Four Portraits and Dénouement from ‘The Gambler’, Op. 49

Program notes

About the Work

The Gambler is the opera of Prokofiev’s mid-twenties, written in 1915 and 1916 from Dostoevsky’s short novel of 1866. The story is set in a German spa town the novelist calls Roulettenburg. A Russian General, deep in debt, waits for news that his rich aunt has died; the aunt arrives in person, very much alive, and loses a fortune at the tables; Alexei, a penniless tutor in the General’s household, loves the General’s ward Polina and stakes everything on roulette to win her. Prokofiev set Dostoevsky’s prose almost as speech, fast and without arias. A production planned for the Mariinsky Theatre in Petrograd fell victim to the revolution of 1917, and the opera was not staged until the end of the 1920s, in Brussels, in a revised version sung in French.

In 1931 he made an orchestral work from it, and gave it its own opus number, 49. The difficulty was that an opera without set pieces offers nothing to extract. By his own account he took a vocal score, tore out the pages belonging to each of the four main characters, sorted them into piles and recomposed each pile as a portrait. To the four he added a Dénouement drawn from the opera’s final act. The result is less a suite of highlights than a set of character studies, and it carries the nervous, sardonic energy of the young Prokofiev into the concert hall at full strength.

What to Listen For

Alexei comes first: restless, impulsive music that never sits still, the portrait of a man who thinks faster than he judges. The Grandmother (Babulenka) begins as a formidable old lady who knows her own mind, then a solo violin leads into something more touching, as if the composer liked her too much to leave her as a caricature. The General is all bluster and empty ceremony.

Polina has the longest movement and the most ambiguous. It starts quietly and tenderly, grows stronger and more troubled, and ends subdued. The Dénouement returns to the gaming tables and what follows them. It is the most dramatic music of the five, driven and feverish, with a sharp-edged, dissonant close that offers no consolation. Heard after the moonlit Summer Night suite in the first half, it shows how far apart the two ends of Prokofiev’s operatic career were.