Eugene Onegin (Overture Opera Guides) 184749546X, 9781847495464

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Pushkin into Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin
An Appreciation of Eugene Onegin
A Domestic Love
Eugene Onegin: A Selective Performance History
Thematic Guide
Eugene Onegin
Note on the Text
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Select Discography
Eugene Onegin on DVD, a Selection
Select Bibliography
Tchaikovsky Websites
Note on the Contributors
Acknowledgements

Citation preview

overture opera guides in association with

We are delighted to have the opportunity to work with Overture Publishing on this series of opera guides and to build on the work ENO did over twenty years ago on the Calder Opera Guide Series. As well as reworking and updating existing titles, Overture and ENO have commissioned new titles for the series and all of the guides will be published to coincide with repertoire being staged by the company at the London Coliseum. This volume is published to mark a major new production at ENO of Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s celebrated opera after Pushkin’s verse-novel. Directed by Deborah Warner and conducted by ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, the cast is led by Amanda Echalaz as Tatyana, Audun Iversen as Onegin and Toby Spence as Lensky. We hope that these guides will prove an invaluable resource now and for years to come, and that by delving deeper into the history of an opera, the poetry of the libretto and the nuances of the score, readers’ understanding and appreciation of the opera and the art form in general will be enhanced. John Berry Artistic Director, ENO November 2011

The publisher John Calder began the Opera Guides series under the editorship of the late Nicholas John in association with English National Opera in 1980. It ran until 1994 and eventually included forty-eight titles, covering fifty-eight operas. The books in the series were intended to be companions to the works that make up the core of the operatic repertory. They contained articles, illustrations, musical examples and a complete libretto and singing translation of each opera in the series, as well as bibliographies and discographies. The aim of the present relaunched series is to make available again the guides already published in a redesigned format with new illustrations, some newly commissioned articles, updated reference sections and a literal translation of the libretto that will enable the reader to get closer to the meaning of the original. New guides of operas not already covered will be published alongside the redesigned ones from the old series. Gary Kahn Series Editor

Sponsors of the Overture Opera Guides for the 2011/12 Season at ENO

Eric Adler Frank and Lorna Dunphy Richard Everall Ian and Catherine Ferguson Lord and Lady Young Ralph Wells

Eugene Onegin Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Overture Opera Guides Series Editor Gary Kahn Editorial Consultant Philip Reed Head of Publications, ENO

OP OVERTURE

overture opera guides

in association with

Overture Publishing an imprint of oneworld classics

London House 243–253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2LL United Kingdom Articles by Caryl Emerson, Roland John Wiley and Natalia Challis first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1988 Articles by Marina Frolova-Walker and John Allison first published in this volume © the authors, 2011 This Eugene Onegin Opera Guide first published by Overture Publishing, an imprint of Oneworld Classics Ltd, 2011 © Oneworld Classics Ltd, 2011 All rights reserved English translation of libretto © Opernführer, Bern Printed in United Kingdom by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall isbn:

978-1-84749-546-4

All the materials in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents List of Illustrations

8

Pushkin into Tchaikovsky Caryl Emerson

9

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin Roland John Wiley

19

An Appreciation of Eugene Onegin Natalia Challis

39

A Domestic Love Marina Frolova-Walker

51

Eugene Onegin: A Selective Performance History John Allison

59

Thematic Guide

75

Eugene Onegin, Libretto

81

Note on the Text

83

Act One

89

Act Two

149

Act Three

187

Select Discography

213

Eugene Onegin on DVD, a Selection

219

Select Bibliography

223

Tchaikovsky Websites

225

Note on the Contributors

227

Acknowledgements229

List of Illustrations 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Alexander Pushkin Title page of first edition of the score The Moscow Conservatory of Music The cast of the first performance Maria Klimentova Sergei Gilyov and Vasily Makhalov (Lebrecht Music & Arts) Leonid Sobinov (Lebrecht Music & Arts) Ivan Kozlovsky (Lebrecht Music & Arts) Act One of Boris Pokrovsky’s Bolshoi production (Planeta) Act Three of Boris Pokrovsky’s Bolshoi production (Planeta) Assen Selimsky and Elisabeth Söderström (Guy Gravett) Ileana Cotrubaş and Thomas Allen (Clive Barda) Andrei Serban’s production at Welsh National Opera (Julian Sheppard) Benjamin Luxon and Galina Vishnevskaya (Daniel Faunières) Wojciech Drabowicz and Elena Prokina (Guy Gravett Collection/ArenaPAL) Orla Boylan (Bill Rafferty/ENO) Solveig Kringelborn and Anthony Michaels-Moore (Kleinetenn) Neil Shicoff and Marianna Tarasova (Metropolitan Opera Archives) Mirella Freni and Nicolai Ghiaurov (Ramella & Gianesse) Galina Gorchakova and Roberto Frontali (Maggio Musicale) Rolando Villazón and Dmitri Hvorostrovsky (Clive Barda) Olga Mykytenko and Margarita Nekrasova (Alain Francella/Bertrand Stofeth) Anna Samuil, Peter Mattei and Ferruccio Furlanetto (Bernd Uhlig) Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production at the Bayerische Staatsoper (Wilfried Hösl) Achim Freyer’s production at the Berlin Staatsoper (Monika Rittershaus) Ekaterina Scherbachenko (Damir Yusupov) Marika Schönberg (Andreas Birkigt) Stefan Herheim’s production at the Holland Festival (Forster)

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1. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) in 1879, the year of Eugene Onegin’s first performance.

2. Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), 1827 portrait by Orest Kiprensky.

3. Title page of the first edition of the score, published by Jürgenson in 1880.

4. The Moscow Conservatory of Music, where Eugene Onegin had its first performance (above); 5. The cast of the first performance in Act Two, Scene One (below).

Some early Russian performers, from top left: 6. Maria Klimentova, the first Tatyana; 7. Sergei Gilyov and Vasily Makhalov, the first Onegin and the first Gremin; 8. Leonid Sobinov and 9. Ivan Kozlovsky, two Lenskys.

10. Act One of Boris Pokrovsky’s classic production, designed by Alena Pikalova, at the Bolshoi Theatre, first seen in 1944 (above). It remained in the repertory until 2006. 11. Act Three of Boris Pokrovsky’s Bolshoi Theatre production (below).

12. Assen Selimsky and Elisabeth Söderstöm in Michael Hadjimischev’s production, designed by Pier Luigi Pizzi, at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1968 (above); 13. Ileana Cotrubas and Thomas Allen in a revival of Peter Hall’s 1971 production, designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman, at the Royal Opera House in 1986 (below).

14. Andrei Serban’s production, designed by Michael Yeargan, at Welsh National Opera in 1980, with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as the dying Lensky and Thomas Allen as Onegin (above); 15. Benjamin Luxon as Onegin and Galina Vishnevskaya as Tatyana in Gian Carlo Menotti’s production, designed by Pasquale Grossi, at the Paris Opéra in 1982 (below). This was Vishnevskaya’s last appearance in the role she had first sung in 1953.

16. Wojciech Drabowicz as Onegin and Elena Prokina as Tatyana in Graham Vick’s production, designed by Richard Hudson, at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1994.

17. Orla Boylan in a revival of Julia Hollander’s 1994 production, designed by Fotini Dimou, at ENO in 2000 (above); 18. Solveig Kringelborn and Anthony Michaels-Moore in Willy Decker’s production, designed by Wolfgang Gussmann, at the Opéra Bastille in 1995 (below).

19. Neil Shicoff as Lensky and Marianna Tarassova in the production directed by Robert Carsen and designed by Michael Levine at the Metropolitan Opera in 1987 (above); 20. Mirella Freni as Tatyana and Nicolai Ghiaurov as Gremin in the production directed by Vittorio Borrelli and designed by Georgy Meskhishvili at the Teatro Regio, Turin in 1988 (below).

21. Galina Gorchakova as Tatyana and Roberto Frontali as Onegin in Alexander Shulin’s production, designed by Christoph Sehl, at the Maggio Musicale in 2000 (above); 22. Rolando Villazón as Lensky and Dmitri Hvorostrovsky in Steven Pimlott’s production, designed by Antony McDonald, at the Royal Opera House in 2006 (below).

23. Olga Mykytenko as Filippyevna and Margarita Nekrasova as Tatyana in Peter Stein’s production, designed by Ferdinand Wögelbauer, at the Opéra National de Lyon in 2007 (above); 24. Anna Samuil as Tatyana, Peter Mattei as Onegin and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Gremin in Andrea Breth’s production, designed by Martin Zehetgruber, at the Salzburg Festival in 2007 (below).

25. Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production, designed by Malgorzata Szczeniak, at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2007, with Michael Volle as Onegin (above); 26. The production directed and designed by Achim Freyer at the Berlin Staatsoper in 2008 (below).

27. Ekaterina Scherbachenko as Tatyana in the production directed and designed by Dmitri Tcherniakov first seen at the Bolshoi Theatre in 2006 and presented at the Royal Opera House in 2010

28. Marika Schönberg as Tatyana in Peter Konwitschny’s production, designed by Johannes Leiacker, at Oper Leipzig in 2010 (above); 29. Stefan Herheim’s production, designed by Philipp Fürhofer, at the Holland Festival in 2011. Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana and Mikhail Petrenko as Gremin (below).

Pushkin into Tchaikovsky Caustic Novel, Sentimental Opera Caryl Emerson It is a paradox of Russian culture that Alexander Pushkin (1799– 1837), that restlessly ironic poet and master of the subtle and swiftly moving scene, should have proved so popular a source for opera. For the nineteenth-century opera libretto tended to heroicize, slow things down, replace narrative irony with fully committed dramatic aria. Conciseness and emotional constraint, those great trademarks of Pushkin’s mature style, transpose poorly into musical drama. In fact, almost everything that Pushkin parodied about Romanticism was, loosely speaking, ‘operatic’. But happily, musical adaptations are not to be judged solely by criteria of fidelity. A great variety of relationships, ingenious and multi-voiced, are possible between a libretto and its source text. The complexities here in fact resemble those we confront when evaluating translations from one national language into another: interlinear cribs succeed on one level and satisfy one purpose, whereas ‘poetic imitations’ are assessed according to other criteria and satisfy us in a different way. The equivalent processes in song-writing and opera would be (on the one hand) literal wordfor-word settings that aim to ‘realize’ the verbal text, and (on the other hand) free adaptations that in effect discard the text once a basic cast of characters and some blunt plots have been extracted. Tchaikovsky’s version of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin belongs to a third and intermediate category, however, in many ways the most theoretically challenging. 9

Eugene Onegin

This last category of opera is organized around the principle of ‘scenes from classic works’. The opera composer follows the source text closely in some areas and violates it appallingly in others. But these departures from the text are not, strictly speaking, infidelities, because the audience of a ‘scenes-from’ opera is expected to know the from. The libretto is not obliged to retell the story; what happens on stage is not new information but rather a reminder of something already intimately known. Such librettos thus presume the sort of audience implied for epic performances. The story is familiar – and thus suspense, sequence of events, and the specifics of start and finish are not at issue. Such cultural knowledge is part of any performance of a ‘scenes-from’ opera, where the audience does not expect a full text any more than a reader, familiar with a novel, would expect its illustrations alone to ‘tell the whole story’. The success and appeal of the transposition lie precisely in the variation of a known text under new circumstances. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – the masterpiece of the nation’s master poet – had achieved that status in Russian culture by 1877. In that year Tchaikovsky, after some hesitation, decided to take on the challenge of an operatic setting. Since that time, lovers of Pushkin have repeatedly maligned the composer and his librettist brother Modest for ‘destroying’ and ‘violating’ Pushkin’s original. Yet a derived text need not, of course, be perceived as a threat or a distortion. Pushkin is put in no danger by the existence of sentimental libretti drawing on his characters and occasionally on his verse. In fact, it could even be argued that Tchaikovsky, far from misreading Pushkin’s original, intended his composition to say something about the incompatibility of opera and novel. In an oft-cited letter to Sergei Taneyev (January 1878), the composer made his fears and intentions clear: I composed this opera because I was moved to express in music all that seems to cry out for such expression in Eugene Onegin […] The opera Onegin will never have a success [at the major houses]: I already feel assured of that […] I would much prefer to confide 10

pushkin into tchaikovsky

it to the theatre of the Conservatoire […] This is much more suitable to my modest work, which I shall not describe as an opera, if it is published. I should like to call it ‘lyric scenes’ or something of that kind.1 Tchaikovsky did in fact subtitle his Onegin ‘lyric scenes’, which suggests not a musical realization or embodiment of Pushkin but something much bolder: selected portions of Pushkin’s novel reworked in the lyric mode. Pushkin’s poetic gift was dry, ironic, often cruel on characters and on readers. Tchaikovsky’s musical gift – by his own insistent testimony – was almost entirely emotional and sentimental. The very existence of this opera alongside its source text serves to reconfirm the uniqueness of Pushkin’s novel rather than to undermine it. What sort of work, then, is Pushkin’s original? Like Boris Godunov, the other great operaticized Pushkin classic, Eugene Onegin has become for western audiences a story that has always been sung. But unlike Pushkin’s dramatic chronicle Boris – which never really succeeded on the stage, and which many would say has gained in stature through its operatic setting – Pushkin’s Onegin was celebrated from the start as an untranslatable miracle of form. Written and published during the years 1824–29, Eugene Onegin is a ‘novel in verse’ of some five-and-a-half thousand lines. It is set for the most part in intricately rhyming fourteen-line stanzas distributed over eight chapters or cantos. On the level of plot, the tale is banal – if not outright repulsive. Eugene Onegin, a young Petersburg fop (or ‘drawing-room automaton’, as Nabokov calls him), wearies of city life and retires to his recently inherited country estate (Chapter One). There he makes friends with Vladimir Lensky, a young and very romantic poet on a neighbouring estate, and together the two plan to call at the home of Lensky’s betrothed, Olga Larina (Chapter Two). The visit takes place. As Lensky sings the praises of his bride, Olga’s older sister Tatyana falls instantly and irreversibly 1 See Modest Tchaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, ed. and trans. Rosa Newmarch (New York: John Lane, 1906), pp. 255–57.

11

Eugene Onegin

in love with the aloof Onegin. She writes him a letter (in seventynine moving, freely-rhymed lines) declaring her love; Onegin does not respond (Chapter Three). Finally he pays a visit to reprimand Tatyana, correctly but condescendingly, for her presumptuous act, adding that he was not made for conjugal bliss (Chapter Four). Tatyana is mortified, and in a terrifying erotic dream imagines herself pursued through snowdrifts by a shaggy bear and ultimately entertained at table by monsters whose master is Onegin. Soon after, Tatyana celebrates her name day. Both Onegin and Lensky attend, and Onegin, giving vent to his playful spleen, teases Lensky by flirting with Olga. Lensky leaves the Larins in a jealous fury (Chapter Five). The following day Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel. Onegin agrees indifferently, and kills his friend on the first shot (Chapter Six). Some time passes. Olga quickly marries another, Onegin leaves for foreign lands, and Tatyana (still smitten) visits Onegin’s abandoned house, seeking in his library some clue to his strange character. Madame Larina, worried about her elder daughter, takes her to the Moscow ‘marriage market’ (Chapter Seven). Several more years pass. Onegin returns to St Petersburg and happens to meet Tatyana at a ball; she has become a sophisticated, well-disciplined society belle, and is married to an elderly general. It is now Onegin’s turn to fall immediately and irreversibly in love. But his requests for an interview (and his passionate letter) all remain unanswered. Only when he arrives at Tatyana’s residence unannounced and falls at her feet does she sternly declare that she loves him still, but has been given to another, to whom she will remain forever faithful. With his unfortunate hero in that symmetrically satisfying position, Pushkin takes leave of his novel (Chapter Eight). Two points must be emphasized about this plot. First, it is told by a witty, aggressive narrator, who only partly speaks for Pushkin, and who weaves into it lengthy digressions, sly ruminations and commentary that in fact constitute the genius of this otherwise undistinguished tale. Secondly, and in apparent contradiction to the above point, the critical reception of Onegin in the nineteenth century tended to strip away precisely what was extraordinary 12

pushkin into tchaikovsky

about the work – this inventive and provocative narrative voice.2 In the 1840s Vissarion Belinsky, ‘father’ of Russian literary criticism, wrote of Onegin and Tatyana as if they were real-life social types, and burdened their relationship with the suffering and sociopolitical impotence expected of educated subjects of the Russian Empire. The radical critic Dmitri Pisarev, writing on the work in the 1860s, railed equally and on the same plane against the author Pushkin, his hero Eugene Onegin, and the critic Belinsky – the first two for their aristocratic enthusiasms and Byronic ennui, and Belinsky for being taken in by them, that is, for blaming the moral flaws of the Pushkins and the Onegins on society and not on the men themselves. Pisarev did not even touch upon questions of irony, narrative voice or the fact that the novel was a fiction. By the time Fyodor Dostoevsky delivered his famous ‘Pushkin Address’ at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow (1880), there was ample precedent for misinterpreting the tone of Eugene Onegin at almost every crucial point. In that speech, Dostoevsky invested Tatyana’s decision not to leave her elderly husband for Onegin with all the moral and millenarian pathos of Ivan Karamazov’s challenge to God. ‘Can anyone,’ Dostoevsky wrote of the heroine, ‘possibly build his happiness on the unhappiness of another?’ Through such readings, Pushkin, an enlightened conservative with profound sympathy for his own beleaguered class, was being successfully reinvented as a left-wing radical in one decade and a right-wing nationalist in another. This history of critical reception should be kept firmly in mind when considering the musical and literary contexts for Tchaikovsky’s 1878 operatic interpretation of Eugene Onegin. By that time, Pushkin’s plot from the 1820s had long since entered the public domain. It was being read through literary and social events of the second half of the century. 2 For an anthology in English of the relevant essays, see Sona Hoisington (ed. and trans.), Russian Views of Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

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Eugene Onegin

Soviet music historians have in fact suggested two different lines along which Tchaikovsky transposed Pushkin’s texts into opera.3 The first might be called the ‘Dostoevsky line’, marked by large, tragic gestures culminating in violence or madness. The central texts here are Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and Queen of Spades, and the relevant Dostoevskian filter is, of course, Raskolnikov. Hermann, the hero of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, does indeed resemble the hero of Crime and Punishment in that he, too, cannot be satisfied with mere disillusionment, with ennui pure and simple. The cold calculations of the ‘superfluous man’ in Pushkin’s tale give way to emotionally extravagant acts of murder or suicide. The other tendency, much more restrained, could be called the ‘Turgenev line’. Here, as in Turgenev’s novels and dramas, we confront a vocabulary of small gestures, domesticity, and patient longing. Whatever crises do erupt are resolved by the strength and self-discipline of women. Clearly, Tchaikovsky’s master text in this line is his Eugene Onegin. Let us consider several aspects of the opera from this point of view. Librettos leave out a great deal, and it should not surprise us that much of Pushkin’s novel is lost – most importantly, the rhythmic pace of that severely uniform ‘Onegin stanza’ which sheathed a garrulous narrator and a world of warring intonations. But on closer inspection it is quite remarkable how much has been left in. Whole chunks of Pushkin’s verse are set almost unchanged: Tatyana’s letter to Onegin (Act One, Scene Two), for example; Onegin’s response (Act One, Scene Three); and Lensky’s farewell verses in Act Two, Scene Two (although they are transposed to the scene of the duel). Occasionally the characters sing to others what Pushkin has them only think. The famous opening stanza of the novel, which Onegin speaks to himself en route to his dying uncle, is sung to Tatyana in the opera at the end of their first meeting (Act One, Scene One). 3 Boris Asaf’yev and Abram Gozenpud have both advanced such theses. See the discussion in B.Ya. Anshakov, ‘O nekotorykh chertakh khudozhestvennogo mira P.I. Chaykovskogo i osobennostyakh pereomysleniya pushkinskikh obrazakh v opere Pikovaya dama,’ in P.I. Chaykovskii i russkaya literatura (Izhevsk: Udmurtiia, 1980), pp. 125–28.

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pushkin into tchaikovsky

Still, other passages are recast from the narrator’s sphere into the mouths of the protagonists, imparting to these characters a strangely naive immediacy. Onegin, for example, sings at the name-day party of his dissatisfaction with his own irresponsible behaviour in ensemble with the insulted Lensky (Act Two, Scene One), and in the following scene – right before the fatal shot is fired – Lensky and Onegin sing a duet drawn from the narrator’s rhetorical plea for reconciliation. To be sure, such operatic juxtapositions and externalizations of the inner self are perhaps inevitable compensation for the absence of a narrator and exploit (quite properly) what music does best. Tchaikovsky goes further, however, subtly re-accenting his characters’ lines so that all genuinely conditional and ambivalent elements are removed. In a famous piece of advice to Lensky in the novel (Chapter Three, V), Onegin, considering the two Larin sisters, remarks: ‘I would have chosen the other one if I were, like you, a poet.’ But the whole novel rests on the fact that Onegin is not a poet. In fact, he creates and imagines nothing, and is almost completely defined by what he negates, by what he has ceased to care about.4 Negation is notoriously difficult to transmit musically, and Tchaikovsky, weaving these lines of Pushkin’s into a quartet between the four principals (Act One, Scene One), has Onegin repeat only the first and more affirmative half of the phrase at the end of the number. In the final category of text – unmistakably marked in Russian, for the poetry is doggerel – there are those lines completely invented by Tchaikovsky in collaboration with his two fellow librettists (his brother Modest and the minor poet Konstantin Shilovsky). Exemplary here are Lensky’s love transports and Gremin’s famous aria. The effect of these amateur interpolations into a scene dominated by chunks of Pushkin’s text is most peculiar on the Russian ear that knows Pushkin’s Onegin by heart. They tend to make the whole ironic, and bring, as it were, two quite separate universes into 4 See J. Douglas Clayton, Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), ch. 5.

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Eugene Onegin

contact. But as Tchaikovsky said of his later opera The Queen of Spades, he stood by the scene and not by the word.5 What, for him, were the crucial scenes? The answer is easy enough: those scenes where Tatyana is central, and particularly where she is in a state of painful longing.6 The entire opera is in fact told from her point of view, with her reactions to the world given primary expression. Tchaikovsky did not much like Onegin. Significantly, the opera opens not on the hero’s dissolute life in St Petersburg but directly on material from Chapter Two: the two Larin daughters and their mother, singing of the blessedness of habit and fidelity. Ambivalent or erotic elements, such as Tatyana’s dream, are passed over in silence. In his work on the opera, Tchaikovsky appears to have progressively ‘cleansed’ his heroine. In the first version of the libretto, the ending was considerably more painful and passionate for both parties: Tatyana struggled with her conscience over many pages, even allowing herself to fall into Onegin’s arms – and when she finally found the courage to dismiss her suitor, he cried out for death to release him. Ultimately, however, Onegin was reduced to repeating his declaration of love to a stern audience and his passion was in no way ennobled. One reading of the final scene7 even suggests that Tchaikovsky intended us to perceive Onegin’s desperate courtship of Tatyana ironically – since the composer sets this frantic wooing to orchestral themes and textures first heard in Onegin’s rejection of Tatyana in Act One, Scene Three. Tatyana knows that Onegin has not changed, that his themes are thin, and the presence of 5 From Tchaikovsky’s letter to his brother Modest, 20th February 1890. See the discussion of this, and other particulars of Tchaikovsky’s libretto aesthetic, in E.M. Orlova, Pyotr Il’ich Chaykovskiy (Moscow: Muzyka, 1980), pp. 171–81. 6 For more on the nature of Tchaikovsky’s borrowings from Pushkin, see Gerald Abraham, The Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 147–54; and Gary Schmidgall, Literature as Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), ch. 7. 7 Nicholas G. Zekulin (University of Calgary), ‘Evgenii Onegin: Novel to Opera. The Art of Adaptation’, paper delivered at Pushkin Symposium, University of Ottawa, February 26–28, 1987.

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pushkin into tchaikovsky

Lensky’s themes throughout the final act continually reminds us of that act of indifferent violence. Indeed, Tchaikovsky had little faith in Onegin. As in Turgenev’s novels, this sort of man is morally disoriented and – for all his rhetorical skill – not a little trivial. It is the woman who absorbs the pain of difficult choices, and she does so with dignity. Her drama is a domestic one. In a letter to his publisher Jurgenson (February 1878), Tchaikovsky shared his own hopes for Eugene Onegin. He was eager that parts for the opera be made available as soon as possible, even before the premiere. ‘This opera, it seems to me, will sooner have its success in homes and, if you will, on the concert stage than on the grand stage’, Tchaikovsky wrote. ‘The success of this opera must begin from the bottom up, and not from the top down. That is, it is not the theatre that will make it known to the public but, on the contrary, the public, little by little becoming familiar with it, will come to love it, and then the theatre will stage the opera in order to satisfy a demand of the public.’8 There could not be a more accurate expression of the private space, domestic values, and fragmentable performance that Tchaikovsky envisioned for his ‘lyric scenes’. And in this way the composer, while fully resisting Pushkin’s irony, displays a curious fidelity to Pushkin’s text. The original Eugene Onegin – which Pushkin called a ‘free novel’ – had emerged in instalments over a number of years. Its readers, experiencing these successive fragments, matured along with the novel’s protagonists. The intimate, open-ended scenes that Tchaikovsky desired for his listening public had been part of Pushkin’s agenda for his Onegin as well.

8 P.I. Tchaikovsky, Perepiska s P. I. Yurgenson, vol. I (1877–1883) (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1938), p. 32.

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Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin Roland John Wiley Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived.

– Gregory of Nyssa

‘Onegin’ as drama Russians have always esteemed Eugene Onegin. Is it, in Boris Asaf’yev’s hyperbole from Symphonic Etudes, a flower of the field, ‘one of those rare works of art which so integrally enters into life and intertwines with life so closely that the two together become a vital, inevitable fact […] which affectionately warms the spirit’?1 Let us consider the relationship of drama to music in an attempt to answer this question. Like Musorgsky in Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky and his co-librettist Konstantin Shilovsky retained in Onegin large segments of Pushkin’s text, adapted Pushkin’s words in other passages, and relocated many lines in their libretto. This produced a story with distinctive theatrical attributes, which are discussed in the other essays in this guide. In the process of adaptation, Tchaikovsky made the subject his own. The composer’s direct emotional engagement with the characters and the demands of the theatre take precedence over the poet’s more detached view. For example, in Tchaikovsky, 1 Igor’ Glebov (Boris Asaf’yev), Simfonicheskiye etyudy (St Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaya filarmoniya, 1922), p. 177.

