The Gam­bler (Rus­si­an: Игрок — Ig­rok in trans­lit­er­a­tion) is an op­era in four acts by Sergei Prokofiev to a Rus­si­an lib­retto by the com­poser, based on the story of the same name by Fy­odor Dostoyevsky.Is it love or com­puls­ive gambling, greed for money or lust after power? There is prob­ably not a single char­ac­ter in Prokofiev’s op­era that one can have con­fid­ence in.

Prokofiev de­veloped a per­son­al­ity pro­file of a com­puls­ive gam­bler by com­pos­ing sketches of mu­sic­al char­ac­ters. With­in those sketches most of the sing­ers’ parts rest in a de­clam­at­ory at­ti­tude. Thus, “The Gam­bler” is kind of an “anti-op­era” – a piece of mu­sic theatre that sets it­self apart from the usu­al op­er­at­ic forms by passing on arias.

In or­der to char­ac­ter­ise the fig­ures, Prokofiev uses ele­ments that come close to leit­mot­ifs. In this man­ner a broad­er mu­sic­al con­text seems to act coun­ter­bal­an­cing the un­bowed high scen­ic speed of the dia­logues.

This pro­duc­tion from the Staat­sop­er unter den Linden Ber­lin is staged by Rus­si­an dir­ect­or Dmitri Tch­er­niakov (who also cre­ated a mar­vel­lous Chow­an­sht­sh­ina.) Daniel Bar­en­boim con­ducts the Staat­so­per­n­chor and the Staat­skapelle Ber­lin.