The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Girl meets boy meets regret By Joe Amarante
Yale Opera production of ‘Eugene Onegin’ shows the timelessness of Tchaikovsky’s story
Romantic book fan Tatiana loves slightly older Eugene. But Eugene is a jerk and mostly just loves Eugene. Tatiana moves on and marries another. Eugene then realizes he loves Tatiana.
That’s pretty much the plot of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Yale Opera’s final full production under storied artistic director Doris Yarick-Cross, to be performed Friday through Sunday at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. It’s set more than a century ago, but the story seems pretty relevant today.
In a phone chat with Paul Curran, stage director for the Yale Opera production, we first seek the proper pronunciation of the title of “Eugene Onegin,” which is a popular one in Russia and highculture places but not so much in the rest of the world.
“What’s the proper way to say it — O-knee-gun?,” I ask, knowing it can’t be “On-Again.”
“In Russian, it’s Yiv-geny Onyay-gyen,” says Curran, a welltraveled director who speaks fluent Russian and lives on Long Island.
“Yiv-gee-knee Oh-knee-gin, OK,” I say.
He repeats his pronunciation to correct me. I repeat mine as if I’ve changed it. My eyes dart to my computer, hoping there’s a supertitle to explain things, like in today’s opera.
“No,” he says quickly. “You don’t say O-nya-gin, you say Ahn-yay-gin, like a slight ‘ah.’ ”
“Look at these characters: There’s a wealthy ne’er-do-well who just runs around the world partying, having a good time, doesn’t do a scrap of work and is famous for being famous. Hashtag Kardashian, Hilton, whatever you want to call it.”
Paul Curran, director, Yale Opera production of “Eugene Onegin”
We move on. So, what excites the savvy Curran about this Yale production (which will also feature the Yale Philharmonia led by Perry So)? “Very simple. The students . ... I come to Yale to work with these young people,” says Curran. “They need to know a standard of professional excellence that they’re going to be meeting when they get out of here very shortly.”
Curran, who has directed theater’s familiar (“La Traviata”) and obscure ( “Die Königskinder”), loves working with talented people and knows that “you don’t get to go to Yale Opera if you’re not a talented person,” as he puts it. And Curran is impressed. “These kids have prepared this fantastically, I mean immaculately. When I showed up, I really was astonished how well they were prepared both musically and linguistically,” says Curran, who worked as a Russian interpreter when he was a dancer.
The episodic opera is based on Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel about youthful passion, heartless dismissal and lasting regret. “Tchaikovsky wrote it for students, for the Moscow Conservatory, and it premiered in 1878,” says Curran. “... So it’s a young people’s opera about young people.”
Tatiana is “quiet and rather bookish,” says Curran, “and she becomes obsessed with this man who comes visiting, who turns out to be a complete rake and, in modern parlance ... an (scatalogical expletive) . ... And then, when she becomes rich and rather famous because she marries, actually, his cousin, he decides he’s in love with her and he comes back to her and basically begs her to give up her life, her marriage, her reputation and everything for him. Of course, she says, ‘Get lost.’ ”
There’s a secondary story about Onegin’s clash with a guy over a different woman that leads to a duel, too. “So I think this story is a fascinating one because actually it’s kind of modern. Look at these characters: There’s a wealthy ne’er-do-well who just runs around the world partying, having a good time, doesn’t do a scrap of work and is famous for being famous. Hashtag Kardashian, Hilton, whatever you want to call it.”
There are parallels to today’s scene, with its cable TV and social media stars, then.
“What I don’t need to do, as a director, is ... hit you over the head with that ... with a sledgehammer and do a modern production where she looks like a Kardashian,” says Curran. “...
We’re doing it in an early 20th-century style ... and the parallels become very clear.” Curran laughs when he points out the oft-stated intention to base the production on “characters and relationships — wow. (But) this is the reason: These are young singers at the beginning of their careers. I think it’s vital for them, absolutely essential for them, to have the ability and be challenged to create their own characters, to discover, to excavate what a character is ... without overlayering it with too many conceptual ideas.”
For years, Yale Opera has produced the entertaining and varied “Yale Opera Scenes” in the fall (when a song from “Onegin” was sung in 2018) and also its full-staged spring semester production. Yarick-Cross and husband Richard Cross, who have served on the music school’s faculty since 1983 and 1995, respectively, plan to retire at the end of the current academic year.
Tchaikovsky didn’t call the episodic “Onegin” an opera but “lyric scenes,” said Curran. The great conductor told folks in letters
that “some of the scenes end with a bang and some just drift away.” Curran says you need to listen to the piece with Tchaikovsky’s life situation in the back of your head. “Tchaikovsky was a man who was, within his own time, as openly gay as he dared to be,” said Curran, “and he was a man who was tortured by that who married a young woman ... and he wrote to his brother ... ‘I really tortured that woman; I was so stupid to marry her.’ ” But Tchaikovsky was also identifying with a character running off to hedonistic pursuits instead of choosing the marriage he wished for himself, says Curran.