Main Characters
| Character | Voice Type | Description |
| Frederick "Freddie" Trumper | Tenor | "The American": The United States' champion—a self-absorbed, fame-and-fortune-seeking, short-tempered, Russophobic bad boy, who either matures, aiding Anatoly a year after his own defeat, or remains selfish and wins (depending upon the version). |
| Anatoly Sergievsky | Baritone/Tenor | "The Russian": The Soviet Union's champion—a troubled father and husband who despises the propaganda and politics of the tournament, eventually deciding to defect from his homeland, even at the cost of deserting his family. |
| Florence Vassy | Mezzo-Soprano or Belter | Freddie's strong-willed English (though, American, in the Broadway version) second and paramour, who was born in Budapest and separated from her presumably captured or killed father during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, having now no further knowledge of his whereabouts (though she is of Czech birth in the Sydney version); she feels strained by Freddie's brashness and falls in love with Anatoly, eventually becoming his mistress. |
| The Arbiter | Baritone/Tenor | The coldly objective, no-nonsense referee of the championship tournament and also the president of the International Chess Federation. |
| Molokov | Bass or Bass-Baritone | Anatoly's slick second who is also, in fact, a manipulative KGB agent; in the West End version his first name is mentioned as Alexander; in the Broadway and Sydney versions, it is Ivan. |
| Walter de Courcey | Bass-Baritone | A media personality of the tournament and a secret CIA agent; his surname is sometimes spelled "de Courcy." |
| Svetlana Sergievsky | Mezzo-Soprano or Belter | Anatoly's estranged wife who, under Molokov's machinations, tries to persuade Anatoly to return to his homeland; although upset at Anatoly's betrayal, she also understands that Florence has given Anatoly something she cannot herself. (In actual Russian, her surname is stylized as the feminine "Sergievskaya.") |
Read more about this topic: Chess (musical)
Famous quotes containing the words main and/or characters:
“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)