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Lensky’s behaviour at Tatyana’s name-day party is much less discreet than in Pushkin. Lensky creates a public scene, whereas in the poem he leaves the party when Olga refuses him the cotillion in favour of Onegin, resolves to challenge his friend, delivers his note the next day, sees Olga again after that, and duels only the second morning after the party. In the opera, Tatyana is tempted for a moment to act on her love for Onegin when he declares himself at the end. In Pushkin she never wavers in her fidelity to her husband. Tchaikovsky also specified the characters’ ages more closely than Pushkin had: Onegin is twenty-two, Lensky nineteen, Tatyana seventeen, Madame Larina fifty-six, the nurse seventy, and Gremin forty-five. These details, preserved in the composer’s draft of the libretto, were not published in the score. Character study is central to both poem and opera. The change of medium, however, prevented Tchaikovsky from following all the beautiful digressions on character which Pushkin scattered throughout the poem. Instead, the composer focuses on Tatyana, Lensky, and Onegin in Acts One, Two and Three respectively. Of these Tchaikovsky loved Tatyana most. She was, in the composer’s description to Nadezhda von Meck: …full of the pure feminine beauty of a maidenly soul, still not touched by contact with real life; hers is a dreamlike nature, vaguely seeking an ideal and passionately driving after it. Seeing nothing approaching her ideal, she remains calm but unsatisfied. But it had only to happen that a person appear who in externals stands apart from the milieu of the common-provincial, and she imagined this to be her ideal, and she is overcome with passion.2 ‘I came to see’, Madame Larina explains to Tatyana, ‘that there are no heroes in real life.’3 And there is none in the opera. But 2 P.I. Tchaikovsky, Perepiska s N.F. fon-Mekk, vol. III (1882–1890) (Moscow– Leningrad: Academia, 1936), p. 227. 3 See libretto, p. 107. Quotations from the libretto are given in the trans­lation used in this edition. Those from the novel are from Charles Johnston’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) [Ed.].

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contact with ‘real life’ in the form of actions by Onegin destroys Tatyana’s dreams in the first act and Lensky’s in the second; in the third, Tatyana’s commitment to ‘real life’ shatters Onegin. This process is set in motion because the lovers seem to be mismatched: Lensky loves Olga, Tatyana loves Onegin. ‘Can you really be in love with the younger one?’ Onegin queries Lensky in the quartet, ‘I should have chosen the other, / had I been, like you, a poet!’ Onegin is right, and such plot as develops in the opera bears out his remark. Onegin is a tale of what might have been had events been ever so slightly different or fate the least bit kinder. ‘Happiness was within our reach, / so close’, sing Tatyana and Onegin in the final duet. For the empiricist the attribution of any occurrence to fate is unacceptable. Human events are determined by human actions. For Tchaikovsky, if his letters accurately reflect his beliefs, fate was a controlling factor in human affairs which might seem to be attributable to pure chance, and over which a person’s actions had little influence. In Onegin, fate thus functions in two ways. It is called upon to explain events unpersuasively explained by chance. How is it, for instance, that Onegin happens to visit Madame Larina’s estate in the first place? Fate also interacts with society’s rules and customs. A character vexed by the tension between the expectations of social ritual and the temptation to thwart them will rationalize a course of action by invoking fate. Much of Tatyana’s distress in the Letter Scene can be traced to this tension, placed in relief by her conversations with the nurse, who has never challenged expectations. But Tatyana does not escape fate by yielding to social pressure. When she rejects Onegin in the last act she is acting out of moral duty, a duty which fate has placed upon her by her marriage and which comes before desires of the heart. Nowhere in Onegin does the pressure to conform seem greater than in the duel scene. Neither man despises the other or wants to kill him; both acknowledge that their enmity is superficial and ask themselves if they should not burst out laughing and part friends before blood is spilled. They don’t, and social ritual becomes the agency of fate. 21

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Appreciating Onegin rests with understanding the rich complexities as expressed by the aspirations of the characters. Tchaikovsky (like Pushkin) illuminates the universal traits of the characters, and through them ponders the nature of beauty and creativity. Some parts of the opera are straightforward; others, ‘untheatrical’ and ‘lacking in action’ (Tchaikovsky’s terms), challenge us to seek beyond what is immediately perceived. Act One In the orchestral introduction Tatyana’s theme [1a]4 is presented first in single phrases, then in sequence. The stronger, richer variant of this theme [1b], which occurs repeatedly later in the act, hints at the strength of character beneath Tatyana’s demure exterior. The first scene has a simple structure in three parts: the opening tableau in Madame Larina’s garden, the interlude with the peasants and the visit of Lensky and Onegin. This visit, preceded by Olga’s short aria about herself, serves as an exposition of the characters. The visit also advances the narrative from absolute dramatic stasis to a point where it is possible for Tatyana to write her letter. The opening tableau is remarkable for the lack of excitement when the curtain goes up. There is no crowd, no movement, no engaging stage business to arrest the eye or ear. Two activities are proceeding at once, neither of which seems very important: Madame Larina and the nurse are making jam and the two girls are singing inside the house [2]. Activity without underlying dramatic momentum establishes the calm of our starting point, utter eventlessness awaiting an event. On closer examination, we discover that something is happening, a counterpoint of music and dramatic motif. Tatyana’s and Olga’s duet, added by the librettists, is composed to Pushkin’s poem ‘The Singer’. A voice is heard in the quiet of the night, a singer of love and sorrow: have you heard the voice? Did you affirm his feelings with a quiet sigh of resignation? The reference to creativity, to the singer, to 4 Numbers in square brackets refer to the Thematic Guide on pp. 75–79 [Ed.].

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the ‘sound of his fife, simple and melancholy’, pointed by Pushkin’s use of svirel’, the Russian for ‘panpipes’ in descriptions of pastoral scenes of ancient Greece, brings hints of Hellenic classicism to the first words we hear in the opera. Could this be an invocation of the muse, in which Tchaikovsky is referring to himself as the ‘singer’ of the opera, or possibly an allusion to the poet Lensky and his melancholy fate? The connection between this duet and Tatyana is indisputable: at the high point of each verse Tchaikovsky states the theme of the introduction, soon to be identified explicitly with her. Simultaneously, Madame Larina and the nurse sing their duet. From the casual recollections of two mature women about their younger days we learn that Madame Larina was married to Larin despite her preference for another man and that household duties compensated for love throughout her marriage. ‘Habit is sent us from above / in place of happiness’, they sing. The motif of loveless marriage sustained by a sense of duty will return in this act when Tatyana talks to the nurse, and again in Act Three to determine the outcome of the opera. For the moment, it serves as a foil for the girls’ song, the unnoticed chatter of reality sounding in counterpoint to the voice of artistic reverie. Peasants come to celebrate the harvest. Their first song [3] is a protyazhnaya pesnya or ‘extended song’, in which the chorus responds to the opening phrase sung by a soloist; it is about unrequited love. The second is a khorovod [4] about a pretty girl and a handsome lad. These choruses forecast the different characters of Tatyana and Olga, a contrast supported by Olga’s own aria [5]. Behind the second chorus is a subtler message, which links it as well as the first with Tatyana. The man coming across the bridge carries a cudgel, and the threat is heightened because one of the girls must come out of the house to see him. Is this a presentiment of Onegin’s arrival? It may be an intentional substitute for the prophecy the poet offers Tatyana in Pushkin (‘Dear Tanya, you’re condemned to perish; / but first, the dreams that hope can cherish / evoke for you a sombre bliss…’), which the librettists omitted. ‘How I love to dream when I hear these songs / and float away / somewhere, somewhere far off!’ is Tatyana’s guileless response. 23

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Lensky and Onegin arrive. After Onegin is introduced, the principals sing a quartet full of intimate revelations. For a moment, dramatic time pauses as if to absorb the shock of this unexpected event. The two men carry on a dialogue in which Onegin chides his friend for choosing the wrong girl; Tatyana admits that she is smitten with Onegin; while Olga remains, as she will throughout the opera, largely unaware of the deeper motivations of the other characters: she points out that Onegin’s visit will set the neighbours gossiping. This ensemble mirrors the opening scene in the joining of two duets to form a quartet, and in the understated presentation of important ideas. Tatyana’s admission prepares us for the Letter Scene, and the fatal conflict between Lensky and Onegin over Olga is adumbrated as Lensky almost takes offence at his friend’s derogatory remarks. After the quartet Lensky pairs off with Olga, Onegin with Tatyana. Consumed by the ardour of a poet, Lensky first formally, then intimately (by changing the form of the second person) proclaims his love for Olga [6]. She is sympathetic but not swept up in Lensky’s transport except to respond, with more portent than she realizes, to his use of the word vechnost’ (literally, ‘eternity’) to describe the twenty-four hours since he last saw her. Called upon in the score to sing ‘with cool politeness’, Onegin nevertheless opens with a lyrical phrase [7], and tells Tatyana that he too was once a dreamer. By having him sing this melody again a few moments later when referring to his dead uncle, Tchaikovsky makes it an expression of his well-polished behaviour in polite company. This use of the music downgrades the warm initial connotations of the theme to an empty formula of social discourse. In Pushkin, Tatyana falls in love with Onegin after a period of longing to fall in love, and waits an unspecified time before writing to him. In the opera her mood is established when she tells of the highly emotional effect of the book she is reading; she responds to Onegin as in Pushkin, but writes to him (according to Tchaikovsky’s draft libretto) a few days later. Her conversations with her nurse, which enclose the Letter Scene, point up her emotional turmoil – by turns painful and exalted. 24

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Tchaikovsky organizes the music of Scene Two (like many other sections of the opera) according to strophic principles similar to those of Wagner’s music dramas. The strophes are not identical, but have enough in common (theme, keys, or sequence of ideas) to provide a strong sense of symmetry with one another. Typically he will mark the beginning of each strophe with a distinctive melody, and continue with new music appropriate to the flow of meaning in the text. He builds the first exchange between Tatyana and the nurse as follows: Introduction. ‘Tatyana alone’ [8] ‘Tatyana’ [1b]; the nurse arrives to see Tatyana to bed. Strophe 1. The nurse’s response to Tatyana’s ‘Let’s talk about the old days’; nurse’s theme [9] in the orchestra, with ‘Tatyana’ as subsidiary theme. Strophe 2. The nurse’s response to Tatyana’s ‘Then how did you get married?’; nurse’s theme in her vocal part. Bridge to Letter Scene ‘Tatyana’s anguish’ [10]. Strophe 1. Tatyana: ‘Oh nurse, nurse, I’m consumed with longing’, [10] in Tatyana’s part. Strophe 2. Tatyana: ‘I’m not ill, / I… Do you know, nurse… I’m… in love’, [10] in orchestra, [9] as subsidiary theme.

The Letter Scene is constructed along similar lines: Introduction [10] with new theme [11]. First pair of strophes [12]: Tatyana begins to write and then breaks off. Second pair of strophes [13]: Tatyana pledges herself to Onegin.

A new theme in this section [14] forms a bridge to the new musical peroration which closes the scene. For all its passion, Tatyana’s letter acknowledges fate, ‘the will of heaven’, and her vow to submit to it. ‘Vsya zhizn’ moya byla zalogom, / Svidan’ya vernogo s toboi’ (‘My whole life has been a pledge / of this inevitable encounter’), she writes. But if Tatyana is submissive, she isn’t blind. She realizes that Onegin is, in large part, a vision conjured up by her own musings, and with commanding perspective on her own emotions of the 25

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moment, she refers to him at the beginning of the scene as a ‘fatal tempter’, and at the end asks: ‘Who are you? My guardian angel / or a wily tempter?’, a line which Tchaikovsky offsets with a new melody [14]. That she intuitively understands the emotional risk she is taking prepares us for the end of this act and the end of the opera. Prediction is one dramatic function of the Letter Scene. Another is to reveal Tatyana’s exceptional personality. If she is impressionable and impulsive, Tatyana is not immature. The conviction of her feelings and her constancy will prove lasting, and she already has the experience of tempering passion with patience and suffering. She goes to her window, draws the curtain and the morning light streams in with a swelling crescendo in the orchestra. The oboe and bassoon play bucolic solos [15] as Tatyana sings ‘The shepherd is playing his pipe… / Everything is peaceful.’ Are these not the panpipes, are these not the shepherd and the brightness of a morning in that Arcadian landscape suggested in the sisters’ opening duet? Suddenly Tatyana finds herself miscast in paradise, a melancholy singer in a carefree world. By distinguishing Tatyana’s thoughts from the reality of her physical surroundings, Tchaikovsky prepares us for her encounter with Onegin; by creating a link with the beginning of the work, he again makes us aware of the delicate symmetries which unify his apparently disparate ‘lyric scenes’. The sunrise at the end of the Letter Scene, and Tatyana’s words ‘Ya zhdu tebya!’ (‘I wait for you!’) also anticipate the duel scene. The nurse returns. When Tatyana calls upon her to send a message to Onegin (a dialogue based on [16]), she never quite grasps the situation. As Scene Two closes do we hear the echo of Shakespeare in the sunrise, a befuddled nurse who talks of marriage and sees to messages, and a young girl in whom impulse and wisdom are combined? The girls’ chorus [17] which opens Scene Three recalls the first chorus of Scene One. There the song was of the harvest, here of picking berries. But the dramatic function is different: this chorus sustains the light-hearted Arcadian atmosphere established by the woodwind [15] at the end of the Letter Scene. It represents the apparent utopia that surrounds Tatyana as she deals with her own realities. 26

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Onegin’s response to Tatyana’s letter is an avowal which is not only troubling to her but, in Tchaikovsky’s presentation of it, potentially troubling to us. The words of his explanation are not disdainful but almost affectionate: were he destined for marriage, Tatyana would be his bride. Yet he is not: ‘But I was not made for wedded bliss, / it is foreign to my soul’ and he imagines a marriage not unlike the one Madame Larina described in the opening tableau. Onegin’s music, however, has the same ambivalence in its expressiveness that it had in Scene One. Again he is called upon to sing ‘somewhat coldly’, again Tchaikovsky gives him a lyrical melody [18 and 19], and again the listener comes away wondering if the sentiments expressed were heartfelt or merely dutiful and engagingly polite. Will he ever be moved in the way Tatyana was? Her wordless reaction to his speech compounds the ambiguities of the scene. What might she have said? Her silence, and the close of Act One, understated and without a strong sense of finality, forestall answers to those questions. Act Two The orchestral introduction is devoted to a single theme [14] from the Letter Scene, which accompanied Tatyana’s question, ‘Who are you? My guardian angel / or a wily tempter?’ In this scene Onegin will appear to Lensky to be Olga’s ‘tempter’. The action of Scene One is unambiguous. Onegin is irritated by the women’s gossip about him, and decides to take vengeance on Lensky (who brought him to the party) by flirting with Olga. Lensky is incensed, a quarrel ensues, Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel. The curtain rises on a choral waltz [20] which draws on the tradition of dances in French opera and is indebted in particular to the waltz in Gounod’s Faust. Unlike the purely spectacular divertissements of Russian classics like Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Borodin’s Prince Igor (1890), these dances merge drama with spectacle. Friction between Onegin and Lensky develops over Olga dancing so much with Onegin. Lensky expresses his pique, but the waltz ends, leaving him without any distracting activity to cover his words. He next turns to Olga, confronts her with her coquetry 27

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and claims that she no longer loves him. But Onegin interrupts this exchange to accompany Olga in the cotillion and Lensky is frustrated again. Another distraction is the appearance of Monsieur Triquet, who sings couplets dedicated to Tatyana on this, her name day. In Pushkin, Triquet is a ‘modish gentleman, recently from Tambov’ (a contradiction, since ‘modish gentlemen’ do not come from the Urals), outlandishly attired in a red peruke, who has refashioned children’s verses into Tatyana’s couplets. Tchaikovsky has taken from Pushkin the Frenchman’s exterior aspect, but he elaborates and changes the significance of the character. Of the two sets of couplets the composer wrote for Triquet (as published in the Collected Works Edition of Tchaikovsky’s music), the first is macaronic in French and broken, almost illiterate (but funny) Russian; it is a bit of comic scene-painting, as in Pushkin, in which Tchaikovsky mimics someone struggling with the Russian language. The second, all in French, is fluent and lovely.5 Triquet invites the guests to contemplate Tatyana’s charm and beauty, and likens her to a star which illuminates both days and nights. ‘Brillez, brillez, toujours, belle Tatiana!’ he sings, keeping a touch of affectation in the final accent. The transformation of Triquet’s scene from a fourteen-line episode in Pushkin (without couplets) into a song of aria-like pretensions invites explanation. The style of his music – the galant phrases which accompany his entrance and the unabashedly Mediterranean consonance of the borrowed tune ‘Dormez, dormez, chères amours’ [21] – might suggest that this interlude is another static, ornamental scene like the one with which the opera began. Except to prolong Lensky’s frustration, it seems to stand apart from the main business of the drama. By troubling to write two sets of couplets, however, Tchaikovsky hinted at another purpose. The relationship between the disjointed, ungrammatical words of the first set and the elegant language 5 Tchaikovsky did not specify which set of couplets (possibly both) should be performed. The first set is surely intended for Russian audiences; the second is suitable for any operatic audience and is the only set that Triquet sings in most productions outside Russia.

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of the second affects our view of Triquet, transformed from a ridiculous dandy into a fair poet. For the first time in Onegin, a singer of songs is presented to us directly on stage and he sings of Tatyana as an inspiration for poetry. In effect, he is declaring her to be a muse. The cotillion [22] is put off until Triquet is finished and Lensky’s anger festers during the delay. Onegin dances his turn with Olga, then takes her to her seat. He spots Lensky and the quarrel recommences as Onegin chides his friend for sulking. At first Lensky maintains control, but as his reproaches grow more indiscreet the other guests notice and stop dancing. In a moment they have surrounded the two men. As he loses control, Lensky in succession declares Onegin not to be his friend, insults him, demands satisfaction and challenges him to a duel. Madame Larina pleads against violence in her house. Repeating the words ‘In your house’ (sung to a variant of [6], his love song in Act One), Lensky initiates the long finale [23], during which Onegin expresses remorse, Tatyana jealousy and anguish, and Olga just joins some of the guests who remark on the men’s behaviour and fear that a duel might in fact ensue. Onegin declares Lensky to be out of his mind, but stands ready to accept his challenge. Lensky bids farewell to Olga ‘for ever’ (a touching echo of the word ‘eternity’ in his address to her in Act One), and the scene ends in an uproar. From his farewell to Olga and throughout Scene Two, it is clear that Lensky is not out of his mind, but responding to the dictates of fate. Tchaikovsky tells us as much in Lensky’s words in this scene (his anger is completely dissipated, replaced by utter resignation) and in the music, starting with the orchestral introduction [24]. Such a clear reference to the beginning of Rigoletto, where the doom of the principal character is represented by similar fanfares, hardly seems accidental. It is dawn in wintertime. Lensky laments his lost youth [25]. Onegin arrives; the adversaries sing a duet [26] as their seconds complete formalities. Lensky and Onegin avoid each other’s eyes but their sentiments, presented musically in near-perfect canon, are exactly the same. They are less angry than incredulous that unreasoning fate has made them enemies and helpless to stop what is about to 29

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happen. Again we hear the beginning of Lensky’s love song to Olga [6], transformed, as the pistols are handed out. A moment later, Lensky is dead. His death seems to be the tragic event foreshadowed in the opera’s opening duet. As Scene Two ends other connections between Tatyana and Lensky come to mind, parallels between the Letter Scene and the duel. Lensky’s soliloquy, like Tatyana’s, is an apostrophe to a loved one. Both scenes end at sunrise, and are marked by the exclamation, ‘Ya zhdu tebya!’ (‘I wait for you!’) Perhaps most strikingly, Tchaikovsky emphasizes the affinity of Lensky and Tatyana by making the principal melody of Lensky’s aria [25] an unmistakable variant of the important melody in the Letter Scene [14] to which Tatyana wondered if Onegin were angel or seducer – Onegin, who in his offhand remark first linked them and who has brought misery to them both. Act Two is framed by the unstated influence of Onegin, because this melody of Tatyana’s is the first music heard in it, and Lensky’s melody the last. The tragedy of Lensky’s death may be argued as more central to the philosophical message of the opera than that of Tatyana’s unhappiness. Pushkin and Tchaikovsky both see the spark of creativity in Lensky, and value above all his vivid appreciation of the beautiful, and his purity of heart. Act Three While continuing and completing the narrative, Tchaikovsky in Act Three also draws parallels with what has come before. The sizeable gap in time and circumstance which separates it from the first two Acts allows him to make it a summary as well as a fulfilment. But it is a summary full of ironic reversal, at the heart of which lies the central irony of the drama: Onegin, who has caused the suffering of others, will presently be his own victim. The irony becomes apparent as soon as the curtain rises. A dance is in progress [27], as it was at the beginning of Act Two, part of a ball at which Tatyana is again a prominent attraction and Onegin a 30

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casual guest. But much has changed: Onegin is now the frustrated lover, Tatyana the object of his affection, and Prince Gremin the self-assured older man. Onegin has, arguably, changed the most. Still bored, he is experiencing genuine remorse for the first time in the opera – anguish about his life, its wasted past and present lack of purpose. Then Tatyana enters [28], radiant if subdued, now Princess Gremina. As Tatyana was instantly smitten with Onegin in Act One, so in Act Three the reverse is true. While neither poet nor composer makes explicit reference to the possibility, Onegin’s self-reproach may have made him especially vulnerable to inspiration at the sight of Tatyana. She is now his muse, and that adds to the ironic effect. Prince Gremin is Onegin’s old friend who, before presenting friend to wife, sings an aria about her [29]. He describes the salutary effects of love (ironic in the wake of Onegin’s rediscovery) and then, in a distinct recollection of Triquet’s apostrophe, describes Tatyana as a ray of sunlight, a bright star on a clear night, an angel. Gremin introduces him; Tatyana, her old feelings revived, claims to be tired and asks to leave. Onegin now reproaches himself for his behaviour toward her before, then expresses his passion. She alone can give meaning to his life. At this point Tchaikovsky gives him a prominent theme from the Letter Scene [11], set to a paraphrase of the text Tatyana sang. The immediate effect is to show the unity of feeling between the characters, but here too there is an ironic twist: that Onegin, more jaded than ever, should still be so far behind Tatyana in reaching the point where her feelings were when she wrote her letter years before. The second scene of Act Three is a reckoning, as the last scenes of each Act have been. Another letter has been sent, with much the same purpose as the first, but Onegin is the author. Tatyana is distressed and crying as she reads it [30], and with the words ‘so that I feel like a young girl again’ we hear her theme [1a] for the first time since Act One. Onegin enters. Tatyana breaks the silence she was unable to break when he addressed her at the end of Act One. She does not so much 31

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reproach him for rejecting her before as question the honour of his motives in asking her to be unfaithful now. This is the worst irony of all: Onegin’s passion, however genuine, cannot reclaim his reputation for incapacity to feel. His sincerity now, like Tatyana’s before, counts for nothing. A moment for decisive action has come, and once again the principals invoke fate. Tatyana confesses that she still loves Onegin, but the opportunity for happiness together has passed. She believes that he is a man of honour [31], but neither the past nor the present can be changed. She stands firm, and Onegin runs out in despair. Tchaikovsky was uncertain for a time about how best to end the opera. In his first version Tatyana struggled with the temptation to join Onegin, and in her anguish claimed to be dying. Gremin appeared and with a gesture ordered Onegin away, to which he responded, ‘O death, I go to seek thee out!’ and ran off. A pianovocal score of this version was published, but without any words set beneath Onegin’s closing melody. Only with the second edition does Onegin sing his final line as we now know it. The ending of Onegin is abrupt and open-ended; it could not be otherwise. With Tatyana’s decision to remain faithful to Gremin, the drama has been played out: we know what she feels about Onegin, and she has given herself up to a life of habit, not of romantic love. Lensky is dead and Olga is married to another man (although Tchaikovsky omits any reference to this). And Onegin, who has shown us no sense of purpose up to now, must continue indefinitely living with this flaw. There is no peroration because there is so little sense of catharsis, so little on which to build a summation. It simply ends. Hidden and perceived in Tchaikovsky’s music ‘Operatic symphonism’ is the term by which some authorities have attempted to account for the relationship of music to words and drama in Onegin. It means, in the broadest sense, that Tchaikovsky’s music is continuously responsive to narrative and character portrayal 32

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while avoiding routine operatic formulas of any kind. We have already observed how themes provide direct and indirect coherence. Tatyana’s melody [1a and 1b] is used unambiguously as a leitmotif in Act One, whereas the thematic relationship which likens her to Lensky [14 and 25] is expressed in subtle melodic variants. Such devices promote unity – an unquestionable virtue – but the more central difficulty in Onegin is providing variety, a problem which originates in the lack of polar contrasts and ongoing tensions in the story. One solution involves a readily perceived distinction between types of music. Another, involving key, is hidden. Together they make Onegin symphonic. The three types of music (as formulated by the late Soviet musicologist Nadezhda Tumanina6) are lyrical, scene-setting, and fateful. Lyricism is pre-eminent in the music of the three principal characters, who at any given moment are moving from neutral or tentative recitative-like themes to fully contoured aria-like melodies. Tatyana’s lyrical music expresses her strength and genuineness of feeling, and gives credibility to the Letter Scene. In Lensky, who seems always on the verge of extremes of feeling, the lyrical is native to his poetical sensitivities. Onegin’s lyricism is more guarded, and only emerges in full flower when his feelings do likewise in Act Three. Lyricism is the foremost means of expressing heightened emotions in Onegin, but it may be affected by the reluctance of characters to let their feelings be known. In such cases the orchestra may provide lyrical music while a character’s emotions (and vocal lines) become liberated. This occurs in the Letter Scene, for example, where the orchestra introduces important themes [12, 14] as if presenting thoughts that come into Tatyana’s mind before she gives them verbal expression. Scene-setting music is what the term implies, with connotations of ethnic character. Tchaikovsky uses it to distinguish the countryside from St Petersburg in music: in Act One by the peasant choruses, 6 For Tumanina’s analysis of Eugene Onegin in full, please see: Vl. Protopopov and N. Tumanina, Opernoye Tvorchestvo Chaykovskogo (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1957), pp. 101–64.

