_Charodeika_ ("The Enchantress") followed _Mazeppa_ in 1887, and was a further step towards purely dramatic and national opera. Tchaikovsky himself thought highly of this work, and declared he was attracted to it by a deep-rooted desire to illustrate in music the saying of Goethe: "das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan," and to demonstrate the fatal witchery of woman's beauty, as Verdi had done in "La Traviata" and Bizet in "Carmen." _The Enchantress_ was first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in October 1887. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the first performances, and, having hoped for a success, was deeply mortified when, on the fourth performance, he mounted to the conductor's desk without a sign of applause. For the first time the composer complained bitterly of the attitude of the press, to whom he attributed this failure. As a matter of fact, the criticisms upon _Charodeika_ were less hostile than on some previous occasions; but perhaps for this reason they were none the less damning. It had become something like a pose to misunderstand any effort on Tchaikovsky's part to develop the purely dramatic side of his musical gifts. He was certainly very strongly attracted to lyric opera; and it was probably as much natural inclination as deference to critical opinion which led him back to this form in _The Queen of Spades_ ("Pique-Dame"). The libretto of this opera, one of the best ever set by the composer, was originally prepared by Modeste Tchaikovsky for a musician who afterwards declined to make use of it. In 1889 the Director of the Opera suggested that the subject would suit Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. The opera was commissioned, and all arrangements made for its production before a note of it was written. The actual composition was completed in six weeks, during a visit to Florence. The story of _The Queen of Spades_ is borrowed from a celebrated prose-tale of the same name, by the poet Poushkin. The hero is of the romantic type, like Manfred, Réné, Werther, or Lensky in _Eugene Oniegin_--a type which always appealed to Tchaikovsky, whose cast of mind, with the exception of one or two peculiarly Russian qualities, seems far more in harmony with the romantic first than with the realistic second half of the nineteenth century.