Rupert CHRISTIANSEN
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1879)
With its sensitive insight into the heroine Tatyana’s psyche and its marvellously supple, lyrical score, this supremely humane work has become the most popular of all Russian operas in recent years.
Plot
On a modest country estate in early 19th-century Russia, the widowed Madam Larina lives with her daughters, the effervescent Olga and introspective Tatyana. They are visited by their neighbour the poet Lensky, who is courting Olga, and his urbane friend from St Petersburg, Eugene Onegin.
Tatyana becomes infatuated with Onegin and spends all night writing him an ill-advised letter confessing her feelings. He rejects her advances coldly but politely. At Tatyana’s birthday party, Onegin flirts with Olga. Lensky is enraged and challenges Onegin to a duel. Onegin shoots Lensky dead and flees into self-imposed exile.
Many years later, Tatyana has married the elderly Prince Gremin, and has now become a great lady in St Petersburg society. Onegin returns after years of travel abroad and encounters her at a ball. He remorsefully realises that she could have been the one to save him from a wasted life. They meet in private: Tatyana admits that she still loves Onegin, but it is too late – she is committed to her husband.
Onegin is left alone in despair.
Background
This opera’s libretto was adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel by the composer and Konstantin Shilovsky. Much of the score was written in 1877-8, during the disastrous period of the homosexual Tchaikovsky’s ill-advised marriage to his ex-pupil Antonina Milyukova. Like Tatyana, she had brought herself to his attention by writing him a confessional love letter, but it seems that this was merely coincidental – Tchaikovsky had expressed a wish to set to music that celebrated episode in Pushkin’s novel long previously.
The first production was staged by students in Moscow in 1879; its professional premiere followed two years later at the Bolshoi. Liszt and Mahler were among its earliest European admirers.
In Britain, it was oddly slow to catch on, and it is only since the late Sixties that it has entered the mainstream repertory. Among many recent stagings, those directed by Peter Hall at Covent Garden and Graham Vick at Glyndebourne are outstanding. A deconstructed version directed in 2007 by Krzysztof Warlikowski at Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich showed Onegin and Lensky as lovers and caused predictable outrage.
What makes it so great?
Although it could be argued that Tchaikovsky’s adaptation shortchanges Pushkin’s subtly ironic comedy by turning the story into the stuff of romantic melodrama, this is an opera that touches the heart and tells the truth about painful human feelings.
At a time when Russian opera was dominated by historical and mythological dramas, this novelistic intimacy of scale was a radical gesture. In reference to its focus on female vulnerability, the musicologist Richard Taruskin has called it “the Russian counterpart to Traviata or Manon … we can ‘see’ and ‘feel’ Tatyana – her movements, her breathing, her heartbeats – in her music”. Lensky and Onegin are characterised musically with equal perception: John Allison has also astutely pointed out how the opera “is as much about three wasted lives as about the collision between two Russian worlds, cosmopolitan decadence versus rustic provincialism”.
The main roles are all relatively easy to cast, and Tchaikovsky’s fluent vocal lines present no horrendous technical challenges, though it is important to find a lyric soprano as Tatyana who can suggest both the shy bookish fragility of the country girl of the first scene and the mature passionate woman of the last, as well as a baritone who can make Onegin’s behaviour seem sympathetic rather than snobbish and caddish.
In the course of the opera, the mood changes from folksy-rustic simplicity to fiery, no-holds-barred dramatic intensity, but its emotional centre occurs in the second scene, when Tatyana spends the night writing her fateful letter to Onegin. Here, over a 12-minute span, the music embodies all the girl’s anxieties, aspirations and hesitations, crowned by a marvellous orchestral crescendo and the sound of a solo oboe representing a shepherd piping in the dawn.
Other highlights include the opera’s enchanting opening tableau in which
Olga and Tatyana sing a parlour duet as their mother and the housekeeper chatter about the past; the aria replete with Russian melancholy that Lensky sings before his duel with Onegin; the contrast between the bucolic chorus of haymakers in the first scene, the jolly waltz at Tatyana’s birthday party and the grand polonaise at the St Petersburg ball; and the scalding confrontation between Onegin and Tatyana that brings the opera to its heated yet open-ended conclusion.
Recordings
There is no absolute front-runner among the audio recordings, and most Russian versions are marred by coarse or wobbly singing.
The safest choice would be between the dramatically taut performance conducted by Semyon Bychkov, with Nuccia Focile and Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the leading roles (Philips), and the lusher, more romantic reading conducted by James Levine with Mirella Freni and Thomas Allen (Deutsche Grammophon).
Two DVDS, both filmed at the Metropolitan Opera, give immediate pleasure: Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky make a vocally and visually glamorous Tatyana and Onegin in Robert Carsen’s attractive staging, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Decca); likewise Anna Netrebko and Mariusz Kwiecien in Deborah Warner’s equally agreeable vision of the piece, also conducted by Gergiev (Deutsche Grammophon).
For a more adventurous approach, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s strangely compelling production, with Tatiana Monogarova and Mariusz Kwiecien conducted by Alexander Vedernikov, rewards attention (Bel Air).