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in Act Two by the choral waltz and the mazurka, and in Act Three by the polonaise and écossaise. Fateful music is brief and strategically placed; it consists of loud, dissonant, mostly harsh sonorities which anticipate fate’s work at the beginning of Act One, Scene Two (leading to the Letter Scene), Act Two, Scene Two (the duel), and Act Three, Scene Two (as the curtain rises on Tatyana with Onegin’s letter). Interwoven among these devices in Onegin is a complex and ingenious system of keys with which Tchaikovsky reinforces its narrative and philosophical message. To be sure, this aspect of Onegin is subtle. The composer never referred to it, and while we may sense the key relationships immediately, our appreciation of their contribution to unity in the opera increases with reflection and study. In effect, the relationships which exist between keys and modes in the opera as keys and modes can form, through association, analogies with situations and characters. The system of keys in Onegin centres around two sets of associations. One applies to the basic premises of the opera: G minor: the country (the opening scene) E minor: fate (the key of Lensky’s aria, and of the end of the opera as Tatyana refuses Onegin) C© minor: Lensky’s death (the pointless squandering of beauty)

Another series of relationships, similar to the first except based on major keys, is established within Act One: G major: arrival of Onegin E major: Lensky’s love for Olga D¨ major: Tatyana; the Letter Scene

The first and third keys within each group are based on opposite scales. No two keys in regular use can be any further removed from one another than these. When we extend this relationship of music theory to the opera, key reinforces situation: Lensky’s death is a break with the harmony of the country scene (in Pushkin’s and 34

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Tchaikovsky’s view, it also affects the wellspring of creative life); and Onegin’s arrival is ominous for Tatyana. The middle keys of each grouping are equidistant from the outer ones, and their associations are appropriate to this relationship: fate interrupts country life to bring about Lensky’s death, but in the beginning Lensky is the intermediary through whom Tatyana first meets Onegin. (The association of fate with E minor may be observed elsewhere in Tchaikovsky’s music, as in Francesca di Rimini, the Fifth Symphony, and The Sleeping Beauty.) In addition, certain relationships between the groupings are also illuminating because some keys in one group share the same scale with a key in the other but are based on a different tonal centre. E major and C© minor are two such relative keys, and suggest the proximity, appearances notwithstanding, of Lensky’s death to his love for Olga. G major and E minor also share the same scale, and make the critical connection between fate and Onegin’s initial visit to Madame Larina’s estate. Elsewhere in the opera Tchaikovsky uses relative keys to bring about a sense of ironic reversal. Onegin’s response to Tatyana in Scene Three, for example, is in B¨ major, the relative of G minor and country life. And when Onegin and Tatyana in Act Three sing ‘Happiness was within our reach’ Tchaikovsky moves to B¨ minor, the relative of D¨ major, Tatyana’s key. Keys separated by a semitone, also distantly related to one another, are yet another means by which Tchaikovsky reinforces dramatic nuance. In the Letter Scene, for example, the principal key of D¨ is juxtaposed with episodes in keys a semitone on either side, C major and D minor. All three are coordinated with Tatyana’s changes of mood, C major for rapturous flights of fancy, D minor for moments of sober reality, and D¨ for the expression of her vulnerability. These associations continue throughout the opera: the A major of the girls’ chorus at the beginning and the end of Scene Three may be taken as a dominant function of D minor, and represent reality in the context of Tatyana’s musings (it echoes the A major of the nurse’s stories of the past before the Letter Scene). After Lensky’s death, Tchaikovsky returns to D minor to end the act, not the E minor of Lensky’s aria or the C© minor of the death itself, as if to bring us back, benumbed, 35

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to what is real – sunrise on a grey, muddy, frozen day. The key of Tatyana at the ball is D¨; she is still a vulnerable Tatyana, and she is tempted for a moment (also in D¨) to give in to Onegin’s entreaties. How appropriate, in this context, is Tchaikovsky’s shift to D major just for Tatyana’s ‘I love you’, a touching moment of reality in this emotionally turbulent scene. Tchaikovsky’s use of E minor shows us how fate intervenes to shape the tragic outcomes of Acts Two and Three. At the party in Act Two, Onegin’s decision to punish Lensky by flirting with Olga is wilful, and is pointed by his dancing the cotillion with her after Lensky had asked her for that dance. The cotillion thus begins in G major, Onegin’s key. No sooner has an interlude in the dance given Onegin the opportunity to make fun of Lensky than Tchaikovsky moves to E minor, for this is the moment when Onegin yields control over events to fate. Lensky’s burst of anger cannot be subdued by Onegin or anyone else, and leads to the challenge and the duel. In Act Three Tchaikovsky does not move decisively to the key of fate until Tatyana overcomes the temptation to go with Onegin and resolves to remain faithful to Gremin. Hers is a wilful act, but represents to Onegin the fateful outcome of a sequence of her actions over which he yielded control when he rejected her in Act One. The principal virtue of Tchaikovsky’s key system is to establish and emphasize the kinds of contrasts which are understated in the libretto. The keys also enrich the music in other ways, especially in Act Three. That Tchaikovsky moves directly and emphatically to D¨ major when Tatyana enters in that Act affirms that she is the same person she was at the end of the Letter Scene. When Onegin borrows Tatyana’s text and melody from the Letter Scene, it is relevant that he sings in B¨ major, for that was the key of his rebuff to Tatyana in Act One. The choice deepens the rich stream of irony which runs through the act. Tchaikovsky treats the final scene of the opera with special care. It opens with Tatyana in the key of Lensky’s death singing a melody which mimics that of the aria her husband has just sung (compare [30] with [29]) while she sorrows over the letter she has just received from the man she really loves. Tragedy and responsibility and passion 36

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are all concentrated here. For a moment, when Tatyana sings that Onegin is honourable [31], the key of the Letter Scene returns. As we have just observed, however, when she resolves to remain true to her husband, Tchaikovsky moves to E minor. Key is but one of the complex dimensions of Onegin which deserves closer scrutiny. Speech rhythms, folk intonations, and orchestration also contribute to the labyrinth of relationships which bind together these ‘lyric scenes after Pushkin’. But, in the end, Onegin is only partly remarkable for the finesse and power of its artistry. It survives by the eloquence with which Tchaikovsky illuminated the tragedy hidden behind a death in the country and a life misspent in St Petersburg.

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An Appreciation of Eugene Onegin Natalia Challis …We are such stuff As dreams are made on… – The Tempest

As Shakespeare illuminates the whole of English culture, its inner life and nuances and aspirations, so Pushkin and Tchaikovsky give us an insight into Russian life and its ideals. All three artists share a capacity for love and sense of humanity. The creative essence of Pushkin’s art was best expressed by Dostoevsky, who in his own work perhaps more than any other writer spoke of the conflict of Russian culture with western; but he also saw the two united in the grace of Pushkin’s poetry and in Pushkin’s ability to understand and express the human condition regardless of nationality. This universality is present in Tchaikovsky’s music when he re-conceives in western forms the Russian pesennaya kul’tura. This term for the types of expression in Russian song refers more broadly to how everyday life in Russia, its joys – love and marriage – and sorrows, such as parting and death, had an ancient cultural and ritual expression in song. By making use of this tradition, the art of both poet and composer does not withdraw from reality, but rather moves towards it, and we come to understand that certain dreams are alike, whether in rural Russia or on an island ‘full of noises, sounds and sweet airs’. It is a tradition among Russians to take Eugene Onegin, both poem and opera, as a means to understand and share the spirit 39

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of what is Russian. Pushkin’s poetry and Tchaikovsky’s music reflect our yearnings; we are companions in their artistic quest. We may even come to a discovery anticipated by neither poet nor musician and experience something in their work of which they may not have been aware. All art possesses an inner freedom, the potential for interpretation which it offers its beholders. Through Prospero, Shakespeare grants this freedom to his art, and in the last chapter of Onegin Pushkin too speaks of this inner freedom, which he could see but through a glass darkly when he began his poem. Pushkin described his art as a gift of grace, which he received freely and freely gave up again to his audience: In my childhood she loved me And handed me the flute of seven pipes, Smiling, she listened to me, And gently touching the sound holes of the hollow reed With my weak fingers, I played already then, Both solemn hymns inspired by the gods And songs of peaceful Phrygian shepherds. From morn till evening in the groves’ mute shade I heeded diligently the secret maiden’s words; And rejoicing me with unexpected favour, Having brushed the curls back from her sweet brow, She herself took the panpipes from my hands, The reed was animated by divine breath And my heart filled with sacred enchantment. Pushkin, The Muse1 When Eugene Onegin was suggested to Tchaikovsky as a possible text for an opera he first demurred, then re-read the poem ‘with delight’, as he wrote, ‘and spent an absolutely sleepless night, the result of which was the scenario of a charming opera with Pushkin’s 1 Translations, except for those from the libretto, are the author’s [Ed.].

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text […]’ ‘What a deep mine of poetry there is in Onegin!’ he continued later. ‘I do not deceive myself, I know that there will be few theatrical effects in the opera. But the poetic richness everywhere, the humanity, the simplicity of narrative, together with the inspired text will readily overcome these defects. I am writing my music with great pleasure and I know with certainty that the poetic quality of the narrative and the ineffable beauty of the text will come through.’2 Tchaikovsky wrote his music in rare consonance with the verbal and musical rhythms and the aesthetic of Pushkin’s text. The expressiveness and suppleness of language in the poem are translated into a subtle feeling of harmoniousness which permeates the opera. Pushkin perceived sounds musically, as a true poet. The words of the poem fill it with sounds of nature – of changing seasons, leaves rustling in the wind, the cries of birds, crickets chirping in the fields. In the following passage, for example, Pushkin invokes an autumnal image by what is described: […] the mysterious canopy of forests with a sad rustle bared itself, a mist settled on the field. A caravan of honking geese stretched out towards the south… Onegin, Chapter Four, xl In Russian, the gait of the metre and the subtle repetitions of consonants ‘s’, ‘sh’ and ‘zh’ actually replicate the rustling sound of the falling leaves, while in the last two lines of the passage, the shift to consonantal stress on ‘g’ and ‘k’, combined with the upward gesture implicit in looking from earth to sky and a rise in tessitura, capture in sound the new image of the cackling geese:

2 P.I. Tchaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, vol. VI (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye musikal’noye izdatel’stvo, 1961), pp. 135–36.

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Lesov tainstvennaya sen’ S pechal’nym shumom obnazhalas’, Lozhilsya na polya tuman, Gusei kriklivykh caravan Tyanulsya k yugu… The effect is not unlike the ‘Spring Song’ in Act One of Wagner’s Die Walküre, where similar shifts of consonantal values coincide with changes in poetic image. Sounds and voices of the city and the countryside are heard in this way throughout Pushkin’s poem. We hear, in Dostoevsky’s phrase, the ‘passing choir of this earth’. Tchaikovsky does not reproduce the fullness of Pushkin’s world, for he gives us only seven scenes, in which, with an impressionist’s brush, he depicts the quiet mood of late summer soon to be disturbed, the air of sadness of early autumn, death in the stillness of deep winter and hints of spring and hope – beyond the end of the stage narrative. Hope is alluded to in Pushkin’s poem ‘The Singer’, which Tchaikovsky chose as the text of the girls’ duet at the beginning of the opera. The poem echoes and replies to Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, which was translated into Russian by Pushkin’s teacher, the poet Zhukovsky, whose version was considered a wellspring of inspiration for Russian poets in the early nineteenth century. ‘The Singer’ may be the key to understanding Tchaikovsky’s concept of Onegin, for the hope which lies at the heart of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ is the hope for forgiveness and the resurrection. Although we do not know Tchaikovsky’s reason for choosing ‘The Singer’, this brief poem unquestionably adds a dimension to his work for us to interpret. Tchaikovsky strove for all possible fidelity to his libretto, set in the 1820s (now called the Pushkin epoch), a time of classical simplicity of mood and dress. It is an epoch which, for Russians, does not date, as we can appreciate from the grace and poise of the unhurried round of country life, as much as from the preserved architectural elegance of ‘Pushkin’s St Petersburg’. Elements of Onegin – the poem and the opera – and events of Pushkin’s life become intertwined on stage. We are visually reminded of Pushkin’s literary presence in the first act, for the stage setting 42

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of the Larin home, the fields and church beyond (as indicated in the libretto) depict Trigorskoye, an estate owned by Pushkin’s friends, not far from Pushkin’s own home Mikhailovskoye, by tradition taken to be the location of Onegin’s ‘charming village manor’. Act Three, in music and dance movement of simplicity and grandeur, evokes the ‘austere, harmonious aspect’ of St Petersburg, beloved by poet and composer (though at times they may have assured us otherwise). And we also recall in the duel scene that Pushkin, like the young poet Lensky, was to be mortally wounded in a duel in the snows of January. Throughout this scene, Tchaikovsky ‘sings out’ (as we speak of the Orthodox funeral service) the dreams of both poets, and this music may bring to mind Horatio’s valediction for Hamlet: Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. The opera thus presents to contemporary Russian viewers images from a very familiar tradition. At the time Tchaikovsky wrote the opera, Pushkin’s poetry was considered a classic but did not enjoy the pre-eminence it does today. Poetry had been overshadowed by the prose of the Golden Age, the novels and inspired literary and art criticism which reflect the often tempestuous aspirations of the middle of the century. Pushkin was considered a worthy poet who founded the literary language but who had been superseded by writers who were thought to have a fuller understanding of Russian needs and ideals. Only Turgenev, Dostoevsky and the poet-critic Apollon Grigoriev saw in him the qualities which, in time, became appreciated by a larger audience. Tchaikovsky in his opera of 1877–79 and Dostoevsky in his Pushkin Address of 1880 almost simultaneously brought to public attention the aesthetic and philosophic depth of Eugene Onegin – the composer in his reconception of the beauty and personal drama of the poem, the writer in his claim that it was an image of Russia’s spiritual state. Both the poem and the opera have a quality in common: simplicity. The Metropolitan Anastasy, a hierarch of the Russian church, wrote of Pushkin’s gift: 43

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Pushkin approaches everything simply and naturally […] He takes all reality as God gave it to us. Like a true artist he contemplates and depicts its scenes calmly and objectively. From this approach springs a childlike spontaneity, clarity, and the purity of his contemplation, the pastel-like lightness and transparency of his design, which make his work equally comprehensible to persons of all ages. We accept his images as simply and spontaneously as we do nature itself. This is that simplicity of genius or the genius of being simple. Together with artistic truth Pushkin everywhere seeks the truth as expressed by humankind, for one is inseparable from the other. He strives to be sincere both with himself and with his reader, which, as Carlyle expressed it, is the stamp of genius.3 This is precisely what Tchaikovsky translated so well into music. By emulating not every detail of narrative, but rather Pushkin’s simpli­ city of design and expression, Tchaikovsky preserved the essence of Pushkin’s art. * * * ‘It is almost impossible to grasp the depth of meaning of Pushkin’s words’, wrote Anna Akhmatova, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century and a Pushkin scholar. Pushkin worked towards the creation of a ‘metaphysical language’, as he called it, which reveals man’s spiritual life. Tchaikovsky responded with a richness of musical nuance fully equal to Pushkin’s sensitivity to the philosophical associations of the poem. Through music he keeps faith with the poet’s dramatic narrative. Tchaikovsky gives the audience a sense of time as it is perceived by each individual in the opera. Onegin and Tatyana, Lensky and Olga, and all whose lives they touch, allude to their dreams and to their awareness of the passage of time in the realization of their dreams. 3 Metropolitan Anastasiy (Gribanovskiy), ‘Pushkin v ego otnoshenii k religii i Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi’, quoted in A.N. Strizhev (ed.), A.S. Pushkin: put’ k Pravoslaviyu (Moscow: Otchiy dom, 1996), p. 68.

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Tchaikovsky emphasizes the words mechtá, a dream or ideal, and mechtán’e, the process of dreaming, of desiring, and shows us how the protagonists reach their ideals, and how Onegin is unable to rise above the process of desire or dreaming. The choices they have made or must make comprise the opera’s underlying dramatic tension, and some of the choices are to be resolved outside the narrative we see on stage. Madame Larina and the nurse sing of the dreams of their youth, unfulfilled then, but now found in their home and family. Olga, in Pushkin’s description, is ‘always bright as the morn’, and in the libretto confesses that she herself is ‘carefree and full of fun’. Lensky takes her for his muse; she may be likened to the image of the cloudless classical poetry which inspired Pushkin in his youth. Lensky, who personifies the Romantic spirit, as encapsulated by Pushkin in his early poetry, loves the physical radiance of his Hellenistic muse. He is introspective, a man with deep emotions and passionate dreams. He compares himself to Onegin: […] wave and rock, poetry and prose, ice and flame are not as different as we are! Pushkin places the passionate element of creativity in Lensky beside the cold worldliness of Onegin, which will devastate Lensky’s dreams. The theme of inspiration destroyed by the worldly and the narrowly rational is also explored by Pushkin in his play Mozart and Salieri. In Lensky’s aria before the sunrise, in Act Two, Scene Two, Tchaikovsky presents the metaphysical language of Pushkin and the poet’s suggestion that Lensky does achieve his ideal before dying with the realization that all is blessed in life and death: ’tis all one; both sleeping and waking have their appointed hour. Blessed is the day of care, blessed, too, the coming of darkness! 45

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Lensky perceives this but cannot accept it, and his anguished call may not be to Olga, his muse, but to an unnamed ‘desired friend’. Critical controversy surrounds the character of Onegin. In his Pushkin Address, Dostoevsky characterizes him as an aimless wanderer through his native land: You see, Tatyana does understand who he is. An eternal wanderer suddenly saw a woman, on whom he had once looked down, in new, splendid surroundings. This is my ideal, he exclaims, here is my salvation, here is the outcome of my anguished boredom. I passed it by, and ‘happiness was within our reach, so close.’ He aspires to Tatyana, strives for her, seeking his deliverance in a new, fantastic dream. Cannot Tatyana see this in him, has she not long ago understood him? She knows with certainty that in reality he is in love with his new fantasy, not with her, the Tatyana humble as before! She knows that he is taking her for someone else, not for who she really is, even that he does not love her, that perhaps he does not love anyone, nor is even able to love anyone, although he is tormented so by his sufferings.4 In his libretto, Tchaikovsky advances the motif of Onegin’s dreams and desires, and his inability to live them and bring them to reality. Onegin scorns Lensky’s dream; he confesses to Tatyana that life with her would be a burden to him; and even on his return to St Petersburg he feels his love for Tatyana ‘as in a dream’. He states that he will be filled with the unrealizable dream of his love and that ‘this is bliss, / this is my only dream, my only happiness!’ Neither Pushkin nor Tchaikovsky passes judgement on Onegin, nor resolves his torment. Consolation (if not salvation) for Onegin’s suffering comes in Tatyana’s ‘I love you’, in her all-forgiving love. Dostoevsky’s pessimism aside, the theme of a man enraptured by a dream develops across the whole of Pushkin’s work, and ends on 4 F.M. Dostoevsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, vol. XXVI (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), pp. 129–49.

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an optimistic note. In The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Gypsies the hero flees civilization to realize his dream. Onegin followed these works, and then, two years before his death, Pushkin wrote ‘The Pilgrim’, a poem inspired by Bunyan, in which he describes not an aimless wanderer, as in Onegin, but a pilgrim who has left all for the sake of a love ‘not of this world’. Could this possibly have been Onegin’s fate as well? While Onegin as a character may be elusive, Tatyana is simple in her spirituality. She is like the flame of a candle, quivering and flickering in the first windrush of love. Here Tchaikovsky beautifully conveys the emotion of one who could abandon all for passion, or could be guided by the love of family and humility of faith taught her by her nurse. Tchaikovsky insisted that the Letter Scene be performed complete, including Tatyana’s conversation with the nurse, so that we clearly understand the source of the girl’s beliefs. Monsieur Triquet, in the old tradition of a name-day panegyric, sings of Tatyana’s spiritual beauty, as yet unrecognized by the others, and wishes her flame to shine for ever. The words of Prince Gremin (partially taken from Pushkin’s text and partially written by Tchaikovsky) pick up this theme of Tatyana’s inner radiance: Onegin, I shan’t disguise the fact that I love Tatyana to distraction! My life was slipping drearily away; she appeared and brightened it like a ray of sunlight in a stormy sky, […] she shines like a star in the night’s darkest hour, in a pure, clear sky and to me she always appears in the radiant, radiant nimbus of an angel! Tchaikovsky’s words are consonant in image and metre with Pushkin’s words in the last chapter of the poem: 47

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There, in mysterious valleys in the springtime, at the cries of swans near the waters, radiant in the stillness, the Muse began to appear to me. The similarity of metre and rhythm may be observed by aligning the two texts above one another. Especially telling is the way Tatyana’s name coincides with Pushkin’s word for swans (lebedinykh), a symbol of dreams and ideals in Russian song: Onégin, yá skrivát’ ne stánu, V te dní v taínstvennykh dolínakh, Bezúmno yá lyublyú Tatyánu, Vesnói pri klíkakh lebedínykh, Tosklívo zhizn’ moyá teklá, Bliz vód siyávshikh v tishiné, Oná yavílas’ i zazhglá. Yavlyát’sya Múza stála mné. Tatyana in her steadfast love becomes the symbol for Pushkin and Tchaikovsky of the reality of their music. Tchaikovsky wrote: [Music] is not an illusion, it is a revelation. And in precisely this lies its victorious strength: thus it opens, reveals to us that which is inaccessible in any other sphere, elements of beauty, the contemplation of which is not temporary, but forever reconciles us with life. It spiritually enlightens and rejoices.5 In the end all great art is a commentary on our wanderings, our pilgrimage to the realization of our dreams. Yet there would be no commentary without inspiration, which comes on the one hand 5 P.I. Tchaikovsky, Perepiska s N.F. fon-Mekk, vol. i (1876–78) (Moscow– Leningrad: Academia, 1934), p. 112.

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from the artist’s muse, and on the other from us, the audience, of whom a certain compassion is expected. In Onegin Tchaikovsky asks us for that compassion in ‘The Singer’, the duet the girls are performing as the curtain rises on Act One. Just as Prospero asks his audience to accept his project and his art, so Tchaikovsky asks us to receive the work he offers us without preconceptions, and with affection.

