The Gambler

Music by Sergei Prokofiev
Libretto by the composer after Fyodor Dostoevsky

With its jagged, modernist score, The Gambler offers a chillingly relevant look at the price of desire. Place your bets on a night of operatic intensity and join us for this rare, visceral revival.

This year’s ‘opera for the head’ is Sergei Prokofiev’s The Gambler, written in 1917 during the First World War when the composer was 26 years old and still considered to be in his enfant terrible phase. The opera was not performed until 1929.

In this new production – marking the Wexford debuts of director Ivan Popovski and conductor Valentin Uryupin – nervous obsession spirals into self-destruction. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 novella, the libretto draws directly from Prokofiev’s own gambling addiction. Set in 1865 in the fictional German spa town of Roulettenburg, everything is deliberately artificial. The opera follows the protagonist, Alexei, a young tutor, as he spirals into gambling debt while being obsessed with his employer’s stepdaughter, Polina.

In the final act, the casino itself emerges as the central character, controlling the destiny of those consumed by their passion for the roulette wheel, like moths to a flame. Prokofiev intended the work as a reaction against Romantic lyricism, instead preferring to create ‘an opera in the declamatory style’, closer in technique to the stageworks of Dargomyzhsky and Mussorgsky which set musical prose in natural speech rhythms.

First performance 29 April, 1929 at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. Previously staged at Wexford Festival Opera in October 1973