THE GAMBLER
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A couple of years ago Lyric launched its “Toward the 21st Century” initiative, which was intended to “show the direction opera is taking as the turn of the new century looms.” Under this heading Lyric planned to stage contemporary or neglected works that had found favor with an establishment elite but had been roundly ignored by general audiences. Given that this season’s two installments of the initiative, Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra and Prokofiev’s The Gambler, are 25 and 60 years old, one is led to believe that Lyric management is actually currying favor with the critics rather than charting the course of opera for the 21st century. Enormously popular 20th-century favorites such as Madama Butterfly (1904), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), and Turandot (1926) earned their places in the repertory immediately. Britten’s Peter Grimes premiered in 1945 and received its due as well. The Gambler and Antony and Cleopatra both had their chance to win a place in the sun–and they failed. If opera has a future, it does not lie with these dead ends of the 20th century.
Prokofiev based his work (for which he also prepared the libretto) on a story by Dostoyevski written and set in the 1860s. Prokofiev moved the setting forward about 50 years to the eve of World War I, which has no important effect on the characters or action, though it reveals the intellectual wellspring of the opera, which is an extended socialist whine about how bad money is. This contempt for money (all the characters disdain yet desire it) is stock leftist cant. Especially interesting is Alexey’s contempt for money acquired through work and savings–though evidently money won at the gaming tables is OK. He repeatedly excoriates Germans for their petit-bourgeois virtues and claims that in a few generations such practices will turn the persevering family into Rothschilds. Fingering the cosmopolitan Rothschild family as the unpalatable product of bourgeois behavior seems to border on a kind of cocktail-party anti-Semitism.