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A Domestic Love Marina Frolova-Walker Tchaikovsky’s international fame as an opera composer rests on a single work, Eugene Onegin (1879), even though he wrote nine other operas, including one more masterpiece, The Queen of Spades (1890). Surprisingly, much the same could have been said a century ago. We might well ask why he failed to follow the winning recipe of Onegin in any of the following six operas: some of these, like The Maid of Orleans (1881) or Mazeppa (1884), seem so much more conventional and strained. Tchaikovsky tried out so many different routes to public acclaim as an opera composer, but the one time he stumbled upon a path that led him there, he failed to recognize it. Instead, he was consumed by doubt: did Onegin even deserve to be called an opera? (He billed it as a series of ‘lyric scenes’.) Was it fit for the grand stage? (He awarded the premiere to a modest student troupe.) Tchaikovsky’s own lack of confidence in Onegin contributed to its slow ascent in the early years of its existence, but he was still reluctant to trust in its worth when it began to conquer audiences. Tchaikovsky’s doubts, misplaced as they were, help to remind us that the opera was radically new both in content and form. In Onegin, he cut away the paraphernalia of operatic grandeur, exaggeration and elevation. There are no storms or raging fires, no wars or regal processions. Instead, the curtain rises on a scene of jam-making and falls on a final scene set in Tatyana’s claustrophobic room in St Petersburg. The only flash of brilliance is the high-society ball with its obligatory ballet, but this is dramatically justified rather than a mere concession to operatic convention: the audience must 51

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appreciate Tatyana’s changed social situation before the rest of the plot can unfold. The opera is also devoid of the supernatural or exotic ingredients that opera had come to rely on to excite its audiences. And even the central love interest here – the main driving force of the plot – is not conventionally operatic. It is not all-consuming and blind to reason, like the love of Orfeo, nor an absolute and immoral obsession, like Calaf’s love for Turandot, nor the murderous love of Don José, nor again the self-destructive sacrificial love of countless operatic maidens. It is love, more or less, as we ourselves encounter it: born out of chance meetings within certain social situation and conditional upon the continuation of those same social circumstances. It is not that we should think of Tatyana’s love as lukewarm beside Isolde’s or that her sufferings are trivial compared to those of Wagner’s heroine. No, the difference is that Isolde’s love is abstracted and absolute, whereas Tatyana’s experiences unfold in a concrete world that we can recognize. In that concrete world, an absolute love like Isolde’s can take possession of a Tatyana, but only fleetingly, in the fever of a sultry night. The arrival of morning places it in a more sober light. And a change in social circumstances can make it seem futile and irresponsible. Lensky’s love may seem more operatic, since he dies for it, but even here we are made to realize that it was utterly misplaced, for its object is the trivial coquette Olga. Lensky’s death is all the more shocking because of its unoperatic nature: it is an act of folly, especially by the standards of Tchaikovsky’s time (rather than Pushkin’s) when duelling to the death was a shocking rarity. Normal operatic deaths are presented as an inevitability, and tragic or glorious, not as avoidable acts of stupidity. And in Onegin, Lensky’s death also stands alone: after the tense final encounter between Tatyana and Onegin, we know perfectly well that she will not plunge into a river and that he will not blow his brains out – no, they will behave as you or I would, saddened, but sane. This, perhaps, is the first reason for the opera’s universal and enduring success: psychological realism. Why does Tatyana fall in love with Onegin? She doesn’t know him at all. It is not even true to say that she falls in love at their first meeting – she has effectively 52

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fallen in love even before his arrival. Tchaikovsky’s orchestra, which lets us into the inner life of characters, reveals all in a few bars of music [1a]. Tatyana knows that Lensky, who courts her sister, will be accompanied by a friend. She has already heard the talk about this urbane, dark and interesting character and invests in him promise of another life. She knows what to expect from the novels she has read and confidently waits for love to descend upon her. The visitors are about to arrive, the household is in a commotion as everything is made ready to impress the new visitor, but the orchestra is in a turmoil that cannot possibly be motivated by anything so mundane. Instead, Tchaikovsky is presenting us with Tatyana’s thoughts, in which she has already entrusted her life to the unknown guest and perhaps even decided that the story must have a tragic outcome. The mismatch between the orchestral music and the stage action illustrates how Tchaikovsky found his own means to recreate Pushkin’s ironies for the musical stage. Tchaikovsky’s work on Onegin began with Tatyana’s Letter Scene (Act One, Scene Two), the passage that most attracted him in Pushkin’s text. The girl’s imagination has been set alight and she musters all her courage to pour her feelings out on paper in a letter to Onegin. Pushkin created a masterpiece of adolescent psychology there: beginning with a coy politeness, addressing Onegin with a formal You, she reaches the end in a whirlwind of infatuation, when You turns to Thou, and her passionate appeal ‘O come, o come!’ leaves propriety far behind, courting danger. No standard operatic form could embrace this lengthy transformation, so Tchaikovsky trusts in his own abilities, following the changing tone of Pushkin’s text closely. The music has correlates for the events we can see on stage: here Tatyana sits down and puts her pen to paper, now she rips up the first draft. But much more importantly, it traces a great succession of emotions, from the initial timidity, through the longing, the rapture, to the desperate boldness of the final appeal. Then another masterful psychological touch, when she hears a shepherd’s pipe ring out [15]. This could simply have shifted the scene to conventional pastoral idyll, but instead Tchaikovsky uses the device to shake 53

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some sense into Tatyana: ‘The world’s at peace’, she says, ‘but look at the state of me!’ Even before the Letter Scene begins in the opera, Tchaikovsky provides us with an introduction of tragic character, including his trademark sobbing strings [8]. It is worth pointing out that no one among the original Russian audiences would have been unaware of the story’s end – Pushkin’s great verse-novel was universally read and admired in Russia. This lack of suspense leaves Tchaikovsky free to foreshadow later events, imbuing these earlier scenes with a darker colour than the stage action alone would demand. Onegin, having received his letter, eventually comes to speak with Tatyana. His music is deliberately left rather characterless and remains merely polite and gentlemanly [18]. We are placed in Tatyana’s position now and she soon realizes that she knows little about this man. The lack of warmth in his voice makes Tatyana shudder. His arioso is cool and he takes no great pains to be sensitive to her plight, but we can hardly fault him: he is firm in his resolve not to take advantage of Tatyana and speaks honestly about his social ambitions, which certainly do not include marriage to an obscure country girl. Perhaps he flaunts his superior experience of the world too much (Tchaikovsky tells us he is only five years older than the seventeen-year-old Tatyana), and perhaps we think he might have shown a good deal more kindness, but the truth is that he is not in love and that is the end of the matter. But in that case, what could make him fall in love with Tatyana a few years later? The answer is patently clear: Tatyana’s newly elevated social situation is the necessary condition. Now she is the elegant star of St Petersburg high society, while he has become something of an outsider, just returned from his travels. We would be wrong to think of this as mere cynicism and we find that the depth of his infatuation is quite equal to Tatyana’s earlier in the drama. He is now the besotted petitioner, imposing himself on a social superior. Tchaikovsky’s music insists on this precise reversal, when he gives Onegin both words and music that we had heard during Tatyana’s Letter Scene [11]. Tellingly, this harks back to the draft that was consigned to the wastepaper basket. We know, then, that he is not 54

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bitterly throwing her words back in her face, since he never even read them before. He has simply entered the same psychological state as Tatyana in her younger days. All his worldly experience evaporates and he sounds no more sophisticated than a sentimental country girl. From the orchestral introduction to the final scene, we are once more told how the scene will unfold and we can imagine Tatyana rehearsing in her mind her melancholy but resolute words of rejection. Now she tells Onegin how it would be folly for her to destroy her social standing and reputation. Tchaikovsky remains honest here and in his music he allows us to wish that they could be united, while reason tells us that nothing but scandal and grief would ensue. Their voices blend together for a moment: ‘Happiness was within our reach, / so close!’ But in truth, was it ever? Perhaps at this moment we are ready to draw some kernel of wisdom from the maxim heard in the duet between Tatyana’s mother and nurse at the very beginning of the opera: it is God-given habit that is our substitute for happiness. For this unoperatic love story, Tchaikovsky found unusual means of expression. Aside from the St Petersburg ball scene, the settings are domestic and even claustrophobic. Even in the open air, there is a certain claustrophobia, where Tatyana seeks solitude but cannot escape the sounds of the berry-pickers’ chorus. The crowded country ball is claustrophobic too, shot through with the gossip and prying eyes of pursed-lipped neighbours ready to turn the smallest faux pas into a scandal. The duel scene, set in a wintry forest, is even more oppressive, not least in the music, which traps Lensky and Onegin in a canon that forces the one to repeat the phrases of the other – they cannot break free from the conventions that will lead to a needless death. Wagner took his audiences from Alberich’s subterranean furnaces to Valhalla in the clouds, but in Onegin, Tchaikovsky only allows us to travel a few rungs up the social ladder. This circumscribed social world allows him to maintain a stylistic unity in his musical language and he adopted the musical idiom most appropriate to the story’s setting. This is the idiom of the parlour song from Pushkin’s 1820s, the ‘romance’ as it is known in Russia. Large chunks of Onegin are instantly memorable and hummable, and still more for 55

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Russians, who have already memorized many of Pushkin’s lines. The voices are not alienated from the text through operatic virtuosity, but cling intimately to the intonations of ordinary, everyday speech. When the singer breaks off for a moment, the orchestra fills the space with the same phrases, echoing or prefiguring the voice. Tchaikovsky preferred not to impose artificial contrasts on Pushkin’s characters, maintaining the common ground not only in their social standing, but in their mental world. Tatyana’s and Lensky’s similar descending lines have received much attention: Tatyana’s are ecstatic (‘Who are you? My guardian angel?’) while Lensky provides darker, minor-key versions (‘Where, oh where have you gone, / golden days of my youth?’). The vocal forms are likewise modest, most falling into the ABA type. As mentioned earlier, Tatyana’s long Letter Scene follows the text rather than any single form, but even here there is a succession of these small forms in evidence. The style in this scene may be ‘higher’ than that of a parlour song and the vocal writing beyond the reach of any amateur singer, but Tchaikovsky still avoids the temptation to break into a full operatic aria. The dances, especially at the country ball, also retain their closeness to real-life ballroom dances, fit for a small, unpretentious orchestra. This approach is also in evidence at the beginning of the opera, with an equally realistic scene of amateur music-making by Tatyana and Olga. In many ways the uniqueness of Onegin comes precisely from the restrictions Tchaikovsky imposed upon himself. So many standard elements are absent from this opera: there are no theatrical effects, no self-conscious display of compositional mastery or vocal virtuosity, no complex ensembles and no coloratura. There is even very little of the ‘Russian’ idiom that was fashionable at the time, detectable in the choruses of the serfs and in the nurse’s folk-like turns of speech. Contemporary critics complained about this lack of folksy Russianness, but this would have been an inappropriate indulgence for the representation of a Russian gentry that was very much westernized by Pushkin’s time, let alone Tchaikovsky’s. Pushkin, indeed, tells us that Tatyana’s letter was penned in French and that her emotional world was supplied by French novels. Accordingly, 56

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Onegin often contains hints of a French accent and contemporaries heard Gounod in the more passionate lyrical outpourings. France is important in the genesis of Onegin for another reason. The emphasis on the domestic setting and the portrayal of love kept in check by moral and social codes may remind us of French bourgeois drama, which also creates precedents for the immediacy of emotion and the realism of the setting. It is hardly an accident that the strongest operatic precedent for Onegin is Verdi’s La traviata (based on Dumas’s La dame aux camélias), another love story in a domestic setting, where our understandable desire for the lovers to be united is thwarted by an even stronger social taboo. There, too, we find the claustrophobic domestic settings, an ‘unoperatic’ realism (Violetta’s illness), and a realistic soundtrack of waltzes. And after Onegin, too, Puccini’s most intimate and domestic opera, La bohème, was also prompted by a French source. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when most Russian composers were preoccupied with grand, public opera plots that drew on Russian history and mythology, Tchaikovsky took the risk in Onegin of moving in the opposite direction into an intimate, private world of the here and now. The resulting opera responded to needs of audiences who had immersed themselves in Turgenev’s love stories or (a little later) to Chekhov’s tragedies of the banal. The undemonstrative and empathetic power of Tchaikovsky’s music seems inexhaustible, to be recreated afresh with each new performance.

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Eugene Onegin A Selective Performance History John Allison This brief survey of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Lyric Scenes’ on stage begins in Moscow and returns full circle to the Russian capital. After all, this is the city that saw its premiere at the Conservatory’s Maly Theatre in 1879 and witnessed the controversy of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging at the Bolshoi Theatre in 2006 – one that prompted the venerable Galina Vishnevskaya, most celebrated of the theatre’s living Tatyanas, to vow never to set foot inside the Bolshoi again, offended as she was by the new staging’s lack of historic memory. But the performance history of Eugene Onegin is by no means a Russo-centric affair. Deservedly viewed as Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, this work is now one of the most popular operas in the repertory – certainly the most widely performed of all Slavic operas – and it has reached every corner of the operatic world. What follows is a description of some performance highlights. It was the composer’s friend Nikolay Rubinstein, head of the Moscow Conservatory, who conducted the premiere there on 29th March 1879. The intimacy of the piece and its concerns with young love – Tchaikovsky specified the ages of Lensky and Onegin, nineteen and twenty-two respectively – had prompted him to seek a student performance of the first four scenes even before he had finished composing the whole work, and these scenes were heard in a ‘dress rehearsal’ in December 1878. Fearing that the work’s special qualities would be smothered by the full force of a professional house, he was keen that Rubinstein’s students should 59

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present the entire piece, which in 1879 they did in set designs by Karl Valts. The title role was sung by Sergei Gilyov, Tatyana by Maria Klimentova and Lensky by Mikhail Medvedyev. The first cast also included Aleksandra Levitskaya (Olga) and Vasily Makhalov (Gremin). Just under two years later, on 23rd January 1881, Eugene Onegin reached the Bolshoi Theatre, with Enrico Bevignani conducting a cast that included Pavel Khokhlov (Onegin), Elena Verni (Tatyana), Dmitri Usatov (Lensky), Aleksandra Krutikova (Olga) and Abram Abramov (Gremin). Further modest productions followed in Russia in the early 1880s, but it was the work’s entry to the Imperial Opera at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1884 that set the seal on its great popularity. At the request of the theatre’s Intendant, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky revised Act Three and added the Écossaise in the ballroom scene, and this version was first given on 1st October 1885 under the baton of the great Eduard Nápravník. By all accounts, Emiliya Pavlovskaya was an outstanding Tatyana, and this cast also included Maria Slavina as Olga, Ippolit Pryanishnikov as Onegin and Mikhail Koryakin as Gremin. By now, Onegin was ready not just to wander the world – as its eponymous anti-hero does for a few years – but to conquer it permanently. The first non-Russian city to receive the opera was Prague, where on 6th December 1888 Tchaikovsky himself conducted a performance in Czech, translated by Marie ČervinkováRiegrová (librettist of Dvořák’s operas Dimitrij and The Jacobin). It reached Hamburg on 19th January 1892 under the baton of Gustav Mahler, no less. Tchaikovsky himself had been invited to Hamburg to conduct it, and duly took charge of the dress rehearsal. But, feeling uncomfortable with following the German text (a translation credited to A. Bernhard), he insisted that Mahler, who had been preparing the work, should conduct the opening, at which Tchaikovsky was an admiring audience member. He wrote to his nephew Bob Davidov: ‘The conductor here is not merely passable but actually has genius… Yesterday I heard a wonderful performance of Tannhäuser under his direction. The singers, the orchestra, the managers and the conduct­or (his name is Mahler) are all in love 60

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with Eugene Onegin, but I have my doubts about the Hamburg public’s sharing their enthusiasm.’1 Although Mahler was not the only great composer to take an interest in the work (Liszt had produced one of his operatic paraphrases for the piano, based on the Polonaise, as early as 1880), he was perhaps the most significant. As well as introducing Tchaikovsky’s last opera, Yolanta, to Hamburg early in 1893, barely a fortnight after its premiere in St Petersburg, he made Onegin one of the first operas he conducted after taking up his tenure at the Vienna Hofoper in 1897 (he would also give Yolanta and The Queen of Spades there). This first performance in Vienna of Onegin on 19th November 1897 helped to secure the work’s place in German-speaking houses. Meanwhile, Onegin had reached England, one of the countries where it has enjoyed a particularly rich performance history. The first performance in London, on 17th October 1892, was given at the Olympic Theatre by the Moody–Manners Company in an English translation by H.S. Edwards, conducted by the young Henry Wood. His cast included Eugene Oudin in the title role, Fanny Moody as Tatyana, Iver McKay as Lensky and Charles Manners as Gremin. Onegin reached Covent Garden – this time in Italian – on 29th June 1906. Mattia Battistini took the title role, and Emmy Destinn was Tatyana. The fondness of leading Italian opera stars for this opera led to its being performed frequently in Italian in the top houses during this period. Before picking up on Onegin’s history back in Russia, a few other dates and key cities are worth listing. The opera’s first performance in France was in Nice (in French) on 7th March 1895; it reached Paris on 23rd May 1911. Before the end of the nineteenth century, it had also been seen in Riga (1896), Berlin (1898), Madrid (1898) and Warsaw (1899). The first theatre to embrace it in the twentieth century was La Scala, where it was given on 7th April 1900. Nearly a decade passed before it crossed the Atlantic. A concert performance in English at Carnegie Hall was New York’s introduction (1908), and it entered the 1 P.I. Tchaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, vol. XVI-B (Moscow: Muzyka, 1979), pp. 15–16.

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Metropolitan Opera on 24th March 1920, with Giuseppe De Luca in the title role, Claudia Muzio as Tatyana, Giovanni Martinelli as Lensky and Adam Didur as Gremin. Artur Bodanzky conducted the staging by Ryszard Ordynski, Max Reinhardt’s former protégé who had settled in New York about five years earlier. Meanwhile, it had reached the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires on 20th August 1911, with Titta Ruffo in the title role. This was the period that saw one of the most famous and influential of all Onegin productions: Konstantin Stanislavsky’s ‘studio’ staging in Moscow. A study of scenes from Onegin had been a thread of the great theatre director’s work with the Bolshoi Theatre Opera Studio (set up in 1918 and renamed in 1926 as an independent Stanislavsky Opera Theatre Studio), and the ballroom that served as a theatre and adjoined the living quarters of his base at Leontyevski Lane became the scene of this seminal staging, which opened in full on 15th June 1922. Indeed, when he had first visited the building eighteen months earlier, Stanislavsky’s immediate comment was: ‘It will be perfect for Onegin’. His production was designed to fit here, and the chamber dimensions dictated the use of piano accompaniment and the trimming of the opening peasant scene, which Stanislavsky in any case saw as something of a conventional set piece that got in the way of the true drama. In place of a real set, there were the four columns of the ballroom, which acquired iconic status – influencing almost every Russian production of Onegin for a long time to come. The production itself transferred in 1924 to the Novy Teatr with full orchestra, and survived many changes of cast. Its pioneering influence is still felt today in those productions that recognize how a sparse and spare approach cuts straight to the heart of the work – Onegin is as much about three wasted lives as about the collision of two Russian worlds, cosmopolitan decadence versus rustic provincialism. The other most famous Russian staging was Boris Pokrovsky’s, made for the Bolshoi Theatre in 1944, early in this legendary director’s long career. Despite its wartime provenance, the production looked lavish enough to grace the Bolshoi’s big stage, and even the ‘Stanislavsky columns’ were there in some scenes, albeit multiplied. Conducted in 1944 first by Alexander Melik-Pashayev, it showcased 62

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the cream of Russian performers until it was replaced by Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2006 staging, and certainly during its first three decades or so of existence it witnessed some of the greatest Onegin casts. Several of those were recorded, under such conductors as Melik-Pashayev, Boris Khaikin, Mstislav Rostropovich and Mark Ermler. The roll call of singers here includes Tatyanas such as Elena Kruglikova, Galina Vishnevskaya and Tamara Milashkina, Onegins such as Yevgeny Belov, Pavel Lisitsian and Yuri Mazurok, and Lenskys including Sergei Lemeshev and Vladimir Atlantov. Given its secure and well-loved place in the repertory of British opera companies today, it is strange to recall that Eugene Onegin made a slow start in this country. A long period elapsed between its 1906 Covent Garden incarnation and the next major production, that by John B. Gordon at Sadler’s Wells in 1935, with a cast including Joan Cross and Sumner Austin as Tatyana and Onegin, and Edith Coates and Henry Wendon as Olga and Lensky. Though it achieved little popular success then, the opera was given a studio performance by the BBC soon after the Second World War, making audiences more receptive when it returned to Sadler’s Wells in 1952 in a new production by George Devine. This featured sets and costumes by Motley (that were anything but) and choreography by John Cranko. The well-balanced cast included Frederick Sharp in the title role, Amy Shuard as Tatyana and Rowland Jones as Lensky, singing Edward Dent’s translation. One notable turning point in British Onegin history was its first production at Glyndebourne, staged in 1968 by the Bulgarian director Michael Hadjimischev and featuring naturalistic sets by Pier Luigi Pizzi, whose use of sepias and greys conjured up plenty of atmosphere. Two great artists appeared in the cast: Elisabeth Söderström as Tatyana and Wiesław Ochman as Lensky. Assem Selimsky was the Onegin, and the performances also benefited from Hugues Cuenod’s brilliant character study of Monsieur Triquet. John Pritchard was the fine conductor. Later revivals of his production introduced British audiences to the remarkably handsome, aristocratic and finely sung Onegin of Richard Stilwell. Three years later, in 1971, another great soprano arrived in Britain as Tatyana: Ileana Cotrubaş’s assumption of the role at Covent 63

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Garden led Arthur Jacobs (in Opera) to declare her ‘a dream of a Tatyana’. This was Peter Hall’s new staging in realistic designs by Julia Trevelyan Oman, and the distinguished cast also included Victor Braun in the title role and Robert Tear as Lensky. Employing a new English translation by David Lloyd-Jones that has gone on to be widely used, it was conducted by Georg Solti. Later performances switched to Russian, and they showcased such notable Tatyanas as Kiri Te Kanawa, Eugenia Moldoveanu and Mirella Freni. Subsequent stagings at Covent Garden have been more noteworthy for their casts than their production values. John Cox’s 1993 Royal Opera version suggested a ‘hands-off’ approach. Lavish costumes excepted, his production avoided putting a very Russian gloss on the piece. But, just as Tchaikovsky’s (limited) use of folk music is not what makes the opera perhaps the most deeply Russian in his output, it is never fussy decoration that makes Onegin Russian either. With some thoughtful details (though his designer Timothy O’Brien is not the only one to have placed the Letter Scene in a small box, effective in evoking the young girl’s bedroom), it did the music no harm, but more could surely have been achieved with a cast of the stature here: the principals were Galina Gorchakova (Tatyana), Sergei Leiferkus (Onegin), Gegam Grigorian (Lensky) and Nicolai Ghiaurov (Gremin), and exciting musical values were instilled by Valery Gergiev in his Royal Opera debut. (Six years earlier, Leiferkus – still a member of the then Kirov Opera – had led the company when it visited Covent Garden with its old-fashioned but well-integrated Onegin staging in designs by Igor Ivanov, conducted with verve, dramatic intensity and at times exaggerated underlining by the Kirov’s chief conductor of the period, Yuri Temirkanov.) Not on Gergiev’s (or Temirkanov’s) level, but good at articulating the melancholy side of Tchaikovsky’s score, Philippe Jordan conducted the most recent Covent Garden staging, that by Steven Pimlott in 2006. Costumed in clashing colours by Antony McDonald, it went for postmodern familiarity. Yet one nice touch was to set the St Petersburg ball not inside Gremin’s palace but at a skating party on the Neva. Dmitri Hvorostovsky brought his rich and smooth tone to Onegin’s lines, Amanda Roocroft was a warm Tatyana, but 64

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Rolando Villazón (covered in his tone and puppyish in his acting) was miscast in his role debut as Lensky. At ENO, the predecessor of Deborah Warner’s 2001 staging was the Julia Hollander production, first seen in 1994. Her generally uncluttered stage pictures were carefully composed, several of them making use of a giant frame at the back of the stage that was filled with a succession of painterly images. The opera opened against a dusky Repin-like landscape that reminded one of the Larin estate’s lonely provinciality. Sometimes one wished for deeper characterization from Hollander, but the original touches she brought were justifiable: at the St Petersburg ball the guilt-ridden Onegin was visited by the ghost of Lensky, while couples promenaded mechanically across the stage to the Polonaise, as if supplying a vision of the oppressive life from which Onegin had been running away. Overall, a truthful and moving production, this cast included Peter Coleman-Wright as Onegin, Cathryn Pope as Tatyana, Ethna Robinson as Olga, Bonaventura Bottone as Lensky and Richard Van Allan as Gremin; it was conducted by Alexander Polianichko. Only five years earlier, ENO had introduced another, short-lived staging. Of Graham Vick’s 1989 production, Rodney Milnes wrote in the June issue of Opera that ‘it was hard to see what on earth he was up to. The central action was left largely to look after itself … while the director lavished all his attention on the periphery.’ At least the cast featured Marie McLaughlin (Tatyana), Jonathan Summers (Onegin), Arthur Davies (Lensky) and Norman Bailey (Gremin). Ethna Robinson was already seen here as Olga and Richard Van Allan, soon to graduate to Gremin, was the Zaretsky. Mark Elder conducted. So it was perhaps unexpected that Graham Vick should deliver, in 1994, one of the most memorable of all British Onegin stagings. Feeling like the real opening of the new theatre at Glyndebourne (it was the first new production there), this staging truly captured the contrast between two Russian worlds that lies at the opera’s heart. A plain but very beautiful production, it made a strong impact in simple surroundings. Vick used empty space with flair, though much of this staging’s power derived from Richard Hudson’s breathtaking 65

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designs (and colourful, beautifully cut costumes) and the subtle poetry of Thomas Webster’s lighting. Colour was used to illuminate the narrative: cream and beige dominated the first two acts (yellow corn in the first scene helped to ‘place’ the Larins’ provincial estate) and gave way to the formality of blue, green and grey in the St Petersburg act. Vick and Hudson made a feature of huge ‘silk’ curtains that swept sensuously across the stage, underlining the feminine aura of the opera – which Onegin undoubtedly possesses, despite its masculine title – and dividing up the episodes on stage like the chapters in Pushkin’s poem. Perhaps the drapes also did too much toing and froing, each time revealing a camp little cameo of St Petersburg society, and possibly the irony went too far. In Ron Howell’s choreography, the Polonaise was staged as a pas de deux, with a resulting loss of tension. But Howell’s choreography made a positive impression elsewhere, nowhere more so than in the choreographed chaos of the Larin ball. Vick’s brilliant direction of the Larin ball made it more than simply the centre of the opera – the fourth of the seven scenes – but a centre on which the drama pivots. The deliberately cramped stage seemed ready to burst with tension, and Lensky’s challenge the only way out. The duel that follows was seen through the doors of the mill and the shots were fired out of sight, giving the scene a sense of ‘unreal’ detachment. Of the many memorable images in this Vick staging, perhaps the most enduring were the two chairs placed diagonally apart and on a bare stage for both the rejection scenes: by switching Tatyana and Onegin (back-to-back and unable to communicate) around in Acts One and Three, Vick mirrored each one’s predicament and unified the opera as a whole. By keeping it unsentimental rather than overtly passionate, Vick’s achievement was to have found an ideal balance between Pushkin and Tchaikovsky. The production also gained dramatic credibility by having a Lensky and Onegin young enough to look the ages Tchaikovsky specified. It marked an important milestone in the career (cut tragically short by an accident in 2007) of Wojciech Drabowicz, the Polish baritone who had seemed destined for greatness. And the production also enshrined one of the finest performances of 66

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the Russian soprano Elena Prokina (creamy of tone and a portrayal of dramatic truth and intelligence) at a time when she was at her peak. Andrew Davis’s conducting was warm and eloquent, and stressed the work’s lyricism. But no history of Onegin in Britain would be complete without Andrei Serban’s important 1980 staging for Welsh National Opera, typical of a company that at that time was connected to the mainstream of European operatic culture. This Onegin had an East European pedigree, as the young Romanian director was joined by the experienced Russian Onegin conductor Mark Ermler. In Opera of May that year, Alan Blyth said, ‘It would be hard to think of an opera production with more thought-provoking images or more intelligent motivating of the characters and chorus.’ It also marked an early sighting of the American designer Michael Yeargan’s work, whose sets transported the audience immediately to a Russian countryside dominated by sun-drenched corn. The cast was a distinguished one too, led by Thomas Allen (Onegin), Josephine Barstow (Tatyana) and Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Lensky). Before turning to more recent stagings of a mostly Regietheater bent, the majority of them originating in continental Europe, a brief look back at America, where the opera had made slow progress after a bright start at the Met in 1920. For example, it entered the repertoire of San Francisco Opera only in 1971, in Paul Hager’s by then already moth-eaten Mannheim production, but on the plus side it was conducted by Charles Mackerras with an excellent cast led by Thomas Stewart, Evelyn Lear and Stuart Burrows – whose Lensky led the critic Arthur Bloomfield to declare that ‘really, nothing had ever been better sung in the house’. And, of course, great singing is what the Met is (or ought to be) all about. George London (Onegin), Lucine Amara (Tatyana), Richard Tucker (Lensky), Rosalind Elias (Olga) and Giorgio Tozzi (Gremin) starred when Onegin returned to the Met to open the 1957–58 season. It was a big event, with Sputnik circling overhead and the Met’s manager Rudolf Bing serenely serving vodka to the hundreds of standees who had been queuing at the box office all day. Few of them would have been disappointed by what they saw in 67

