Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) wrote down most of the opera "Queen of Spades" in only 44 days. The premiere became a great success - which continues to this day.
The opera tells the story of an old countess who was involved in the Paris card-playing scene in her youth, her granddaughter Lisa, who loves the soldier Hermann but is engaged to another man, and Hermann.
Hermann learns of the Countess’s life story, according to which she knew three winning cards, but would die at the hands of the person to whom she told the secret, along with her husband and her lover. Hermann senses a chance for wealth in this, as he believes he can win Lisa over in this way. He breaks into the Countess’s house and demands that the fortune cards be revealed. The Countess refuses, but dies of shock during Hermann’s threats. Lisa, who has rushed from the tumult, subsequently rejects Hermann, but later agrees to flee for a life together with him. Meanwhile, Hermann hallucinates about the three cards and, delirious, puts gambling above love for Lisa, who subsequently takes her own life. After initial wins, Hermann loses everything to the Queen of Spades card in the third game, ending his life.

“Le nozze di figaro” marked the beginning of the happy and fruitful collaboration between W. A. Mozart (1756-1791) and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, which was to bring both success and artistic satisfaction. Although Da Ponte, as a precautionary measure and in view of the sharp censorship, dispensed with the biting sarcasm of Beaumarchais’ original, which served as the model for the new opera buffa, there was still enough fuel in it to deal with a major theme of the time: The examination of the complex relationships between the social classes, or rather the discrimination of the lower classes by the upper ones.
While Count Almaviva embodies a reactionary representative of the nobility, the shrewd Figaro is presented as a representative of the rising third class. Two forces face each other here, each claiming power in pre-revolutionary Europe. Mozart found in this passionate and ironic piece so much of the shame and disappointments he had experienced during his artistic life that he let all his bitter experiences and mental anguish flow into the composition.
Despite the explosive theme, the premiere performance in Vienna in 1786 under the reign of Emperor Joseph II was a great success. Today "Le nozze di figaro" is one of the most popular and most performed operas worldwide.