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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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2/7/04
Tchaikovksy, The Queen of Spades
Reviewed by Laurel Kenner
Vic rarely stays through to the end of any performance, let alone an opera. He did for this one. You can take that as a recommendation.
The themes of The Queen of Spades hold much interest for speculators. The obsessive Gherman, played at the Metropolitan Opera season premiere on Feb. 7, 2004, by Placido Domingo, self-destructs by pursuing the perfect system. Tchaikovsky's opera is based on a Pushkin story. It begins with Gherman hearing a perhaps fanciful tale that a frightful old Countess known as the Queen of Spades possesses a magical secret: an unbeatable method for winning at the game of faro. Gherman gains entry to the Countess's room by making love to her granddaughter. But his threats and pistol-waving frighten the old woman to death before she can divulge her secret.
The granddaughter, hearing noises, rushes in to find her grandmother dead. She quickly realizes that Gherman's desire to win has trumped his desire for her. She sends him away, then repents and sends him a desperate note begging for a last midnight meeting at the riverbank. Gherman, disconsolate at losing the secret, ignores the granddaughter's note until the Countess appears to him in a vision and shows him the three winning cards: three, seven, ace. The Countess says she is telling him this so he can save her granddaughter. But Gherman's obsession has overcome his love for the girl, and he has completely forgotten his initial reason for wanting the secret system -- to make enough money to elope with her. Arriving late for his midnight tryst, he callously dashes her last hopes and rushes off to the gaming tables, leaving her to commit suicide by jumping in the frigid water.
The first two cards give him a marvelous rake-in. But when he triumphantly plays the ace, he loses all his winnings. The winning card is the Queen of Spades.
As Vic says, fixed systems all lead to disaster.
Putting all your chips on the table is generally a good strategy only in the Rudyard Kipling poem "If" which dozens of Vic's well-wishers sent him after his 1997 loss:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
...
Tchaikovsky's libretto does not explore Gherman's psychological motivations, but the theory is that obsessive gamblers -- and speculators -- are bent on punishing themselves for a guilty secret (usually, the desire to seduce Mom). The gambler wants to die. (Which Gherman does, in a manner completely in character with all his previous moves.)
There's also the familiar speculative theme of ever-changing cycles. How many times have prospective speculators searched for a good system among the historical data, back-tested it, and trotted it out for a debut, only to experience crushing defeat?
Aside from all the thematic interest, the music is beautiful, Tchaikovsky at the height of his dramatic talents. It's a world apart from The Gambler, the young Prokofiev's bombastic, best-forgotten opera. The singing of the two male stars of The Queen of Spades was beautiful. Neither of us knew that Placido Domingo could still sing. He can. We liked Vladimir Chernov as Yeletsky, the nice guy whom the Countess's granddaughter throws over in her ill-fated passion for Gherman. The conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, was both sharp and poetic.
The Queen of Spades is playing through February at the Met; the schedule is available at www.metopera.org.