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Peter Brook’s production, one of the Met’s most lavish during this period in designs by Rolf Gérard. The conductor was none other than Dimitri Mitropoulos. Subsequent revivals featured an outstanding roll call of artists: Tatyanas included Leontyne Price, Teresa ŻylisGara (a radiant soprano, if less famous than some of her colleagues, who surely counts as one of the ideal exponents of this role) and Ileana Cotrubaş; among the Onegins were Sherrill Milnes and Yuri Mazurok; the Lenskys included Nicolai Gedda, Jess Thomas and Neil Shicoff; and Gremins Martti Talvela and Paul Plishka. More in demand in Europe than at the Met, the Canadian director Robert Carsen gave New York a new staging in 1997, and audiences perceived it as controversial. Set in mostly minimalist boxes, the design supplied little furniture but concentrated on the costumes. The fine cast was led by Vladimir Chernov and Galina Gorchakova, and Clifton Forbis made his role debut as Lensky. New to the house were the Olga of Marianna Tarasova and the conductor, Antonio Pappano. At its most recent revival, in 2009, the cast was led by Thomas Hampson and Karita Mattila, who a decade and a half earlier had sung Tatyana in Madrid and Hamburg. Carsen’s staging also went to the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2008, where the title role was shared by Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Mariusz Kwiecien, Dina Kuznetsova was Tatyana, Frank Lopardo Lensky and Nino Surguladze (in her American debut) Olga. Andrew Davis conducted. Willy Decker’s 1993 production in Cologne achieved exactly the right atmosphere for the ‘Lyric Scenes’, even if the open landscape of Wolfgang Gussmann’s set was devoid of Russian folklore: each scene became a mood picture of undefined yearning in a state of suspense, and it was as if it concentrated on the characters simply because they happened to wander into the limelight. Conducted by James Conlon, the cast was a strong one: Bo Skovhus (Onegin), Adrianne Pieczonka (Tatyana), David Kuebler (Lensky), Elena Zaremba (Olga) and Kurt Moll (Gremin). First staged for the Dutch company Nationale Reisopera in 2000, but widely revived in several parts of Europe, Peter Konwitschny’s Onegin is one of the most dramatically alive and truthful takes on Tchaikovsky’s opera I have seen. At least, in the version I encountered 68

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in Bratislava, it would easily have been the most alive and truthful were it not for an over-reliance on certain clichés. Konwitschny showed himself all too ready to equate Russia with vodka, so that even before the music began (Johannes Leiacker’s shiny, mirrored stage was curtainless) we saw drunkards sprawled around. Before the Madame Larina and Filippyevna could sing their duet they needed a few shots of vodka. The wrapping around Onegin’s bottle of champagne became the paper on which Tatyana writes her letter of love. By the third scene, featuring a chorus of drunken tarts who taunted Tatyana and caroused with Onegin, the inebriation was simply tiresome – there are, after all, another four scenes to go, and yes, you’ve guessed it, Onegin arrived for the duel blind drunk. But set against this was some wonderfully detailed and deep Personenregie, and a sense of claustrophobia that was all the more remarkable given the openness of the stage. There was no bed in the Letter Scene, just a pile of books that remain throughout, and from which Tatyana copied snippets of poetry for her declaration of love. The stage was extended via a ramp around the orchestra pit right into the auditorium, but this was used sparingly and only in key moments: Tatyana delivered her most imploring phrases right to the audience, and to heart-rending effect. Not least because the music for Onegin’s desperate plea in the final scene echoes this moment, Konwitschny had him down here too in the closing minutes of the opera. Where normally an Onegin with just one interval ruins the balance of the acts, here Konwitschny made a compelling leap from the duel straight into the first of the St Petersburg scenes. Dispensing with dancers in the Polonaise, he had Onegin pick himself up from the duel and attempt a deranged dance with Lensky’s corpse. Also in 2000, at Florence’s Maggio Musicale the staging of Onegin was entrusted to the young German director Alexander Schulin, who veered from having little to say to moments of pretentious deconstruction without settling at an interesting midpoint, but at least it looked stylish – the birch tree became a visual leitmotif here. Roberto Frontali’s steely performance reclaimed the title role for Italian baritones, and Ferruccio Furlanetto was a moving, dignified 69

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Gremin. Ramón Vargas’s Lensky had tragic pathos, but the sisters were still assigned to Russian singers, Galina Gorchakova and Marianna Tarasova. But the highlight was the conducting of Semyon Bychkov, which had sweep and drive yet never sounded hurried. As on his Philips recording of the work, surely the finest modern version on disc, each scene was paced to perfection, every detail lovingly savoured. Christof Loy’s 2001 Brussels production transplanted Onegin to the drab concrete of post-war Stalinist Russia. Perhaps he was trying to show that, 120 years after the events of Pushkin’s poem, characters forced into such a depressingly restrictive communist system would behave in the same way as their ancestors. Once again, vodka featured prominently, contributing to the coarse frenzy of many scenes, and the Polonaise became a parody of classical ballet. Under Lothar Zagrosek’s baton, the Monnaie fielded a strong cast, led by Peter Mattei and with Nina Stemme singing her first Tatyana. Irina Brook’s 2002 staging at Aix-en-Provence was the antidote to all of this, but went too far in the opposite, bland direction. The all-white stage (designed by Noëlle Ginefri) was punctuated by white vertical slats resembling abstract tree trunks, but putting the cast in neutral-coloured designer clothes only added to the impression that the action was set in London’s Hempel Hotel. At least the cast, conducted by Daniel Harding, included Olga Guryakova as Tatyana. Vladimir Moroz was Onegin, and Daniil Shtoda the Lensky. In opposite corners of the German tradition were Peter Stein’s Lyon staging and Andrea Breth’s Salzburg production, both in 2007. Stein’s work came as part of his Tchaikovsky-Pushkin trilogy at the French house, and had an atmospheric, storybook quality. Lending it particular dignity was the Onegin of Wojciech Drabowicz, in one of his last assignments before his tragic death, and it was conducted by Kirill Petrenko. At Salzburg, Daniel Barenboim conducted the Vienna Philharmonic with Romantic sweep, which may have been at odds with the subdued work of Breth (better known at this stage for her theatre productions), well thought through though it was. The year 2007 also brought one of the most controversial stagings of Tchaikovsky’s opera – the so-called ‘Gay Onegin’ at Munich’s 70

a selective performance history

Bayerische Staatsoper. One of the first productions Krzysztof Warlikowski did outside his native Poland, it was this director’s signal that he wished to join the ranks of Europe’s régisseur-provocateurs, something he has undoubtedly since achieved. Its main idea was to have art imitating life, since one of the impetuses the homosexual composer received shortly before deciding to set Pushkin’s verse novel was a passionate epistolary declaration of love from a woman he briefly married. The trouble is, neither Pushkin nor Tchaikovsky envisaged (so far as we know) any gay subtext, and Warlikowski’s gloss made nonsense of the characters’ relationships. Onegin and Lensky started the duel scene in bed together, making the shooting of Lensky a crime passionnel. With his male lover gone, Onegin was thus free to fall in love with Tatyana in the final act, whose Polonaise was danced by bare-chested cowboys in an apparent reference to the film Brokeback Mountain. Conducted by Kent Nagano, the cast was led by Michael Volle and Olga Guryakova. For his production at the Berlin Staatsoper in 2008, Achim Freyer wanted to tell the audience that life is an ‘eternal stream of sameness, flowing towards us and away again’. To show this, he developed a complex mass choreography with everyone on stage – from the principals to the extras – moving in slow motion, and repeating the patterns over and over again. Daniel Barenboim conducted a cast including Roman Trekel and Rolando Villazón as the leading men, Anna Samuil as Tatyana and René Pape as Gremin. At the 2011 Holland Festival in Amsterdam, the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim applied his ‘historical pageant’ trademark to Tchaikovsky’s opera, turning the St Petersburg ball into a parade of historical characters (including Nicholas II, Rasputin, Yuri Gagarin), Russian stereotypes, and even a dancing bear. During the Introduction, Onegin had been glimpsed as a modern-day figure at an oligarch’s ball; going to bed, his dreams take him back to the Pushkin period, and the rest of the action follows subsequent history, with Lensky becoming Lenin. In the November 2011 Opera, Hugh Canning called it ‘brilliantly done, if you like the idea of a Cirque du Soleil Onegin’. One of the attractions was Mariss Jansons’s conducting of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The cast was led by 71

Eugene Onegin

Bo Skovhus, now sounding a rather mature and worn Onegin, and included Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana. Meanwhile, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2006 Bolshoi staging, mentioned at the start of this survey, had been doing the rounds on tour, and at its 2010 Covent Garden showing (conducted by Dmitri Jurowski) it was not hard to see why Galina Vishnevskaya had hated it so much – all the traditions enshrined in Moscow’s previous staging, an institution dating back to 1944, had been turned on their head. Yet though it was certainly easy to find aspects of Tcherniakov’s stagecraft intrusive or irritating, this Onegin remains also one of the most acutely crafted productions of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. It certainly felt right for the Muscovite director to be making his British debut with this Onegin. To enter into Tcherniakov’s Onegin is to forget the outside world and ignore the way nature and its seasons inform so many of Tchaikovsky’s Lyric Scenes. Tcherniakov’s production (in his own sets) was hermetically sealed, as if the characters had been locked up in a single room. His opening scene was striking: the curtain rose accompanied by the tinkling of crockery, and we found ourselves in the middle of a lunch party gathered around the big oval table of a modest but handsome house in the Russian provinces. Dressed in early twentieth-century costumes, the characters could have stepped out of a Chekhov drama, and the Chekhovian tone of what followed seemed to be Tcherniakov’s way of making the point that it is only the plot outline that comes from Pushkin – and that the emotional pull of the opera is all Tchaikovsky’s. As he has shown in other productions, he appears to have a thing about dinner tables – this one remained in place at the centre of an essentially single set for the first five scenes (in other words, up to and including the duel). For the final St Petersburg scenes, it was replaced by a grander table that dominated a plush red room in oligarch style, this giving Tcherniakov the opportunity to display one of his most telling ideas: Onegin’s arrival was treated with indifference by the already seated guests, who thwart his every attempt to find an empty chair, and when he finally pulled up his own chair and began to make a ‘speech’, the party-goers melted away. 72

a selective performance history

What came in between was a mixture of the theatrically compelling and unmusically banal, and nearly all of it involved some stretching of the stage directions or even plot. It surely doesn’t matter that early in the first scene the lunch guests burst into song with the peasants’ harvest chorus – on the contrary, their toast to Madame Larina is very effective – nor that for her Letter Scene, Tatyana stays up all night writing in the dining room. When Onegin finally arrives in the third scene (in which the chorus is relegated offstage), he addresses her at a formal distance from the opposite end of the table. But for much of the first five scenes the opera seemed to be more about Olga and her mother than anyone else: Larina was a bustling busybody, and she and her party guests a heartless bunch who mocked Lensky’s anguish with a cruelty that not even Pushkin at his most detached would have recognized. Along with the dancers, Monsieur Triquet is the biggest casualty of Tcherniakov’s scenario, inexplicably disappearing altogether – his lines were taken by Lensky, clowning away embarrassingly in a party hat. Instead of a formal duel, and while the remains of the party were tidied away all around them, the two men tussled over a shotgun – which of course went off, killing Lensky. Much of the action is set too far back: putting the table so far upstage hardly showed Tcherniakov in a singer-friendly light. But in a staging that has already showcased many singers, one has consistently stood out: the Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien. His aloof characterization and evenly sculpted voice have already shown him to have the hallmarks of a top-class Onegin. Just as the Pushkin masterpiece on which the opera is based draws the reader back again and again, so does the opera itself. Tchaikovsky’s Onegin – and, for that matter, Prokofiev’s version with incidental music – adds to our experience of the story: only the most tone-deaf Pushkinite can still scoff at this great opera, and fail to comprehend how its music works. Fortunately for operatic audiences, who get their fair share of Onegins and have indeed probably been more exposed to it than any other Russian opera, it is as hard to tire of Tchaikovsky’s work, which despite being gentle and ‘sensitive’ in tone has stood up remarkably well to the interpolations of many directors. 73

Thematic Guide Themes from the opera have been identified by the numbers in square brackets in the article on the music. These are also printed at corresponding points in the libretto, so that the words can be related to the musical themes.  

                                          



                            



  

        









   

         

      

    



       



       





  

                     

     

            

 

                     



                     

 



        

75

 



   Onegin    Eugene            

       





  

     

 

            

 

                     

        

  

                     

            





                   



   



   

   



                      



           

     

 



  

        





 

                       



 

 

    





 

 

       

        



                                    



        



 76  

         

    

 

 

    





 





      guide thematic  

        



                                    



        



  

         

                    

 



  



  

  



           

        



     





        

        

                 





 

   



 







    



                    





  

                            

         

        

   

                                     

           

  

                        77               

            

    

   

    Eugene Onegin                                 

           

  

                         

           

            



                         



 



        

      

 

                



      



     

  

     



                   





                                    





            



      



          

      

  

   



              78

           

  

          



     thematic    guide          

      



  

   

            





           

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Eugene Onegin

Note on the Text

The libretto and scenario of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin were written by Tchaikovsky himself in collaboration with Konstantin Shilovsky and his brother Modest Tchaikovsky. Despite its relatively straightforward composition history, however, performances of the opera often highlight a number of variants in the libretto. In Act One, an alternative version has Filippyevna enter ‘in haste’ with a coachman to announce the arrival of Lensky and Onegin. This variant allows Filippyevna to leave after arranging Tatyana’s dress, instead giving Madame Larina’s instruction ‘Quick, ask them to come in’ to the coachman. Other productions prefer to cut the coachman’s non-singing role, with Madam Larina giving the instruction directly to Filippyevna. Act Two sees a number of textual variants both in Tatyana’s nameday celebration scene and in the duel scene. In Scene One there is an alternative Russian version of Monsieur Triquet’s couplets (‘À cette fête conviés’), replete with comic misspellings and mispronunciations of the Russian. Later on in the same scene, there are a number of extra stanzas for the ensemble that were written and set to music by Tchaikovsky. This additional material, coming just after the quarrel breaks out between Lensky and Onegin, were, however, never published in Tchaikovsky’s lifetime and did not appear in print until the 1946 piano score in the Complete Collected Works (Muzgiz, vol. 36; ed. Ivan Shishov). In Act Two, Scene Two, Lensky’s aria (‘Kuda, kuda, kuda vy udalilis’) occasionally sees the line ‘Zabudet mir menya, no ty... Ty!’ substituted for ‘Zabudet mir menya, no ty... Ol’ga!’; however, as Challis 83

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(p. 46) points out, rather than this anguished cry necessarily being directed towards Olga, it may in fact be directed to a ‘desired friend’. In the first edition of the opera (1879), Onegin’s monologue in Act Three, Scene One is followed by a short choral link, sung by the guests and leading into the entrance of Tatyana. Responding to a request from the Mariinsky Theatre for an extra dance, however, Tchaikovsky replaced this choral section in 1885 with the Écossaise, which is played both there and at the end of the scene (instead of the turbulent exit music for Onegin). As this original version is occasionally preferred, it is provided in this guide as a textual variant (p. 189). A further variant exists in Act Three, Scene One when, in conversation with Prince Gremin, Onegin interjects with ‘Tat’yane’, guessing at the identity of Gremin’s young wife. Russian performances prefer giving this line to Onegin, as it coincides with Pushkin’s original and Tchaikovsky’s autograph libretto. Other productions, however, occasionally opt to give the line to Gremin. The final lines of the opera caused Tchaikovsky much anxiety before and after the opera was finished. The libretto has the last verse ‘O death, O death! I go to seek thee out!’ marked through in Tchaikovsky’s hand and replaced with the text printed above. In the first piano score (3rd March, 1878), beneath the notes of Onegin’s last phrase there are no words. It is fully possible that this blank was left until a decision had been taken, for Tchaikovsky had written to K.K. Albrecht on 15th February, 1878: Ask Samarin to read through the libretto carefully. Now, when the score is already prepared, I cannot change anything in the essential course of the action, but I am earnestly asking kind Ivan Vasilyevich [Samarin] to correct everything in the stage directions that seems to him stupid, inappropriate, awkward, etc. I ask him also to pay particular attention to the last line. I was required due to musical and theatrical demands to dramatize powerfully the scene of Tatyana’s explanation with Onegin. At the end I have it that Tatyana’s husband appears and orders Onegin with a gesture to withdraw. It was necessary to me at this point that Onegin say something, and I put into his mouth the following line, ‘O death! 84

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O death! I go to seek thee out!’ It still seems to me that this is all stupid, that he must say something else – and what, I cannot conceive. So then, I am asking I[van] V[asilyevich] that he render me an invaluable service and solve this difficulty.1 In the piano score there was this stage direction: (‘Prince Gremin enters. Tatyana, having seen him, lets out a cry, and falls into his embrace unconscious. The prince makes an authoritative gesture to leave.’), but no final line. In the second edition the present text without the stage direction had been established. In the third, there is the additional rubric, ‘Onegin stands stupefied for a moment...’, as above. See pp. 16 and 32. The direction ‘Tatyana leaves the room’ is in the libretto but not in the scores.

1 P.I. Tchaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, vol. XII (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye musikal’noye izdatel’stvo, 1962), p. 93.

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THE CHARACTERS

Madame Larina, a landownermezzo-soprano Tatyanasoprano her daughters Olgacontralto Filippyevna, an old nursemaidmezzo-soprano Eugene Oneginbaritone Vladimir Lensky, a poettenor Prince Gremin, a retired generalbass Monsieur Triquet, a Frenchmantenor A Captainbass Zaretsky, a retired officerbass Guillot, Onegin’s valet silent role Peasants, ballroom guests, landowners, officers

A Russian country estate and St Petersburg in the 1820s

Eugene Onegin Lyric scenes in three acts and seven scenes by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Op. 24) Libretto by the composer, Konstantin Shilovsky and Modest Tchaikovsky after the novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin English translation by Opernführer

Eugene Onegin was first performed by students of the Conservatory of Music at the Maly Theatre, Moscow, on 29th March 1879. The professional premiere was at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, on 23rd January 1881. It was first performed in Britain by the Moody-Manners Company at the Olympic Theatre, London, on 17th October 1892 (in English). It was first performed at the Royal Opera House on 29th June 1906 (in Italian). The first performance in the United States was a concert at Carnegie Hall, New York, on 1st February 1908 (in English). The first performance at the Metropolitan Opera was on 24th March 1920 (in Italian).

Vstuplenie [1a] D E I S T V I E P E RVO E Kartina pervaya Teatr predstavlyaet sad pri usad’be Larinykh. Nalevo dom s terrassoi, napravo razvesistoe derevo u kurtiny tsvetov. V glubine stseny vetkhaya derevyannaya reshetka, za kotoroi iz-za massi zeleni vidneetsya tserkov’ i selo. Vechereet. Larina sidit pod derevom i varit varen’e, prislushivayas’ k peniyu docherei; Filipp’yevna stoit okolo nei i pomogaet ei varit’. Pri vtorom kuplete dueta Tat’yany s Ol’goi obe starukhi vstupayut v razgovor. No. 1 Duet i kvartet TAT’YANA i OL’GA Slykhali l’ vy za roshchei glas nochnoi[2] Pevtsa lyubvi, pevtsa svoei pechali? Kogda polya v chas utrenii molchali, Svireli zvuk — unylyi i prostoi, Slykhali l’ vy?… Togda svireli zvuk — unylyi i prostoi. Slykhali l’ vy?… LARINA Oni poyut… i ya pevala V davno proshedshie goda — Ty pomnysh’ li — i ya pevala! FILIPP’EVNA Vy byli molody togda! 88

Introduction [1a] Act O ne Scene I The garden of the Larin country estate. On the left, a house with a terrace; on the right, a shady tree by a flowerbed. At the rear of the stage is an old wooden trellis, beyond which, behind a mass of verdure, can be seen a church and a village. It is early evening. Madame Larina is sitting under the tree making jam and listening to the singing of her daughters; Filippyevna is standing beside her and helping her. When Tatyana and Olga begin the second couplet of their duet, the older women enter into conversation. No. 1 Duet and Quartet TATYANA and OLGA Have you not heard, from beyond the grove at night, [2] the voice that sings of love and sings of sorrow? When, at the morning hour, the fields lay silent, the music of the pipe, simple and sad, have you not heard?… Then the music of the pipe, simple and sad, have you not heard?… LARINA They are singing, and I, too, used to sing that song in days gone by. Do you remember? I used to sing it too. FilippyevNA You were young then. 89

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TAT’YANA i OL’GA Vzdokhnuli l’ vy,[2] Vnimaya tikhii glas Pevtsa lyubvi, Pevtsa svoei pechali? Kogda v lesakh… LARINA Kak ya lyubila Richardsona! FILIPP’EVNA Vy byli molody togda! LARINA Ne potomu, chtoby prochla, No v starinu knyazhna Alina, Moya moskovskaya kuzina, Tverdila chasto mne o nyom. FILIPP’EVNA Da pomnyu, pomnyu! TAT’YANA i OL’GA …Vy yunoshu vidali Vstrechaya vzor ego Potukhshikh glaz… LARINA Akh, Grandison! Akh, Richardson! FILIPP’EVNA V to vremya byl eshcho zhenikh Suprug vash… No vy ponevole Togda mechtali o drugom, Kotoryi serdtsem i umom Vam nravilsya gorazdo bole. 90

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TATYANA and OLGA Have you not sighed [2] on hearing that sweet voice sing of love and of its sorrows? When in the forest… LARINA How I loved Richardson! FilippyevNA You were young then. LARINA Not that I’d read his books. But in the old days Princess Alina, my cousin in Moscow, kept on to me about him. FilippyevNA Yes, I remember. TATYANA and OLGA …you saw a youth and met the gaze of his sunken eyes… LARINA Ah, Grandison! Ah, Richardson! FilippyevNA At that time your husband was still courting you; but against your will you were dreaming of another, one who pleased you much more in heart and mind! 91

Eugene Onegin

TAT’YANA i OL’GA …Vzdokhnuli l’ vy? Vzdokhnuli l’ vy? LARINA Akh, Richardson! Ved’ on byl slavnyi frant, Igrok i gvardii serzhant! FILIPP’EVNA Davno proshedshie goda! LARINA Kak ya byla vsegda odeta! FILIPP’EVNA Vsegda po mode! LARINA Vsegda po mode i k litsu. FILIPP’EVNA Vsegda po mode i k litsu. TAT’YANA i OL’GA …Vzdokhnuli l’ vy? Vstrechaya vzor ego Potukhshikh glaz. Vzdokhnuli l’ vy? Vzdokhnuli l’ vy? LARINA No vdrug, bez moego soveta… FILIPP’EVNA …Svezli vnezapno vas k ventsu. Potom, chtoby rasseyat’ gore… LARINA Akh, kak ya plakala snachala! S suprugom chut’ ne razvelas’! 92

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TATYANA and OLGA …did you not sigh? Did you not sigh? LARINA Ah, Richardson! Why, he was a fine dandy, a gambler and an ensign in the Guards! FilippyevNA Years long gone by! LARINA How well I always used to dress! FilippyevNA Always in the latest fashion! LARINA Always in the fashion and becomingly! FilippyevNA Always in the fashion and becomingly! TATYANA and OLGA …Did you not sigh, when you met the gaze of his sunken eyes, did you not sigh, did you not sigh? LARINA But suddenly, without even asking me… FilippyevNA …they married you off without further ado! Then, to relieve your unhappiness… LARINA Oh, how I cried to begin with! I nearly left my husband! 93

Eugene Onegin

FILIPP’EVNA …Syuda priekhal barin vskore. Vy tut khozyaistvom zanyalis’, Privykli — i dovol’ny stali. LARINA Potom khozyaistvom zanyalas’, Privykla — i dovol’na stala. FILIPP’EVNA I slava Bogu! LARINA i FILIPP’EVNA Privychka svyshe nam dana — Zamena schastiyu ona. Da, tak-to, tak: Privychka svishe nam dana — Zamena shchastiyu ona. LARINA Korset, al’bom, knyazhnu Polinu, Stikhov chuvstvitel’nykh tetrad’, Ya vsyo zabyla… FILIPP’EVNA Stali zvat’ Akul’koi prezhnyuyu Selinu, I obnovili, nakonets… LARINA Akh… LARINA i FILIPP’EVNA …Na vate shlafrok i chepets. Privychka s vyshe nam dana — Zamena schastiyu ona. Da, tak-to, tak! Privychka s vyshe nam dana — Zamena schastiyu ona. 94

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FilippyevNA …the master came straight here. Here you busied yourself with the household, became resigned and settled down. LARINA I busied myself with the household, became resigned and settled down. FilippyevNA And God be thanked! LARINA and FilippyevNA Habit is sent us from above in place of happiness. Yes, that is how it is: habit is sent us from above, in place of happiness. LARINA Corset, album, Princess Pauline, the book of sentimental verse, I forgot them all. FilippyevNA You began to call the maid Akulka instead of ‘Céline’ and restored at last… LARINA Ah… LARINA and FilippyevNA …the quilted dressing gown and mob cap. Habit is sent us from above, in place of happiness. Yes, that is how it is! Habit is sent us from above, in place of happiness. 95

Eugene Onegin

LARINA No muzh menya lyubil serdechno… FILIPP’EVNA Da, barin vas lyubil serdechno… LARINA …Vo vsyom mne veril on bespechno. FILIPP’EVNA …Vo vsyom vam veril on bespechno. LARINA i FILIPP’EVNA Privychka svyshe nam dana — Zamena schastiyu ona. (Za stsenom slyshitsya khor krest’yan postepenno pri­blizhayas’.) No. 2 Khor i plyaska krest’yan ZAPEVALA Bolyat moi skory nozhen’ki so pokhodushki.[3] KREST’YANE …Skory nozhen’ki so pokhodushki. ZAPEVALA Bolyat moi bely ruchen’ki so rabotushki. KREST’YANE …Bely ruchen’ki so rabotushki. Shchemit moyo retivoe serdtse so zabotushki: Ne znayu, kak byt’, Kak lyubeznogo zabyt’. Bolyat moi skory nozhen’ki… (Vkhodyat krest’yane, vperedi nesut razukrashennyi snop.) Zdravtsvui, matushka-barynya! Zdravstvui, nasha kormilitsa! Vot my prishli k tvoei milosti, 96

