At the outset, he abjures gambling as "risking the necessary in the hope of acquiring the superfluous". By the end, after killing the countess and extracting the secret from her ghost, he loses first his fortune and then his mind. Pushkin likens him to Napoleon, an anti-hero on the make: Dostoyevsky, excited by the "cold fury" of this proto-surrealist work, took its protagonist as the inspiration for his infinitely more furious Raskolnikov.
The Queen of Spades also gripped Tchaikovsky, who had already turned Pushkin's verse-drama Eugene Onegin into an operatic hit. What this new plot unleashed in him was both beautiful and terrible. The 18th-century court setting inspired him to pastiche Mozart's music - and anticipate Stravinsky's - in ravishing ways. But in killing off Hermann - rather than leaving him in a lunatic asylum, as Pushkin did - Tchaikovsky liberated his own tortured soul.
"I pitied Hermann so much that I suddenly began weeping copiously," he wrote of the hours he spent composing the death scene. "This weeping went on for an awfully long time, turning into a mild fit of hysteria of a very pleasant kind... Afterwards I tried to fathom why... It seems to me that Hermann was not just a pretext for writing this or that music, but a real living human being, at the time very sympathetic to me." As Tchaikovsky's biographer David Brown observes, Hermann's death - particularly the way Tchaikovsky presents it - is not so much a tragedy as the close of a case- history. And that case-history mirrored the pathology of Tchaikovsky's own case.
Initial critical reactions in St Petersburg were negative: the new opera had neither the evenness nor the sweet winsomeness of Eugene Onegin. Not one of the characters was conventionally lovable, and the music was at times futuristically harsh. But over the years its dark power has induced numerous directors to try their hand at it, from Stanislavsky (who couldn't hack it) onwards. And they're still trying: David Pountney (who could hack it) at ENO, followed by Graham Vick, gracefully, at Glyndebourne, Richard Jones, brilliantly, with Welsh National Opera, and now, at Covent Garden, the redoubtable Francesca Zambello.
I find this New Yorker standing by a huge mound behind which rise the tiered boxes of an auditorium the colour and texture of ice. She and her designer Peter Davidson got its shape from photos they'd found of private theatres in Russian palaces, but the ice effect was her idea. "Winter runs through the whole piece," she explains. "Nature keeps trying to thaw things out from the first scene onwards, but the cold prevails. Lisa throws herself into the river Neva, the Countess tries to preserve herself as though in ice, and the vain and shallow society they move in is itself as cold as ice."
The lower orders are not visible in this slice of life, where people watch each other with a murderous eye. It's a society as cruel as that portrayed in Patrice Leconte's Ridicule, where the key pleasures are sex, greed, and the humiliation and destruction of rivals, and where class distinctions calibrate everything. "I felt the piece had to be set in period: it couldn't have been transposed," says Zambello. "I wanted this wealthy, freezing world to seem like the apex of pre-Revolutionary Russian society." As did Tchaikovsky, although - unlike Borodin and Mussorgsky before him - he was not allowed to portray the Imperial family on stage. The ice world he moved in exerted a political censorship just as ferocious as the sexual censorship which eventually killed him as a sad closet gay.
The challenge of the piece, she says, lies in having to unify its disparate elements - a social panorama and a claustrophobic love triangle in which nobody gets what they want. Part of her solution is to place the single interval after the ball scene - later on the psychological focus comes in close. "Tchaikovsky's obsession is with obsession itself. Lisa is obsessed with the idea of love, and the Countess with aging - her obsession is the one we can all relate to. Hermann's progress from desire to obsession is like that pendulum we all try to keep in check, but with him it just goes way over the line. We've met this character in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky - he's very familiar - but he represents a big challenge to the singer. To be at once so fearful and so fearless."
Vladimir Galouzine will take on this role, while the lustrous Karita Mattila will play Lisa, and Josephine Barstow will play the Countess. An inspired choice, not only because she has the requisite charisma, but also because, having played Lisa in her youth (and more recently the 300- year-old monster at the heart of Janacek's The Makropoulos Case), she's inhabited such hellish regions before. Despite her age, the Countess is still a very sexual creature, and Barstow is by all accounts bringing that out with gusto.
For the Prince, whose offer of marriage is spurned by Lisa, Covent Garden has brought in the beefcake baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky - more clever casting. "Even Dmitri will admit that he's perfect for the part of the vain Prince Yeletsky," says Zambello. "There are days when Dmitri's just an impossible, selfish brat. Ideal for a man who's pursuing a girl, merely to add her to his collection."
Since nobody animates large groups more vividly than Zambello does, the big social scenes should be a treat. In her view, this opera dwells in the dark world of Tchaikovsky's ballets, and dance is integral to her conception. Her choreographer Vivienne Newport is currently chasing a movement-style which will suggest 18th-century elegance without being slavishly "in period" - she wants to approach it from the perspective of the 21st century.
It is sad that after so much work and ingenuity, this intriguing show will only get six London airings, before it departs to the United States.
The Queen of Spades, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London (020-7304 4000) from tomorrow. David Brown's definitive two-volume biography of Tchaikovsky is published in paperback by Gollancz
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