Even though Zangiev is just over thirty, his European career is booming, with recent appearances at the Salzburg Festival and Milan’s La Scala and planned engagements elsewhere, including his Met debut next season leading Tchaikovsky’s other well-known opera, Eugene Onegin.
The Met may have to wait longer to welcome back Netrebko, who is currently suing it for discrimination after winning an arbitration judgment of over $200,000 against the company for improperly canceling her contracts. In what may well be a test of fate, she has pledged not to return for as long as Gelb remains.