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LARINA But my husband loved me truly… FilippyevNA But the master loved you truly… LARINA …and trusted me unreservedly. FilippyevNA …and trusted you unreservedly. LARINA and FilippyevNA Habit is sent us from above, in place of happiness. (The singing of peasants is heard from offstage, gradually coming nearer.) No. 2 Chorus and Dance of the Peasants PEASANT LEADER My swift little feet ache from walking. [3] PEASANTS ...Ache from walking. LEADER My white hands ache from working. PEASANTS …Ache from working. My ardent heart aches from caring. I don’t know what to do, how to forget my sweetheart. My swift little feet… (The peasants enter, the leaders bearing a decorated sheaf.) Greetings, your ladyship, greetings, benefactress! We come before your Grace 97

Eugene Onegin

Snop prinesli razukrashennyi: S zhatvoi pokonchili my! LARINA Shto zh, i prekrasno! Veselites’! Ya rada vam! Propoite chto-nibud’ poveselei! KREST’YANE Izvol’te, matushka! Poteshim barynyu! Nu, devki, v krug skhodites’ Nu, chto zh vy? Stanovites! (Molodyozh’ zavodit khorovod so snopom, ostal’nye poyut. Iz doma na balkon vykhodyat Tat’yana s knigoi v rukakh i Ol’ga.) Uzh kak po mostu, mostochku.[4] Po kalinovym dosochkam — Vainu, vainu, vainu, vainu, Po kalinovym dosochkam. Tut i shol, proshol detina — Slovno yagoda-malina, Vainu… Slovna yagoda-malina. Na pleche nesyot dubinku Pod poloi nesyot volynku, Vainu… Pod poloi nesyot volynku. Pod drugoi nesyot gudochek, Dogadaisya, mil-druzhochek! Vainu… Dogadaisya, mil-druzhochek! Solntse selo. Ty ne spish’ li? Libo vyidi, libo vyshli — Vainu… Libo vyidi, libo vyshli. 98

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bearing the decorated sheaf! The harvest is all gathered in! LARINA So, that’s excellent. Now make merry! I’m pleased to see you all. Sing us something jolly! PEASANTS If that’s what you’d like, little mother! Come, let’s entertain the lady. Now, girls, stand in a ring! Come along now, all get ready! (The young peasants form a circle and dance around the sheaf, while the others sing. Tatyana, with a book in her hands, and Olga come out onto the balcony.) One day across the bridge, the little bridge, [4] along the hazel planks, vainu, vainu, vainu, vainu, along the hazel planks, came a fine young fellow, fresh and ruddy as a raspberry, vainu… fresh and ruddy as a raspberry. Over his shoulder he carries a cudgel, under one coat-skirt he carries bagpipes, vainu… under one coat-skirt he carries bagpipes, under the other is a fiddle. Now just you guess, my dearest, vainu… Now just you guess, my dearest. The sun has set, aren’t you asleep, then? Come out yourself or else send out, vainu… Come out yourself or else send out 99

Eugene Onegin

Libo Sashu, libo Mashu, Libo dushechku Parashu, Vainu… Libo dushechku Parashu.’ Sashu… Parashen’ka vykhodila S milym rechi govorila Vainu, vainu, vainu, vainu, S milym rechi govorila: ‘Ne bessud’-ka, moi druzhochek, V chom khodila, v tom i vyshla, V khuden’koi vo rubashonke, Vo korotkoi ponizhonke. Vainu… V khuden’koi vo rubashonke, Vo korotkoi ponizhonke. Ne bessud’-ka, moi druzhochek’ Vainu… No. 3 Stsena i ariya Ol’gi TAT’YANA (s knigoi v rukakh) Kak ya lyublyu pod zvuki pesen’ etikh[1a] Mechtami unosit’sya inogda kuda-to Kuda-to, kuda-to daleko! OL’GA Akh, Tanya, Tanya! Vsegda mechtaesh’ ty. A ya tak ne v tebya, Mne veselo, kogda ya pen’e slyshu. (Ol’ga laskaetsya k materi.) ‘Uzh kak po mostu-mostochku,[4] Po kalinovym dosochkam…’ (Potom poyot sleduyushii nomer, podoidya k avanstsene. Larina, Tat’yana i Filipp’evna okruzhayut eyo.) 100

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Sasha or Masha or dear little Parasha, vainu… Send dear little Parasha, Sasha… Parashenka came out, and had a talk with her sweetheart vainu… had a talk with her sweetheart: ‘Don’t grumble at me, my dearest, I’ve come out just as I was, in my shabby little blouse and my short skirt. Vainu… In my shabby little blouse and my short skirt! Don’t you grumble at me’ vainu… No. 3 Scene and Aria of Olga TATYANA (a book in her hands) How I love to dream when I hear these songs, [1a] and float away somewhere, somewhere far off! OLGA Ah, Tanya, Tanya! You’re always dreaming! But I am quite unlike you, I feel merry when I hear singing. (Olga dances and embraces her mother.) ‘Across the bridge, the little bridge, [4] along the hazel planks…’ (Then Olga sings the following number, coming downstage. Madame Larina, Tatyana and Filippevna stand around her.) 101

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Ya ne sposobna k grusti tomnoi,[5] Ya ne lyublyu mechtat’ v tishi, Il’ na balkone noch’yu tyomnoi Vzdykhat’, vzdykhat’, Vzdykhat’ iz glubiny dushi. Zachem vzdykhat’, kogda schastlivo Moi dni yunye tekut? Ya bezzabotna i shalovliva, Menya rebyonkom vse zovut! Mne budet zhizn’ vsegda, vsegda mila, I ya ostanus’, kak i prezhde, Podobno vetrenoi nadezhde, Rezva, bespechna, vesela! Podobno… Ya ne sposobna k grusti tomnoi… No. 4 Scene LARINA Nu ty, moya vostrushka, Vesyolaya i rezvaya ty ptashka! Ya dumayu — plyasat’ seichas gotova, Ne pravda li? (Filipp’evna s Tat’yanoi otdelyayutsya ot ostal’nykh.) FILIPP’EVNA Tanyusha! A Tanyusha![9] Chto s toboi? Uzh ne bol’na li ty? TAT’YANA Net, Nyanya, — ya zdorova.[1a] LARINA (obrashchayas’ k krest’yanam) Nu, milye, spasibo vam za pesni![4] Stupaite k fligelyu. 102

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I was not made for melancholy sighing, [5] I do not like to dream in silence, nor, on the balcony in the dark night, to sigh, to sigh, to sigh from the depths of my soul. Why should I sigh, when full of happiness, my youthful days flow gently by? I am carefree and full of fun, and everyone calls me a child! For me life will always, always be sweet, and I shall retain, as I always have, light-hearted confidence, be playful, carefree, merry! Light-hearted confidence… I was not made for melancholy sighing… No. 4 Scene LARINA Well, my frolicsome one, merry and playful little bird that you are, I expect you’re ready to dance now, isn’t that so? (Filippyevna and Tatyana have moved away from the others.) FilippyevNA Tanyusha! Hey, Tanyusha! [9] Is anything the matter? You’re not ill, are you? TATYANA No, nurse, I’m quite well. [1a] LARINA (to the peasants) Well, my dears, thank you for the songs. [4] Go over to the annexe. 103

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(k Filipp’evne) Filipp’evna, a ty veli im dat’ vina. Proshchaite, drugi! KREST’YANE Proshchaite, matushka![4] (Krest’yane ukhodyat. Filipp’evna takzhe ukhodit vsled za nimi.) (Tat’yana saditsya na stupen’ki terrasy s knigoi, v kotoruyu uglublyaetsya.) OL’GA Mamasha, posmotrite-ka na Tanyu! LARINA A chto? I vpryam’, moi drug, Bledna ty ochen’! TAT’YANA Ya vsegda takaya, — Vy ne trevozh’tes’, mama! Ochen’, interesno to, chto chitayu. LARINA (smeyotsya) Tak ottogo bledna ty? TAT’YANA Da kak zhe, mama![1b] Povest’ muk serdechnykh Vlublyonnykh dvukh menya volnuet Mne tak zhal’ ikh, bednykh! Akh, kak oni stradayut, kak oni stradayut! LARINA Polno, Tanya! Byvalo, ya, kak ty, Chitaya knigi eti, volnovalas’ Vsyo eto vymysel! Proshli goda, 104

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(to Filippyevna) Filippyevna, see that they have some wine. Goodbye, my friends! PEASANTS Goodbye, little mother! [4] (They leave, accompanied by Filippyevna.) (Tatyana sits down on the steps of the terrace and becomes engrossed in her book.) OLGA Mama, just look at Tanya! LARINA What is it? Indeed, my dear, you’re very pale. TATYANA I always am, don’t worry, Mama! It’s very interesting, this book I’m reading. LARINA (laughing) Is that why you’re so pale? TATYANA Why yes, of course, Mama! [1b] The account of the torments suffered by these true lovers moves me; I’m so sorry for them, poor things! Oh, how they suffer, how they suffer! LARINA That’s enough, Tanya! I used to get upset, just like you, when I read such books. It’s only fiction. As the years went by, 105

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I ya uvidela, chto v zhizni net geroev. Spokoina ya… OL’GA Naprasno tak pokoiny! Smotrite: fartuk vash vy snyat’ zabyli! Nu, kak priedet Lenskii — chto togda? (Larina toroplivo snimaet perednik.) Chu! Podezzhaet kto-to, eto on![1a] LARINA I v samom dele! TAT’YANA (smotrya s terrasy) On ne odin… LARINA Kto b eto byl? FILIPP’EVNA (toroplivo vkhodya) Sudarynya, priekhal Lenskii barin,[1a] S nim gospodin Onegin! TAT’YANA Akh! Skoree ubegu!… LARINA (uderzhivaya eyo) Kuda ty, Tanya? Tebya osudyat!… Batyushki, a chepchik moi na boku!… OL’GA Velite zhe prosit’! LARINA (k Filipp’evne) Prosi skorei, prosi! 106

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I came to see that there are no heroes in real life. Now I take things calmly. OLGA You shouldn’t take things quite so calmly! Look, you’ve forgotten to take off your apron! Supposing Lensky should arrive, what then? (Mme Larina hastily removes her apron.) Listen! Someone’s coming, it’s him! [1a] LARINA It is indeed! TATYANA (looking down from the terrace) He’s not alone… LARINA Who could it be? FilippyevNA (hurrying in) Madam, the young gentleman Lensky has arrived. [1a] Mr Onegin is with him! TATYANA Oh, quick, I’ll run away! LARINA (restraining her) Where are you off to, Tanya? People will talk! Gracious, my cap’s on crooked! OLGA Have them shown in, then! LARINA (to Filippyevna) Quick, ask them to come in! 107

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(Filipp’evna ubegaet. Vse v velichayshem volnenii prigotovlyayutsya vstretit’ gostei. Vkhodyat Lenskii i Onegin. Lenskii podkhodit k ruke Larinoi i pochtitel’no klanyaetsya devitsam.) No. 5 Stsena i kvartet (Vkhodyat Onegin i Lenskii.) LENSKII Mesdames! Ya na sebya vzyal smelost’ Privest’ priyatelya. Rekomenduyu vam: Onegin, moi sosed. ONEGIN Ya ochen’ schastliv! LARINA (konfuzyas’) Pomiluite, my rady vam; Prisyad’te! Vot docheri moi. ONEGIN Ya ochen’, ochen’ rad! LARINA Voidyomte v komnaty! Il’ mozhet byt’, khotite Na vol’nom vozdukhe ostat’sya? Proshu vas, — Bez tseremonii bud’te: my sosedi, — Tak nam chinit’sya nechego! LENSKII Prelestno zdes’! Lyublyu Ya etot sad, ukromnyi i tenistyi! V nyom tak uyutno! LARINA Prekrasno! Poidu pokhlopotat’ ya v dome po khozyaistvu. 108

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(Filippyevna bustles out. The others, in extreme excitement, prepare to receive the guests. Lensky and Onegin are shown in. Lensky kisses Mme Larina’s hand and bows politely to the girls.) No. 5 Scene and Quartet (Onegin and Lensky enter.) LENSKY Mesdames! I’ve taken the liberty of bringing a friend along. May I introduce Onegin, my neighbour. ONEGIN I’m very honoured. LARINA (rather flustered) Oh please… We’re delighted to see you… Do sit down! These are my daughters. ONEGIN I’m very happy to meet you! LARINA Come into the house… Or perhaps you’d prefer to stay out of doors? I beg you, don’t stand on ceremony; we’re neighbours, so there’s no need for formality! LENSKY It’s delightful here! I love this garden, so shady and secluded, one is so comfortable here! LARINA That’s splendid! I’ll go and see to things in the house. 109

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(docheryam) A vy gostei zaimite. Ya seichas! (Ukhodyat, delaya znaki Tane, chtob ta ne dichilas’. Lenskii s Oneginym otkhodyat napravo. Tanya i Ol’ga stoyat na protivopolozhnoi storone.) ONEGIN Skazhi, kotoraya Tatiana, Mne ochen’ lyubopytno znat’. LENSKII Da ta, kotoraya grustna I molchaliva, kak Svetlana. ONEGIN Neuzhto ty vlyublen v men’shuyu? LENSKII A chto? ONEGIN Ya vybral by druguyu, Kogda b ya byl, kak ty, poet. TAT’YANA Ya dozhdalas’, otkrylis’ ochi! Ya znayu, znayu: eto on! OL’GA Akh, znala ya, chto poyavlen’e Onegina proizvedyot Na vsekh bol’shoe vpechatlen’e I vsekh sosedei razvlechot: Poidyot dogadka za dogadkoi… LENSKII Akh, milyi drug… 110

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(to the girls) You entertain our guests. I won’t be long. (She leaves, making a sign to Tatyana not to be shy. Lensky and Onegin walk over to the right, conversing; Tatyana and Olga stand on the opposite side.) ONEGIN Tell me, which is Tatyana? I’m very curious to know. LENSKY Why, the one who is sad and silent, like Svetlana! ONEGIN Can you really be in love with the younger one? LENSKY Why? ONEGIN I should have chosen the other, had I been, like you, a poet! TATYANA My waiting is over, my eyes have been opened! I know, I know that this is he! OLGA Oh, I knew, I knew that the appearance of Onegin would make a great impression on everyone and give the neighbours plenty to talk about! There will be no end to the conjectures… LENSKY Ah, my friend… 111

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ONEGIN V chertakh u Ol’gi zhizni net, Toch’-v-toch’ v Vandikovoi Madonne: Krugla, krasna litsom ona… LENSKII …volna i kamen’, Stikhi i prosa, lyod i plamen’ Ne stol’ razlichny mezh soboi! TAT’YANA Uvy, teper’ i dni, i nochi, I zharkii odinokii son, — Vsyo, vsyo napolnit obraz milyi! OL’GA …Vse stanut tolkovat’ ukradkoi, Shutit, sudit ne bez grekha! Poidyot dogadka za dogadkoi… LENSKII Volna i kamen’, lyod i plamen’… …Stikhi i proza, lyod i plamen’, Ne stol’ razlichnyi mezh soboi… ONEGIN Kak eta glupaya luna, Na etom glupom nebosklone! TAT’YANA Bez umolku volshebnoi siloi Vsyo budet mne tverdit’ o nyom, I dushu zhech’ lyubvi ognyom! OL’GA …Shutit’, sudit’ ne bez grekha, I Tane prochit’ zhenikha! LENSKII …Kak my vzaimnoi raznotoi! 112

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ONEGIN There’s no life in Olga’s features, she’s just like a Van Dyck madonna. Her face is as round and rosy… LENSKY …wave and rock, poetry and prose, ice and flame, are not as different as we are! TATYANA Now, alas, my days and nights and burning, solitary dreams, will always be filled with his dear image! OLGA …everyone will start to whisper, joke, judge – not without malice! There will be no end to the conjectures… LENSKY Wave and rock, ice and flame… …poetry and prose, ice and flame, are not as different as we are… ONEGIN …as that stupid moon on that dull horizon! TATYANA Ceaselessly, with magical power, everything will speak to me of him, my soul will be seared with the fire of love! OLGA …Joke, and judge – not without malice – and appoint him Tanya’s suitor! LENSKY …in our contrasting natures! 113

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ONEGIN Krugla, krasna litsom ona… LENSKII Volna i kamen’, lyod i plamen’, Stikhi i proza… ONEGIN …Kak eta glupaya luna, Na etom glupom nebosklone! TAT’YANA Vsyo budit mne tverdit’ o nyom, I dushu… OL’GA Poidyot dagadka za dogadkoi, I stanut… LENSKII …Ne stol’ razlichnyi mezh soboi, Kak my vzaimnoi raznotoyu! ONEGIN Ya vybral by druguyu! TAT’YANA …zhech’ lyubvy ognyom! OL’GA …Tane prochit’ zhenikha! (Lenskii podkhodit k Ol’ge. Onegin dovol’no beztseremonno ras­ smatrivaet Tanyu, kotoraya stoit opustiv glaza v zemlyu, potom podkhodit k ney i zanimaetsya razgovorom.) No. 6 Stsena i ariozo LENSKII (Ol’ge) Kak schastliv ya, kak schastliv ya:[6] Ya snova vizhus’ s vami! 114

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ONEGIN Her face is as round and rosy… LENSKY Wave and rock, ice and fire, poetry and prose… ONEGIN …as that stupid moon on that dull horizon! TATYANA Everything will speak to me of him, my soul… OLGA There will be no end to the conjectures, and they’ll appoint him… LENSKY …are not as different as we are, in our contrasting natures! ONEGIN I should have chosen the other! TATYANA …will be seared by love’s fire! OLGA …Tanya’s suitor! (Lensky approaches Olga. Onegin looks nonchalantly at Tatyana, who is standing with her eyes cast down; then he approaches her and engages her in conversation.) No. 6 Scene and Arioso LENSKY (to Olga) How happy, how happy I am: [6] I see you once again! 115

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OL’GA Vchera my videlis’, mne kazhetsya? LENSKII O da! No vsyo zh den’ tselyi, dolgii den’ Proshol v razluke. Eto vechnost’! OL’GA Vechnost’![6] Kakoe slovo strashnoe! Vechnost’ — den’ odin! LENSKII Da, slovo strashnoe, No ne dlya moei lyubvi! (Lenskii s Ol’goi prokhodyat. Onegin, obrashchayas’ k Tat’yane s kholodnoi uchtivost’yu.) ONEGIN (Tat’yane) Skazhite mne, — Ya dumayu, byvaet vam[7] Preskuchno zdes’, v glushi, Khotya prelestnoi, no dalyokoi? Ne dumayu, chtob mnogo razvlechenii Dano vam bylo. TAT’YANA Ya chitayu mnogo.[1a] ONEGIN Pravda,[7] Dayot nam chten’e bezdnu pishchi Dlya uma i serdtsa, No ne vsegda sidet’ nam mozhno s knigoi! TAT’YANA Mechtayu inogda, brodya po sadu…[1a] 116

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OLGA We saw each other yesterday, I think! LENSKY Oh, yes, but all the same, a whole long day has gone by since we saw each other last! An eternity! OLGA Eternity! [6] What a dreadful word! Eternity, just one day… LENSKY Yes, a dreadful word, but not for my love! (Olga and Lensky stroll off into the garden. Onegin turns to Tatyana with cool civility.) ONEGIN (to Tatyana) Tell me, is it not dreadfully boring for you [7] here in the depths of the country, which, though lovely, is so far away? I don’t suppose you get much amusement. TATYANA I read a great deal… [1a] ONEGIN It’s true [7] that reading provides abundant food for thought and feeling, but one can’t sit over a book the whole time! TATYANA I daydream sometimes, strolling in the garden. [1a] 117

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ONEGIN O chom zhe vy mechtaete?[1a] TAT’YANA Zadumchivost’ — moya podruga Ot samykh kolybel’nykh dnei. ONEGIN Ya vizhu — vy mechtatel’ny uzhasno. I ya takim kogda-to byl! (Onegin prokhodit v druguyu storonu sada s Tat’yanoi, Lenskii v eto vremya vozvrashchaetsya s Ol’goi.) LENSKII Ya lyublyu vas,[6] Ya lyublyu vas, Ol’ga, kak odna Bezumnaya dusha poeta Eshcho lyubit’ osuzhdena: Vsegda, vezde odno mechtan’e, Odno privychnoe zhelan’e Odna privychnaya pechal’. Ya otrok byl, toboi plenyonnyi, Serdechnykh muk eshcho ne znav, Ya byl svidetel’ umilyonnyi Tvoikh mladencheskikh zabav. V teni khranitel’noi dubravy Ya razdelyal tvoi zabavy. Akh! Ya lyublyu tebya, Ya lyublyu tebya, kak odna Dusha poeta tol’ko lyubit: Ty odna v moikh mechtan’yakh, Ty odno moyo zhelan’e, Ty mne radost’ i stradan’e. Ya lyublyu tebya, Ya lyublyu tebya, i nikogda nichto: Ni okhlazhdayushchaya dal’ Ni chas razluki, ni vesel’ya shum — 118

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ONEGIN What do you dream about? [1a] TATYANA Dreams have been my companions since my earliest days. ONEGIN I see you’re a terrible dreamer! I used to be the same at one time. (They stroll away to the other end of the garden; Olga and Lensky return.) LENSKY I love you, [6] I love you, Olga, as only a poet’s frantic heart can still be fated to love. Always, everywhere, one dream alone, one constant longing, one insistent sadness! As a boy I was captivated by you, when heartache was still unknown; I witnessed, with tender emotion, your childish games. Beneath the grove’s protecting boughs I shared those games. Ah, I love you, I love you with that love known only to a poet’s heart. For you alone I dream. for you alone I long, you are my joy and my suffering. I love you, I love you, eternally, and nothing – not the chilling distance, the hour of parting, nor pleasure’s clamour – 119

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Ne otrezvyat dushi, Sogretoi devstvennym ognyom lyubvi! OL’GA Pod krovom sel’skoi tishiny Rosli s toboyu vmeste my, I, pomnish’, prochili ventsy Uzh v rannem detstve nam s toboi nashi otsy. LENSKII Ya lyublyu tebya!… Ya lyublyu tebya, ya lyublyu tebya! (Na terrasu vykhodit Larina s Filipp’evnoi. Temneet, k kontsu kartiny sovsem temno.) No 7 Zaklyuchitel’naya stsena LARINA A, vot i vy! Kuda zhe delas’ Tanya? FILIPP’EVNA Dolzhno byt’, u pruda gulyaet s gostem; Poidu eyo poklikat’. LARINA Da skazhi-ka ei: Pora-de v komnaty, gostei golodnykh Popotchevat’ chem Bog poslal. (Filipp’evna ukhodit. Lenskomu.) Proshu vas, pozhaluite! LENSKII My vsled za vami! (Szadi ikh Filipp’evna, starayushchayasya podslushat’. Prokhodya tikho po stsene, Evgenii poyot sleduyushchie frazy, pri poslednikh slovakh on uzhe na terrase. Tat’yana vsyo eshcho sokhranyaet svoi smushchonnyi vid.) 120

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can quench that heart aflame with love’s virgin fire! OLGA In rural tranquillity we grew up together; and do you remember how our parents destined us, even as children, for cach other? LENSKY I love you!… I love you, I love you! (Mme Larina and Filippyevna come out onto the terrace. It has grown darker, and within minutes night will have fallen.) No. 7 Closing Scene LARINA Ah, there you are! But wherever has Tanya got to? FilippyevNA She must be strolling by the pond with our guest; I’ll go and call her. LARINA And tell her from me that it’s time to come indoors and let our hungry guests take pot-luck at table! (Filippyevna leaves. To Lensky.) Please come in. LENSKY We’re coming! (Filippyevna follows them, trying to hear their conversation. Onegin walks calmly across the stage, and by the end of his speech has reached the terrace. Tatyana still shows signs of embarrassment.) 121

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ONEGIN Moi dyadya, samykh chestnykh pravil,[7] Kogda ne v shutku zanemog, On uvazhat’ sebya zastavil, I luchshe vydumat’ ne mog. Ego primer drugim nauka. No, Bozhe moi, kakaya skuka S bol’nym sidet’ i den’ i noch’, Ne otkhodya ni shagu proch’! (Tat’yana i Onegin vkhodyat v dom.) FILIPP’EVNA (following them at a distance) Moya golubka, skloniv golovku I glazki opustiv, idyot smirnen’ko… Stydliva bol’no!… A i to! Ne priglyanulsya li ei barin etot novyi… (Ukhodit, zadumchivo kachaya golovoi.) Kartina vtoraya Teatr predstavlyaet komnatu Tat’yany, ochen’ prosto ubrannuyu. Prostye belye derevyannye stul’ya starinnogo fasona, obitye sittsem. Takie zhe sitstevye zanaveski. Krovat’, nad kotoroy polka s knigami. Komod pokrytyi salfetkoy i na nyom zerkalo na stolbikakh. Vazy s tsvetami. U okna stol s chernil’nitsei i so vsem, chto nuzhno dlya pis’ma. Pri otkrytii zanavesa Tat’yana sidit pered zerkalom. Ona ochen’ zadumchiva. Filipp’evna stoit okolo ney. Tat’yana v belom nochnom plat’e. No. 8 Introduktsiya i stsena

[8, 1b]

FILIPP’EVNA Nu, zaboltalas’ ya! Pora uzh, Tanya! Rano Tebya ya razbuzhu k obedne. Zasni skorei. 122

