«Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera «Pique Dame» on the libretto of Modest Tchaikovsky: Toward the problem of the interaction between music and words in the inner artistic concept of the whole»

On Wednesday, April 26, at 15:30 in White Hall of Russian Institute for the History of Arts, George Kovalevsky (PhD, research scientist, Music Department, RIAH) was present his peronal open lecture: “Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera “Pique Dame” on the libretto of Modest Tchaikovsky: Toward the problem of the interaction between music and words in the inner artistic concept of the whole”.

The lecture will dedicated to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera “Pique Dame”, a libretto to which his brother Modest Ilyich wrote. Immediately after the premiere, the text of the “Pique Dame” by Tchaikovsky was repeatedly targeted for criticism, and in the twentieth century was subjected to changes with the aim of “Pushkinization”. In this connection, the question arises as to whether Tchaikovsky relied on Pushkin in the creation of his work and whether the process of writing Pyotr Ilyich’s penultimate opera is an attempt to construct his own myth on the basis of Pushkin’s plotline?