Duet and Pauline’s Aria from Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame

Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame“ (The Queen of Spades), with a libretto by his brother Modest, is based on the Pushkin short story with the same name. It’s the old story: boy meets girl, boy becomes obsessed with girl, boy (sort of) kills girl’s grandmother, and so forth Really, though, everyone in the first half of this show is shown going crazy for Lisa (the ravishing Olga Krasina, voiced by Tamara Milashkina), and making glorious music while they do. This includes Pauline (Irina Gubanova, voiced by Larissa Avdeyeva), who sings a famous duet with her best friend Lisa followed by an even more famous aria where she basically declares her love. It is definitely one of opera’s queerer moments. This clip comes from a film of Pique Dame from 1960, one of three Soviet-era opera films directed by the great Roman Tikhomirov. Instead of taping the singers themselves, these fully realized “opera movies“ use film actors, carefully dubbed, which really heightens the dramatic