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ONEGIN My uncle was a man of the highest principles; [7] when he finally took to his bed he forced the respect of all and it was the best thing he could do. May others profit from his example! But, my God, what a bore it was, sitting by an invalid day and night, never daring to move a step away! (Tatyana and Onegin enter the house.) FilippyevNA (following them at a distance) There goes my little dove, with meekly drooping head, downcast eyes. She’s dreadfully shy! I wonder! Suppose she’s taken a fancy to this new young man?… (She enters the house, thoughtfully shaking her head.) Scene II Tatyana’s room. It is very simply furnished with old-fashioned white wooden chairs covered with chintz and window curtains of the same material. A bed, over which is a bookshelf, a chest of drawers, covered with a cloth, and, on it, a mirror on a stand. Vases of flowers. At the window, a table with writing materials. When the curtain rises, Tatyana is sitting before her mirror, lost in thought. Filippyevna stands beside her. Tatyana is in a white nightdress. No. 8 Introduction and Scene 

[8, 1b]

FilippyevNA Well, I’ve let my tongue run on! It’s time for bed, Tanya, I’ll wake you early for Mass; go to sleep quickly. 123

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(Tat’yana lenivo vstayot i saditsya na postel’. Filipp’evna laskaet eyo.) [1b] TAT’YANA Ne spitsya, nyanya, zdes’ tak dushno! Otkroi okno i syad’ ko mne. (Otkryv okno, Filipp’evna saditsya na stule ryadom s Tat’yanoi.) [1a] FILIPP’EVNA Chto, Tanya, chto s toboi? TAT’YANA Mne skuchno, Pogovorim o starine! FILIPP’EVNA O chom zhe, Tanya? Ya, byvalo,[9] Khranila v pamyati ne malo Starinnykh bylei i nebylits Pro zlykh dukhov i pro devits, A nyne vsyo temno mne stalo: Chto znala, to zabyla. Da! Prishla khudaya chereda! Zashiblo![1a] TAT’YANA Rasskazhi mne, nyanya, Pro vashi starye goda: Byla ty vlyublena togda? FILIPP’EVNA I polno, Tanya! V nashi leta My ne slykhali pro lyubov’ — A to pokoinitsa svekrov’ Menya by sognala so sveta![1a] TAT’YANA Da kak zhe ty venchalas’, nyanya? 124

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(Tatyana lazily gets up and sits on the bed. Filippyevna caresses her.) [1b] TATYANA I’m not sleepy, nurse, it’s so stuffy in here! Open the window and come and sit by me. (Having opened the window, Filippyevna sits on the chair next to Tatyana.) [1a] FilippyevNA Why, Tanya, what’s the matter with you? TATYANA I’m bored. Let’s talk about the old days. FilippyevNA But what about them, Tanya? [9] I used to know any number of old tales and fairy stories about evil spirits and beautiful maidens, but now my memory’s gone: I’ve forgotten all I knew, that’s a fact! I’m getting old. Decrepit. [1a] TATYANA Tell me, nurse, about your past: were you in love when you were young? FilippyevNA Get along with you, Tanya! In those days one didn’t talk of love, or my late mother-in-law would have chased me from the face of the earth! [1a] TATYANA Then how did you get married, nurse? 125

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FILIPP’EVNA Tak, vidno, Bog velel. Moi Vanya[9] Molozhe byl menya, moi svet, A bylo mne trinadtsat’ let! Nedeli dve khodila svakha K moei rodne, i nakonets, Blagoslovil menya otets! Ya gor’ko plakala so strakha, Mne s plachem kosu raspleli,[9] I s pen’em v tserkov’ poveli. I vot vveli v sem’yu chuzhuyu… Da ty ne slushaesh’ menya? TAT’YANA (obnimaya Filipp’evnu s uvlechen’em i strast’yu) Akh, nyanya, nyanya, ya stradayu, ya toskuyu[10] Mne toshno, milaya moya Ya plakat’, ya rydat’ gotova! FILIPP’EVNA Ditya moyo, ty nezdorova; Gospod’ pomilui i spasi![9] Dai okroplyu tebya svyatoi vodoi, Ty vsya gorish’… TAT’YANA (nereshitel’no) Ya ne bol’na,[10] Ya… znaesh’… nyanya, ya… vlyublena! Ostav’ menya, ostav’ menya… Ya vlyublena! FILIPP’EVNA Da kak zhe… TAT’YANA Podi, ostav’ menya odnu. Dai, nyanya, mne pero, bumagu, Da stol pridvin’ ya skoro lyagu… Prosti![9] 126

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FilippyevNA It was God’s will, I suppose! My Vanya [9] was even younger than me, my love, and I was only thirteen! For a week or two the marriage broker kept calling on my parents, and finally my father gave his consent. I cried bitterly with fright; I wept when they undid my maiden plait [9] and led me with songs to the church. And I found myself installed in a strange family… But you’re not listening to me! TATYANA (embracing Filippyevna with passionate emotion) Oh nurse, nurse, I’m consumed with longing, [10] I’m all upset, my dear; I’m ready to burst into tears. FilippyevNA You’re not well, my child; Lord have mercy on us! [9] Let me sprinkle you with holy water. You’re feverish. TATYANA (hesitatingly) I’m not ill, [10] I… Do you know, nurse… I’m… in love… Leave me, leave me… I’m in love… FilippyevNA But of course… TATYANA Go, leave me alone. Give me a pen and some paper, nurse, and move the table up; I’ll soon go to bed. Good night. [9] 127

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FILIPP’EVNA Pokoinoi nochi, Tanya! (Ukhodit) No. 9 Stsena pis’ma (Tat’yana dolgo ostayotsya v zadumchivosti, potom vstayot v bol’shom volnenii i s vyrazheniem reshimosti na litse.) [10] TAT’YANA Puskai pogibnu ya, no prezhde[11] Ya v oslepitel’noi nadezhde Blazhenstvo tyomnoe zovu, Ya negu zhizni uznayu! Ya p’yu volshebnyi yad zhelanii, Menya presleduyut mechty! Vezde, vezde peredo mnoi Moi iskusitel’ rokovoi, Vezde, vezde on predo mnoi!… (Podkhodit k pis’mennomu stolu i saditsya, neskol’ko vremeni pishet, potom ostanavlivaetsya.) [1b] Net, vsyo ne to! Nachnu snachala!… (Rvyot pis’mo.) Akh, chto so mnoi! Ya vsya goryu! Ne znayu, kak nachat’! (Pishet. Ostanavlivaetsya i prochityvaet napisanoe.) [12] ‘Ya k vam pishu — chego zhe bole? Chto ya mogu eshcho skazat’? Teper’, ya znayu, v vashei vole Menya prezren’em nakazat’! No vy, k moei neschastnoi dole Khot’ kaplyu zhalosti khranya, Vy ne ostavite menya! 128

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FilippyevNA Sleep well, Tanya! (She goes out) No. 9 Letter Scene (Tatyana remains sunk in thought, then rises in a state of great agitation with an expression of determination on her face.) [10] TATYANA Let me perish, but first [11] let me summon, in dazzling hope, bliss as yet unknown. Life’s sweetness is known to me! I drink the magic potion of desire! I am beset by visions! Everywhere, everywhere I look, I see my fatal tempter! Wherever I look, I see him! (She goes to the writing table, sits down, writes; then pauses.) [1b] No, that’s all wrong! I’ll begin again! (She tears up the unfinished letter.) Ah, what’s the matter with me! I’m all on fire! I don’t know how to begin! (She writes, then pauses and reads it over.) [12] ‘I write to you, – and then? What more is there to say? Now, I know, it is within your power to punish me with disdain! But if you nourish one grain of pity for my unhappy lot, you will not abandon me. 129

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Snachala ya molchat’ khotela, Pover’te: moego styda Vy ne uznali b nikogda, Nikogda!’ (Otkladyvaya pis’mo v storonu.) O da, klyalas’ ya sokhranit’ v dushe Priznan’e v strasti pylkoi i bezumnoi. Uvy! Ne v silakh ya vladet’ svoei dushoi![1a] Pust’ budet to, chto byt’ dolzhno so mnoi, — Emu priznayus’ ya! Smelei! On vsyo uznaet! (Pishet.)[12] ‘Zachem, zachem vy posetili nas? V glushi zabytogo selen’ya Ya b nikogda ne znala vas, Ne znala b gor’kogo muchen’ya. Dushi neopytnoi volnen’ya Smiriv so vremenem (kak znat’?) Po serdtsu ya nashla by druga, Byla by vernaya supruga I dobrodetel’naya mat’…’ (Zadumyvaetsya. Vnezapno vstavaya) Drugoi! Net, nikomu na svete[13] Ne otdala by serdtsa ya! To v vyshnem suzhdeno sovete, To volya neba: ya tvoya! Vsya zhizn’ moya byla zalogom, Svidan’ya vernogo s toboi; Ya znayu, ty mne poslan Bogom Do groba ty khranitel’ moi! Ty v snoviden’yakh mne yavlyalsya, Nezrimyi, ty uzh byl mne mil. Tvoi chudnyi vzglyad menya tomil, 130

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At first I wished to remain silent; then, believe me, you would never have known my shame, never!’ (She puts the letter aside.) O yes, I swore to lock within my breast this avowal of a mad and ardent passion. Alas, I have not the strength to subdue my heart! [1a] Come what may, I am prepared! I will confess all! Courage! He shall know all! (She writes.) [12] ‘Why, oh why did you visit us? Buried in this remote countryside, I should never have known you, nor should I have known this torment. The turbulence of a youthful heart, calmed by time, who knows? Most likely I would have found another, have proved a faithful wife and virtuous mother…’ (She becomes lost in thought, then rises suddenly.) Another! No, not to any other in the world [13] would I have given my heart! It is decreed on high, it is the will of heaven: I am yours! My whole life has been a pledge of this inevitable encounter; I know this: God sent you to me, you are my keeper till the grave! You appeared before me in my dreams; as yet unseen, you were already dear, your wondrous gaze filled me with longing, 131

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V dushe tvoi golos razdavalsya! Davno… Net, eto byl ne son! Ty chut’ voshol, ya vmig uznala, Vsya obomlela, zapylala, I v myslyakh molvila: vot on! Vot on! Ne pravda l’, ya tebya slykhala:[13] Ty govoril so mnoi v tishi, Kogda ya bednym pomogala Ili molitvoi uslazhdala Tosku dushi? I v eto samoe mgnoven’e Ne ty li, miloe viden’e V prozrachnoi temnote mel’knul, Proniknul tikho k izgolov’yu, Ne ty l’, s otradoi i lyubov’yu Slova nadezhdy mne shepnul? (Podkhodit k stolu i snova saditsya pisat’.) ‘Kto ty, moi angel li khranitel’[14] Ili kovarnyi iskusitel’, Moi somnen’ya razreshi. Byt’ mozhet, eto vsyo pustoe, Obman neopytnoi dushi, I suzhdeno sovsem inoe?’ (Snova vstayot i khodit v zadumchivosti.) No tak i byt’! Sud’bu moyu[1a] Otnyne ya tebe vruchayu, Pered toboyu slyozy l’yu, Tvoei zashchity umolyayu, Umolyayu. Voobrazi: ya zdes’ odna![14] Nikto menya ne ponimaet! Rassudok moi iznemogaet, I molcha gibnut’ ya dolzhna! 132

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your voice resounded in my heart long ago… no, it was no dream! As soon as you arrived, I recognized you, I almost swooned, began to blaze with passion, and to myself I said: ’Tis he! ’Tis he! I know it! I have heard you… [13] Have you not spoken to me in the silence when I visited the poor or sought in prayer some solace for the anguish of my soul? And just this very moment, was it not you, dear vision, that flamed in the limpid darkness, stooped gently at my bedside and with joy and love whispered words of hope? (She returns to the table and sits down again to write.) ‘Who are you? My guardian angel [14] or a wily tempter? Put my doubts at rest. Maybe this is all an empty dream, the self-deception of an inexperienced soul, and something quite different is to be…’ (She rises again and paces pensively to and fro.) But so be it! My fate [1a] henceforth I entrust to you; in tears before you, your protection I implore, I implore. Imagine: I am all alone here! [14] No one understands me! I can think no more, and must perish in silence! 133

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Ya zhdu tebya, Ya zhdu tebya! Edinym slovom Nadezhdy serdtsa ozhivi, Il’ son tyazholyi perervi, Uvy, zasluzhennym, Uvy, zasluzhennym ukorom! (Bystro podkhodit k stolu i dopisyvaet pis’mo. Vstayot i zapechat­ yvaet pis’mo.) Konchayu! Strashno perechest’, Stydom i strakhom zamirayu, No mne porukoi chest’ ego, I smelo ei sebya vveryayu! No. 10 Stsena i duet (Tat’yana podkhodit k oknu i odyorgivaet zanavesky. V komnatu vryvaetsya svet.) TAT’YANA Akh, noch’ minula, Prosnulos’ vsyo, I solnyshko vstayot… (Saditsya u okna)[15] Pastukh igraet, Spokoino vsyo… A ya-to, ya-to? (Zadumivaetsya. Dver’ tikhon’ko otvoryaetsya i vkhodit Filipp’evna.)  [10, 9] FILIPP’EVNA Pora, ditya moyo! Vstavai![9] (Uvidev Tat’yanu) 134

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I wait for you, I wait for you! Speak the word to revive my heart’s fondest hopes or shatter this oppressive dream with, alas, the scorn, alas, the scorn I have deserved! (She goes swiftly to the table, hurriedly finishes the letter and signs and seals it.) Finished! It’s too frightening to read over, I swoon from shame and fear, but his honour is my guarantee and in that I put my trust! No. 10 Scene and duet (Tatyana goes to the window and draws aside the curtains. The room is immediately flooded with light.) TATYANA Ah, night is past, everything is awake… and the sun is rising. (Sits by the window) [15] The shepherd is playing his pipe… Everything is peaceful. While I… I… (Slips into thought. The door opens softly and Filippyevna enters.)  [10, 9] FilippyevNA It’s time, my child! Get up! [9] (Seeing Tatyana) 135

Eugene Onegin

Da ty, krasavitsa, gotova! O, ptashka rannyaya moya! Vechor uzh kak boyalas’ ya… No, slava Bogu, ty, ditya, zdorova! Toski nochnoi i sledu net, Litso tvoyo — kak makov tsvet! (Tat’yana otkhodit ot okna i beryot pis’mo.) TAT’YANA Akh, nyanya, sdelai odolzhen’e… FILIPP’EVNA Izvol’, rodnaya — prikazhi! TAT’YANA Ne dumai… pravo… podozren’e… No vidish’… Akh, ne otkazhi! FILIPP’EVNA Moi drug, vot Bog tebe porukoi. TAT’YANA Itak, poshli tikhon’ko vnuka[16] S zapiskoi etoi k O… k tomu… K sosedu… Da veli emu, Chtob on ne govoril ni slova, chtob on, Chtob on… ne nazyval menya! FILIPP’EVNA Komu zhe, milaya moya? Ya nynche stala bestolkova! Krugom sosedei mnogo est’, Kuda mne ikh i perechest’; Komu zhe, komu zhe, ty tolkom govori! TAT’YANA (neterpelivo) Kak nedogadliva ty, nyanya! 136

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Why, you’re up already, my pretty one! My little early bird! I was so anxious last night… Well, my child, thank God you’re well! Not a trace of last night’s upset. Your cheeks are red as poppies! (Tatyana walks away from the window and takes up the letter.) TATYANA Oh, nurse, be a darling… FilippyevNA Of course, pet, tell me what you want. TATYANA Don’t think… truly… don’t suspect… but you see… oh, don’t say no! FilippyevNA My dearest, as God’s my witness! TATYANA Then, send your grandson, on the quiet, [16] with this note to O… to that… to our neighbour, and tell him not to breathe a word and not to mention my name. FilippyevNA To whom, my dear? I’m not as bright as I was! We’ve lots of neighbours round about, do you want me to go through them all? Which one do you mean? Talk sense! TATYANA (impatiently) How dense you are, nurse! 137

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FILIPP’EVNA Serdechnyi drug, uzh ya stara, Stara, tupeet razum, Tanya; A to, byvalo, ya vostra. Byvalo… byvalo… mne slovo barskoi voli… TAT’YANA Akh, nyanya, nyanya, do togo li?[16] Chto nuzhdy mne v tvoyom ume, Ty vidish’, nyanya, delo o pis’me… FILIPP’EVNA Nu, delo, delo, delo! TAT’YANA Chto nuzhdy, nyanya, mne v tvoyom ume. FILIPP’EVNA Ne gnevaisya, dusha moya, Ty znaesh’, neponyatna ya! TAT’YANA K Oneginu! FILIPP’EVNA Nu, delo, delo! Ya ponyala! TAT’YANA K Oneginu! S pis’mom K Oneginu poshli ty vnuka, nyanya! FILIPP’EVNA Nu, nu, gnevaisya, dusha moya, Ty znaesh’, neponyatna ya! Da chto zh ty snova poblednela? TAT’YANA Tak, nyanya… Pravo, nichego… Poshli zhe vnuka svoego! 138

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FilippyevNA Dear heart, I’m getting old! I’m old; my wits are dull, Tanya; but in the old days I was bright enough. In the old days, one word from the master… TATYANA Oh, nurse, nurse, none of that matters! [16] What do I want with your wits? You see nurse, it’s about a letter… FilippyevNA Well, all right, all right! TATYANA What do I want with your wits, nurse… FilippyevNA Don’t be angry, dear heart! You know how slow I am. TATYANA …to Onegin… FilippyevNA All right, all right: I understand! TATYANA …to Onegin… …with a letter… …to Onegin, send your grandson, nurse! FilippyevNA Well, well, don’t be angry, dear heart! You know I’m slow! …Gracious, why have you turned pale again? TATYANA It’s nothing, nurse, really nothing! Go and send your grandson! 139

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(Filipp’evna, vsyav pis’mo, stoit vsyo eshcho v nedoumenii. Tanya delaet ei znak chtob ona ukhodila. Filipp’evna ukhodit, u dverei ostanavlivaetsya, zadumyvaetsya, snova vozvrashchaetsya. Nakonets dayot pochuvstvovat’, chto ona ponyala, ukhodit. Tat’yana saditsya k stolu, i oblokotivshis’, snova pogruzhaetsya v razdum’e.) [16, 10] Kartina tret’ya Teatr predstavlyaet drugoe mesto sada pri usad’be Larinykh. Gustye kusty sireni i akatsii, vetkhaya skameika, zapushchennye klumby. Sennye devushki, sobirayushchie yagody, mel’kayut v kustakh. Khor na zadnem plane v kustakh. No. 11 Khor devushek DEVUSHKI Devitsy, krasavitsy,[17] Dushen’ki, podruzhen’ki! Razygraites’, devitsy, Razgulyaites’, milye! Zatyanite pesenku Pesenku zavetnuyu, Zamanite molodtsa, K khorovodu nashemu! Kak zamanim molodtsa, Kak zavidim izdali —, Razbezhimtes’, milye, Zakidaem vishen’em, Vishen’em, malinoyu, Krasnoyu smorodinoi! Ne khodi podslushivat’ Pesenki zavetnye, Ne khodi podsmatrivat’ Igry nashi devich’i! Devitsy, krasavitsy… (Devushki ukhodyat v glubinu sada. ) 140

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(Filippyevna takes the letter, but stands as if still in doubt. Tatyana motions her to leave. Filippyevna goes to the door, stands there a moment considering, then turns back. Filippyevna signifies that she understands and leaves the room. Tatyana sits at the table and, rest[16, 10] ing her elbows on it, again becomes lost in thought.)  Scene III Another part of the garden of the Larin estate. Thick lilac and acacia bushes, neglected flower beds and an old bench. In the background, servant girls are gathering berries among the bushes and singing. No. 11 Chorus of Girls SERVANT GIRLS Pretty maidens, [17] dear companions, come on out to play, girls! Trip merrily, my friends, and sing a song, a favourite song to lure a handsome lad to join our dance! When the handsome lad is lured, when he approaches us, let’s run away, my friends, pelting him with cherries, with cherries, with berries, with redcurrants! Don’t you come eavesdropping on our favourite songs, don’t you come spying on our girlish play! Pretty maidens… (The servant girls move off, their singing dies away. ) 141

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No. 12 Stsena i ariya Onegina (Tat’yana bystro vbegaet i v iznemozhenii padaet na skam’yu.) TAT’YANA Zdes’ on, zdes’ Evgenii! O Bozhe, Bozhe, chto podumal on! Chto skazhet on? Akh, dlya chego, Stenan’yu vnyav dushi bol’noi, Ne sovladav sama s soboi, Emu pis’mo ya napisala? Da, serdtse mne teper’ skazalo, Chto nasmeyotsya nado mnoi Moi soblaznitel’ rokovoi! O, Bozhe moi, kak ya neschastna, Kak ya zhalka!… Shagi… vsyo blizhe… Da, eto on, eto on! (Vkhodit Onegin. Tanya vskakivaet. Evgenii podkhodit k nei. Ona opuskaet golovu na grud’.) ONEGIN (s dostoinstvom, pokoino i neskol’ko kholodno) Vy mne pisali, Ne otpiraites’. Ya prochol dushi doverchivoi priznan’ya, Lyubvi nevinnoi izliyan’ya, Mne vasha iskrennost’ mila; Ona v volnen’e privela Davno umolknuvshie chuvstva. No vas khvalit’ ya ne khochu; Ya za neyo vam otplachu Priznan’em takzhe bez iskusstva. Primite zh ispoved’ moyu: Sebya na sud vam otdayu. TAT’YANA (opuskaetsya opyat’ na skam’yu) O Bozhe, kak obidno i kak bol’no! 142

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No. 12 Scene and Aria of Onegin (Tatyana enters, running quickly, and sinks exhausted onto the bench.) TATYANA He’s here! He’s here, Eugene! Dear God! Dear God, what must he have thought? What will he say? Oh why did I obey my aching heart alone, and, lacking all self control, write him that letter? Indeed, my heart now tells me that my fatal tempter will only laugh at me! Oh my God! How miserable I am, how contemptible! Footsteps… they are drawing closer… Yes, it is he, it is he! (Onegin enters. Tatyana leaps to her feet and stands with lowered head as he approaches.) ONEGIN (with dignity, calmly and somewhat coldly) You wrote to me. Don’t deny it. I have read the avowal of a trusting heart, the outpouring of an innocent love; your candour touched me deeply. It has stirred feelings long since dormant. I won’t commend you for this, But I will repay you with an equally guileless avowal. Hear my confession, then judge me as you will! TATYANA (collapsing again onto the bench) O God! How humiliating and how painful! 143

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ONEGIN Kogda by zhizn’ domashnim krugom[18] Ya ogranichit’ zakhotel, Kogda b mne byt’ otsom, suprugom Priyatnyi zhrebii povedel, — To, verno b, krome vas odnoi Nevesty ne iskal inoi. No ya ne sozdan dlya blazhenstva, Emu chuzhda dusha moya; Naprasny vashi sovershenstva, Ikh nedostoin vovse ya. Pover’te, sovest’ v tom porukoi, Supruzhestvo nam budet mukoi. Ya, skol’ko ni lyubil by vas, Privyknuv, razlyublyu totchas. Sudite zh vy, kakie rozy Nam zagotovit Gimenei I, mozhet byt’, na mnogo dnei! Mechtam i godam net vozvrata, Ne obnovlyu dushi moei! Ya vas lyublyu lyubov’yu brata, Lyubov’yu brata, Il’, mozhet byt’, eshcho nezhnei! Il’, mozhet byt’, il’, mozhet byt’, eshcho nezhnei, Poslushaite zh menya bez gneva, Smenit ne raz mladaya deva Mechtami lyogkie mechty! Uchites’, vlastvovat’ soboi… …Ne vsyakii vas, kak ya, poimyot, K bede neopytnost’ vedyot! devushki (za stsenoi) Devitsy, krasavitsy,[17] Dushen’ki, podruzhen’ki! Razygraites’, devitsy… …Razgulyaites’, milye. Kak zamanim molodtsa, 144

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ONEGIN If I wished to pass my life [18] within the confines of the family circle, and a kindly fate had decreed for me the role of husband and father, then, most like, I would not choose any other bride than you. But I was not made for wedded bliss, it is foreign to my soul, your perfections are vain, I am quite unworthy of them. Believe me, I give you my word, marriage would be a torment for us. No matter how much I loved you, habit would kill that love. Judge what a thorny bed of roses Hymen would prepare for us, and, perhaps, to be endured at length! One cannot return to dreams and youth, I cannot renew my soul! I love you with a brother’s love, a brother’s love or, perhaps, more than that! Perhaps, perhaps more than that! Listen to me without getting angry, more than once will a girl exchange one passing fancy for another. Learn to control your feelings… …Not everyone will understand you as I do. Inexperience leads to disaster! SERVANT GIRLS (in the distance) Pretty maidens, [17] dear companions, come on out to play, girls!… …Trip it merrily, my friends. When a handsome lad is lured, 145

Eugene Onegin

Kak zavidim izdali. Razbezhimtes’, milye, Zakidaem vishen’em! Ne khodi podslushivat’, Ne khodi podsmatrivat’ Igry nashi devich’i! (Devushki prodolzhayut pet’, postepenno udalyayas’. Onegin podayot ruku Tat’yane. Ona dolgo smotrit na nego umolyayushchim vzglyadom, potom mashinal’no vstayot i opirayas’ na nego, tikho ukhodit.)

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when he approaches us, let’s run away, my friends, pelting him with cherries. Don’t you come eavesdropping, don’t you come spying on our girlish play! (The voices of the servant girls die away. Onegin offers Tatyana his arm; after giving him a long, imploring look, she rises mechanically, accepts his arm and they leave slowly.)

