PIQUE DAME

The young Uzbek conductor Aziz Shokhakimov can be enjoyed at the Bayerische Staatsoper for the first time as he conducts The Queen of Spades in the 2023/2024 season. Director Benedict Andrews already staged Così fan tutte at the Bayerische Staatsoper in the 2022/2023 season. Recently he has been focussing more on his film projects: Seberg with Kristen Stewart, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, and Una with Rooney Mara, which featured at the Telluride Film Festival in 2016. As Resident Director at the Sydney Theatre Company and later at the Schaubühne Berlin, Benedict Andrews has consistently staged new drama and British playwriting. He has presented opera works at houses such as De Nationale Opera, Amsterdam, the English National Opera, London, the Komische Oper Berlin and Oper Frankfurt. He shares a long-standing collaboration with costume designer Victoria Behr, who has been accoladed numerous times in the Theater heute monthly magazine as “costume designer of the year”. He now collaborates for the first time with Rufus Didwiszus, who designed his first stage at the Bayerische Staatsoper in the 2021/2022 season for Der Rosenkavalier, directed by Barrie Kosky.

Discover the secret, crack the code, get the key: What drives us to submit to the unknown, to forget what we originally felt and who we are? With The Queen of Spades, Alexander Pushkin presented a Russian variant of the Gothic novel in 1834. In it, his protagonist Hermann stares unblinkingly at the window, behind which Liza sits. While he tries to elicit the secret of the three cards from the Countess, whose ward Liza is, Liza mistakes his obsession for love. Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky stages the couple’s downfall all the more drastically in his opera, when, as the plot begins he has the possibility of a joyful life appear and allows the two to take the self-chosen path of estrangement and self-destruction into madness and death. As in a film noir, in the staging by Benedict Andrews it draws the characters into their own abysses.