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D eistvie vtoroe Kartina pervaya Teatr predstavlyaet osveshchonnuyu zalu v dome Larinykh. Poseredine lyustra, po bokam kenkety s zazhzhonnymi sal’nymi svechami. Gosti v bal’nykh naryadakh ves’ma staromodnogo fasona, i sredi nikh voennye v mundirakh dvadtsatykh godov tantsuyut val’s. Stariki sidyat gruppami, lyubuyas’ na tantsy. Mamen’ki s ridikyulyami zanimayut stul’ya, ustavlennye vdol’ sten. Onegin s Tat’yanoi, Lenskii s Ol’goi prinimayut uchastie v tantsakh. Larina besprestanno prokhodit po stsene s ozabochennym vidom khozyaiki. No. 13 Antrakt i val’s s stsenoi i khorom GOSTI Vot tak syurpriz! Nikak ne ozhidali Voennoi muzyki! Vesel’e khot’ kuda! Davno uzh nas Tak ne ugoshchali! Na slavu pir, Ne pravda l’, gospoda? Uzh davno nas Tak ne ugoshchali! Pir na slavu, Ne pravda l’, gospoda? Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! Vot tak syurpriz nam! Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! Slavnyi syurpriz dlya nas! POZHILIE POMESHCHIKI V nashikh pomest’yakh ne chasto vstrechaem Bala vesyologo radostnyi blesk. 148

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AC T T wo Scene I A brightly illuminated ballroom in Mme Larina’s house. In the centre a chandelier; on the walls, sconces with lit tallow candles. Guests in very old-fashioned evening dress and among them officers, dressed in the military uniforms of the 1820s, are dancing a waltz. The older men sit in groups and watch the dancing admiringly. The older women, who are carrying reticules, occupy chairs placed along the walls. Onegin is dancing with Tatyana, and Lensky with Olga. Mme Larina moves about continuously with the air of a busy hostess. No. 13 Entr’acte and Waltz with Scene and Chorus  GUESTS Well, what a surprise! We never expected a military band! Revelry – and to spare! A long time has passed since we were so entertained! A marvellous party, would you not all agree? A long time has passed since we were so entertained! A marvellous party, would you not all agree? Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! What a lovely surprise! Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! A splendid surprise for us all! ELDERLY GENTLEMEN On our estates we don’t often meet with the merry sparkle of a jolly ball. 149

[14, 20]

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Tol’ko okhotoi sebya rasvlekaem: Lyub nam okhotnichii gomon i tresk. MAMEN’KI Nu, uzh vesel’e: den’ tselyi letayut Po debryam, polyanam, bolotam, kustam! Ustanut, zalyagut i vse otdykhayut, I vot razvlechen’e dlya bednykh vsekh dam! MOLODYE DEVITSY (pristayut k rotnomu) Akh, Trifon Petrovich, Kak mily vy, pravo! My tak blagodarny vam… ROTNYI Polnote-s! Ya sam ochen’ schastliv! MOLODYE DEVITSY Poplyashem na slavu my! ROTNYI Ya tozhe nameren, Nachnyomte zh plyasat’! (Onegin tantsuet s Tat’yanoi. V eto vremya drugie tantsuyushchie priostanavlivayutsya i vse nablyudayut za tantsuyushchei paroi.) Dve gruppy MAMENEK (v razgovore) pervye Glyan’te-ka, glyan’te-ka! Tantsuyut pizhony! vtorye Davno uzh pora by! pervye Nu, zhenishok! 150

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The hunt is our only amusement, dear to us is its hubbub and stir. ELDERLY LADIES Amusement indeed! The whole day they dash over hill and dale, marshland and scrub! They tire themselves out, then collapse into bed, and that’s all the amusement we poor women get! YOUNG GIRLS (surrounding Captain Buyanov) Oh, Trifon Petrovich how kind you are, really! We’re so grateful to you… CAPTAIN Not at all… The pleasure is all mine! YOUNG GIRLS We’ll enjoy the dancing so much! CAPTAIN I mean to enjoy it too. Let’s begin, then! (Onegin is still dancing with Tatyana. The other couples stop dancing and watch them.) Two groups OF OLDER LADIES (conversing) Group A Just look there! Just look! The lovebirds are dancing together! Group B High time, too... Group A What a bridegroom! 151

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vtorye Kak zhalko Tanyushu! pervye Voz’myot eyo v zheny… Vmeste I budet tiranit’! On, slyshno, igrok! (Onegin tikho prokhodit mimo mamenek, starayas’ prislushat’sya k ikh razgovoru.) On — neuch strashnyi, sumasbrodit, On damam k ruchke ne podkhodit, On — farmazon, on p’yot odno Stakanom krasnoe vino! ONEGIN (pro sebya) I vot vam mnen’e! Naslushalsya Dovol’no ya raznykh spleten’ Merzkikh! Po delam mne vsyo Eto! Zachem priekhal ya Na etot glupyi bal? Zachem? Ya ne proshchu Vladimiru Uslugu etu! Budu Ukhazhivat’ za Ol’goi, Vzbeshu ego poryadkom! (V eto vremya Ol’ga prokhodit mimo, za nei idyot Lenskii.) Vot ona! (Ol’ge) Proshu vas! (Ol’ga v nedoumenii.) LENSKII (Ol’ge) Vy obeshchali mne teper’! 152

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Group B How sorry one is for Tanya! Group A He’ll marry her… Together …and then play the tyrant! They say he’s a gambler! (Onegin quietly passes them by, trying to overhear their con­ versation.) He’s dreadfully uncouth, his behaviour’s quite mad, he won’t kiss the ladies’ hands, he’s a freemason, he drinks only red wine – by the tumblerful! ONEGIN (aside) There’s public opinion for you! I’ve heard more than enough of this repulsive tittle-tattle! It serves me right, all this! Why did I ever come to this stupid ball? Why? I won’t forgive Vladimir this service! I’ll flirt with Olga… That’ll make him mad! (Olga passes by with Lensky.) Here she is!… (to Olga) May I have the pleasure? (Olga seems undecided.) LENSKY (to Olga) You promised me this one! 153

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ONEGIN (Lenskomu) Oshibsya, verno, ty! (Onegin s Ol’goi tantsuyut.) LENSKII Akh, chto takoe! Glazam ne veryu! Ol’ga! Bozhe, chto so mnoi! GOSTI (tantsuya) Pir na slavu! Vot tak syurpriz! Pir na slavu! Vot tak syurpriz! Vot tak ugoshchen’e! Vesel’e — khot’ kuda! Pir na slavu! Vot tak syurpriz! Nikak ne ozhidali Voennoi muzyki! Vesel’e — khot’ kuda! Uzh davno nas Tak ne ugoshchali! Pir na slavu! Ne pravda l’? Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! Vot tak syurpriz nam! Bravo! Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! Ne pravda l’? Na slavu pir, Ne pravda l’? Da, voennoi muzyki Nikak ne ozhidali my! Pir na slavu… Vesel’e — khot’ kuda! Pir na slavu! 154

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ONEGIN (to Lensky) You must have made a mistake! (Olga and Onegin dance.) LENSKY Why, what’s, this! I can’t believe my eyes! Olga! Heavens, what’s happening to me! GUESTS (as they dance) A marvellous party! What a surprise! A marvellous party! What a surprise! What a delicious treat! Revelry – and to spare! A marvellous party! What a surprise! We never expected a military band! Revelry – and to spare! A long time has passed since we were so entertained! A marvellous party! Isn’t that so? Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! What a surprise! Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! Don’t you agree? A marvellous party, don’t you agree? Indeed, we never expected a military band! A marvellous party… Revelry – and to spare! A marvellous party! 155

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No. 14 Stsena i kuplety Trike LENSKII (podkhodya k Ol’ge, tol’ko chto konchivshei tantsovat’ s Oneginym) Uzhel’, ya zasluzhil ot vas nasmeshku etu? Akh, Ol’ga, kak zhestoki vy so mnoi! Chto sdelal ya? OL’GA Ne ponimayu V chom vinovata ya? LENSKII Vse ekosezy, vse val’sy S Oneginym vy tantsovali! Ya priglashal vas, no byl otvergnut! OL’GA Vladimir, eto stranno: Iz pustyakov ty serdish’sya! LENSKII Kak! Iz-za pustyakov? Uzheli ravnodushno ya videt’ mog, Kogda smeyalas’ ty, koketnichaya s nim? K tebe on naklonyalsya i ruku Zhal tebe! Ya videl vsyo! OL’GA Vsyo eto pustyaki i bred! Revnuesh’ ty naprasno: My tak boltali s nim. On ochen’ mil! LENSKII Dazhe mil! Akh, Ol’ga, ty menya ne lyubish’! OL’GA Kakoi ty strannyi! 156

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No. 14 Scene and Couplets of Triquet LENSKY (approaching Olga as soon as she finishes dancing with Onegin) Have I deserved such ridicule from you? Oh, Olga, how cruelly you treat me! What have I done? OLGA I can’t see that I’ve done anything wrong! LENSKY Every écossaise, every waltz you have danced with Onegin! I asked you, but was refused! OLGA Vladimir, this is ridiculous, you’re angry about nothing at all! LENSKY What! Nothing! How could I be indifferent while you laughed and flirted with him? He was leaning over you and squeezing your hand! I saw it all! OLGA That’s all stuff and nonsense! You have no reason to be jealous, we were only chatting; he’s very nice! LENSKY Nice, even! Oh, Olga, you don’t love me! OLGA How strange you are! 157

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LENSKII Ty menya ne lyubish’… Kotil’on so mnoi Tantsuesh’ ty? (Podkhodit Onegin.) ONEGIN Net, so mnoi! Ne pravda l’, slovo vy mne dali? OL’GA I sderzhu ya slovo! (Lenskomu) Vot vam nakazan’e Za revnost’ vashu! LENSKII Ol’ga! OL’GA (Lenskomu) Ni za chto! (Oneginu) Glyadite-ka: Vse baryshni idut syuda s Trike! ONEGIN Kto on! OL’GA Frantsuz, zhivyot u Kharlikova! MOLODYE DEVITSY Monsieur Triquet, Monsieur Triquet! Chantez de grâce un couplet! 158

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LENSKY You don’t love me! Will you dance the cotillion with me’? (Onegin approaches them.) ONEGIN No, with me. You promised me, didn’t you? OLGA And I’ll keep my promise! (to Lensky) That’s your punishment for being jealous! LENSKY Olga! OLGA (to Lensky) Not for the world! (to Onegin) Look! All the young ladies are coming this way with Triquet. ONEGIN Who is he? OLGA A Frenchman, he lives at the Kharlikovs’. YOUNG GIRLS Monsieur Triquet, Monsieur Triquet, please sing us some verses! 159

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TRIKE Kuplet imeet ya s soboi. No gde, skazhite, Mademoiselle? On dolzhen byt’ peredo mnoi, Car le couplet est fait pour elle! GOSTI Vot ona! Vot ona! (Tat’yanu stavyat posredine kruga, obrazuemogo vsemi gostyami. Trike poyot sleduyushchie kuplety obrashchayas’ k nei, ona konfuzitsya i khochet uiti, no eyo yderzhivayut. ) TRIKE Aha! Voilà tsaritsa etot den’! Mesdames! Ya budu nachinait’! Proshu teper’ mne ne meshait! À cette fête conviés,[21] De celle dont le jour est fété Contemplons le charme et la beauté. Son aspect doux et enchanteur Répand sur nous tous sa lueur, De la voir quel plaisir, quel bonheur! Brillez, brillez, toujours, belle Tatiana! GOSTI Bravo, bravo, bravo, Monsieur Triquet! Kuplet vash prevoskhoden i ochen’, ochen’ milo spet! TRIKE Que le sort comble ses désirs, Que la joie, les yeux, les plaisirs, Fixent sur ses lèvres le sourire! Que sur le ciel de ce pays, Étoile qui toujours brille et luit, Elle éclaire nos jours et nos nuits. Brillez, brillez, toujours, belle Tatiana! 160

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TRIQUET I’as ze verses wiz me. But where, I ask, is Mademoiselle? ’E must be ’ere in front of me, for the verses were written for her! GUESTS Here she is! Here she is! (The guests form a circle, placing Tatyana in the middle, where, despite her embarrassment and attempts to escape, she has to stand while M. Triquet adresses his couplets to her.) TRIQUET Aha! ’Ere is ze queen zis day. Mesdames, I will begin. Please to not interrupt me. As guests, let us pay tribute to the charm and beauty of the one whose name day we celebrate. Her sweet, enchanting countenance sheds radiance all around. What a pleasure, what a joy to see her! Shine upon us for ever, beautiful Tatyana! GUESTS Bravo, bravo, bravo, Monsieur Triquet! Your verses are wonderful and very, very nicely sung! TRIQUET May destiny fulfil her every wish, may joy, amusement and pleasure ever wreathe her lips in smiles! May she be like a star in our country’s firmament, ever shining and casting light, illuminating our days and nights. Shine upon us forever, beautiful Tatyana! 161

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GOSTI Bravo, bravo, bravo, Monsieur Triquet! Kuplet vash prevoskhoden i ochen’, ochen’ milo spet! (Trike klanyaetsya i blogodarit. Konchiv kuplet, Trike podnosit ego, stanovyas’ na kolenii konfuzyashcheisya Tane.) No. 15 Mazurka i stsena ROTNYI Messieurs, mesdames, mesta zanyat’ izvol’te, Seichas nachnyotsya kotil’on! (Tat’yane) Pozhaluite![22] (Rotnyi podayot ruku Tat’yane i puskaetsya v plyas. Tants­ uyushchie gosti rassazhivautsya parami. Onegin saditsya s Ol’goi blizhe k stsene, Lenskii stoit v zadumchivosti szadi nikh. Protantsovavshi tur s Ol’goi, Onegin usazhivaet svoyu damu, potom, delaya vid, chto tol’ko chto zametil Lenskogo, obrashchaetsya k nemu.) ONEGIN Ty ne tantsuesh’ Lenskii? Chail’d Garol’dom stoish’ kakim-to! Choto s toboi? LENSKII So mnoi? Nichego! Lyubyus’ ya toboi, Kakoi ty drug prekrasnyi! ONEGIN Kakovo? Ne ozhidal priznan’ya ya takovo! Za chto ty duesh’sya? 162

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GUESTS Bravo, bravo, bravo, Monsieur Triquet! Your verses are wonderful and very, very nicely sung! (Triquet bows and thanks them. On finishing his song Triquet takes it over to the embarrassed Tatyana and, kneeling, offers it to her.) No. 15 Mazurka and Scene CAPTAIN Ladies and gentlemen, take your places, please the cotillion’s about to begin! (to Tatyana) If you please! [22] (The Captain offers Tatyana his arm and leads off the dance. The guests pair off and dance. Onegin and Olga sit towards the front of the stage. Lensky stands lost in thought behind them. After dancing a turn with Olga, Onegin conducts her to her seat and then turns to Lensky as if he had only just noticed him.) ONEGIN Aren’t you dancing, Lensky? You’re standing around like some Childe Harold! What’s up with you? LENSKY With me? Nothing. I’m admiring you; What a fine friend you are! ONEGIN Well, well! I didn’t expect such an avowal! What are you sulking about? 163

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LENSKII Ya duyus’? O, nimalo! Lyubyus’, ya, kak slov svoikh igroi I svetskoi boltovnei Ty kruzhish’ golovy i devochek smushchaesh’ Pokoi dushevnyi. (Gosti malo pomalu prekrashchayut tantsy, prislushivayas’ k razgovoru Lenskogo s Oneginym.) Vidno, dlya tebya Odnoi Tat’yany malo! Iz lyubvi ko mne Ty, verno, khochesh’ Ol’gu pogubit’, Smutit’ eyo pokoi, a tam Smeyat’sya nad neyu zhe!… Akh, kak chestno eto! ONEGIN (s usmeshkoi, no pokoino) Chto? Da ty s uma soshol! LENSKII Prekrasno! Menya zh ty oskorblyaesh’ — I menya zhe ty zovyosh’ pomeshannym! (Tantsy prekrashchayutsya.) GOSTI Chto takoe? V chom tam delo? Chto takoe? (Gosti ostavlyayut svoi mesta i okruzhayut sporyashchikh.) LENSKII Onegin! Vy bol’she mne ne drug! Byt’ blizkim s vami Ya ne zhelayu bol’she! Ya… ya prezirayu vas! 164

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LENSKY Me, sulking? Not at all! I’m admiring how, with artful words and man-of-the-world chatter, you turn heads and disturb the peace of mind of all the young girls! (The guests gradually leave off dancing as they become aware of the quarrel.) Obviously, Tatyana is not enough for you. Out of love for me, you evidently want to ruin Olga, upset her peace of mind, and then have a good laugh at her expense! Oh, how admirable!… ONEGIN (with a smirk, but calmly) What? You must be mad! LENSKY Excellent! You insult me, and then you call me a madman! (Everybody stops dancing.) GUESTS What’s up? What’s going on there? What’s the matter? (The guests leave their places and surround the quarrelling men.) LENSKY Onegin! You’re no longer my friend! I no longer wish to be on close terms with you! I… despise you! 165

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GOSTI Vot neozhidannyi syurpriz! Kakaya ssora zakipela: U nikh poshlo ne v shutku delo! ONEGIN (otvodya Lenskogo neskol’ko v storonu) Poslushai, Lenskii, ty ne prav! Ty ne prav! Dovol’no nam privlekat’ vniman’e nashei ssoroi! Ya ne smutil eshcho nichei pokoi I, priznayus’, zhelan’ya ne imeyu ego smushchat’. LENSKII Togda zachem zhe ty Ei ruku zhal, Sheptal ei chto-to? Krasnela, smeyas’, ona… Chto, chto ty govoril ei? ONEGIN Poslushai, eto glupo! Nas okruzhayut! LENSKII Chto za delo mne! Ya vami oskorblyon I satisfaktsii ya trebuyu! GOSTI V chom delo? Rasskazhite, Rasskazhite, chto sluchilos’. LENSKII Prosto ya trebuyu, chtob gospodin Onegin Mne obyasnil svoi postupki! On ne zhelaet etogo, i ya Proshu ego prinyat’ moi vyzov! (Larina, probirayas’ cherez tolpu i obrashchayas’ k Lenskomu.) 166

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GUESTS Here’s an unexpected turn of events! What a quarrel has blown up! This is no laughing matter! ONEGIN (drawing Lensky to one side) Listen, Lensky, you’re wrong, you’re wrong! We’ve attracted enough attention with our quarrel! I haven’t disturbed anyone’s peace of mind yet, and neither, I admit, have I any intention of doing so! LENSKY Then why were you squeezing her hand and whispering to her? She laughed and blushed! What were you saying to her? ONEGIN Listen, – this is ridiculous, everyone’s crowding round us! LENSKY What do I care? You’ve insulted me and I demand satisfaction! GUESTS What’s it all about? Tell us. Tell us what has happened. LENSKY I have simply asked Mr Onegin to explain his behaviour to me! He does not wish to do so, so I ask him to accept my challenge. (Larina, cutting through the crowd and turning to Lensky.) 167

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LARINA O Bozhe! V nashem dome! Poshchadite, poshchadite! LENSKII V vashem dome! V vashem dome![6] V vashem dome, kak sny zolotye, Moi detskie gody tekli; V vashem dome vkusil ya vpervye Radost’ chistoi i svetloi lyubvi. No segodnya uznal ya drugoe: Ya izvedal, chto zhizn’ — ne roman, Chest’ — lish’ zvuk, druzhba — slovo… ONEGIN Naedine s svoei dushoi Ya nedovolen sam soboi! Nad etoi strast’yu robkoi, nezhnoi… LENSKII …pustoe, Oskorbitel’nyi zhalkii obman, Da, oskorbitel’nyi, zhalkii, da, Zhalki obman! ONEGIN …ya slishkom poshutil nebrezhno! Vsem serdtsem yunoshu lyubya, Ya b dolzhen, ya b dolzhen pokazat’ sebya… TAT’YANA Potryasena ya, um ne mozhet Ponyat’ Evgeniya… Trevozhit, Menya trevozhit revnivaya toska! GOSTI Bednyi Lenskii! 168

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LARINA Dear God! In our house! Spare us, spare us! LENSKY In your house! In your house! [6] In your house, as in a golden dream, my childhood years flowed gently by! In your house I first tasted the joys of a pure, serene love! But today, I have learnt something different, I have learnt that life is no romantic novel, that honour is but a sound, friendship an empty… ONEGIN In the depths of my heart I am displeased with myself. With this shy and tender passion… LENSKY …word, a humiliating, pathetic lie, yes, a humiliating, pathetic, yes, pathetic lie! ONEGIN …I’ve trifled too thoughtlessly. Loving the youth with all my heart, I should have shown myself… TATYANA I am stunned, I cannot understand Eugene; I am tormented by pangs of jealousy! GUESTS Poor Lensky! 169

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TAT’YANA Akh, terzaet mne serdtse toska! Kak kholodnaya ch’ya-to ruka… OL’GA i LARINA Boyus’ chtoby vosled vesel’yu Ne zavershilas’ noch’ duel’yu! ONEGIN …ne myachikom predrassuzhdenii, No muzhem s chest’yu i umom. GOSTI Bednyi yunosha! TAT’YANA …ona mne szhala serdtse Bol’no tak, zhestoko! ONEGIN Ya slishkom poshutil nebrezho! LENSKII Ya uznal zdes’, chto deva krasoyu Mozhet byt’, tochno angel, mila I prekrasna, kak den’, no dushoyu, no dushoyu, Tochno demon, kovarna i zla! GOSTI Uzhel’ teper’ vosled vesel’yu Ikh ssora duel’yu okonchit nash den’? No molodyozh’ tak goryacha, — Povzdoryat, posporyat, Seichas zhe derutsya Povzdoryat… …Ikh ssora konchitsa duel’yu? No molodozh’ tak goryacha! Oni reshayut vsyo splecha! 170

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TATYANA Oh, my heart is torn with anguish! Like an ice-cold hand… LARINA and OLGA I fear that after all our revelry, the night may end with a duel! ONEGIN …impervious to vulgar prejudice, a man of honour and good sense. GUESTS Poor young man! TATYANA …it clutches at my heart painfully, cruelly! ONEGIN I have trifled too thoughtlessly! LENSKY I have learnt here that a young girl may be beautiful as an angel, sweet and lovely as the day, but in her heart, in her heart as wicked and sly as a fiend! GUESTS Can it be, that after such revelry, their quarrel will end our day with a duel? Young men are so hot-blooded! They argue, they quarrel and soon there’s a fight! They argue… …Will their quarrel end in a duel? Young men are so hot-blooded! They always act on impulse! 171

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TAT’YANA Akh, pogibla ya, pogibla ya! Mne serdtse govorit No gibel’ ot nego lyubezna! Pogibnu, pogibnu, — mne serdtse Skazalo! Roptat’ ya ne smeyu, ne smeyu! OL’GA Akh, krov’ v muzhchinakh goryacha, — Oni reshayut vsyo splecha, Bez ssor ne mogut ostavat’sya! Dusha v nyom revnost’yu obyata, No ya ni v chom ne vinovata, Ni v chom! LARINA Akh, molodyozh’ kak goryacha, Oni reshayut vsyo splecha! Bez ssor ne mogut ostavat’sa… Boyus’ chtoby vo sled vesel’ yu, Ne zavershilas’ noch’ duel’yu, Molodyozh’ tak goryacha! ONEGIN Naedine s svoei dushoi Ya nedovolen sam soboi! Ya b dolzhen pokazat’ sebya… GOSTI i LARINA Akh, molodyozh’ tak goryacha! Bez ssori ne mogut ni chasu ostat’sya! Povzdoryat, posporyat, Seichas zhe i drat’sya oni gotovi! TAT’YANA Akh, zachem roptat’? Ne mozhet on schast’ya mne dat’! 172

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TATYANA Ah, I am lost, I am lost! I feel it in my heart, but destruction by him is dear to me! I am doomed, I am doomed, my heart told me as much, I dare not, I cannot complain! OLGA Oh, men are so hot-blooded, They always act on impulse; they can’t avoid quarrelling! His heart is consumed with jealousy, but I’m not in the least to blame, not in the least! LARINA All, young men are so hot-blooded! They always act on impulse, they can’t avoid quarrelling… I’m afraid that, after all the revelry, the night will end in a duel! Young men are so hot-blooded! ONEGIN In my innermost heart, I am displeased with myself. I ought to have shown myself… GUESTS and LARINA Ah, young men are such hotheads! Not a moment passes without some quarrel! They argue, they quarrel, and suddenly they’re ready for a fight! TATYANA Ah, why complain? He cannot make me happy. 173

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Pogibnu, mne serdtse skazalo, Ya znayu! OL’GA Akh! Ya ni v chom ne vinovata! Muzhchiny ne mogut’ bez ssory ostat’sya Povzdoryat, posporyat… LENSKII Akh, net! Ty nevinna, angel’ moi, Ty nevinna, nevinna, moi angel’! On nizkii, kovarnyi, bezdushnyi predatel’! On budet nakazan! ONEGIN …ne myachikom predrassuzhdenii, Ne pilkim rebyonkom No muzhem uzh zrelim — Ya vinovat! GOSTI Uzhel’ teper’, vosled vesel’yu Ikh ssora duel’yu okonchit nash den’?… TAT’YANA Akh! Pogibnu ya… Roptat’ ya ne smeyu! OL’GA Akh! Krov’ v muzhchinakh goryacha… Ya ni v chom vinovata, ni v chom! LARINA Akh! Molodyozh’ tak goryacha… Molodyozh’ tak goryacha! ONEGIN Naedine s svoei dushoi, Ya nedovolen sam s soboi! No delat’ nechego — 174

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I am doomed, my heart tells me as much, I know it! OLGA Ah, I’m not the least bit to blame! Men can’t avoid quarrelling. They argue, they quarrel… LENSKY Oh no! You are innocent, my angel, you are innocent, innocent, my angel! He is a vile, crafty, heartless betrayer! He shall be punished! ONEGIN …not the plaything of vulgar prejudice, not an excitable boy, but a grown man – I am to blame! GUESTS Can it be, that after such revelry, their quarrel will end our day with a duel?… TATYANA Ah, I am doomed… I dare not complain! OLGA Ah, men are such hotheads… I am not in the least to blame, not in the least! LARINA Ah, young men are such hotheads… Young men are such hot-heads! ONEGIN At the bottom of my heart, I am displeased with myself! But there’s nothing to be done – 175

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Teper’ ya dolzhen otvechat’ Na oskorblen’ya! ONEGIN K uslugam vashim ya! Dovol’no, — Vyslushal ya vas: bezumny vy, bezumny vy, I vam urok posluzhit k ispravlen’yu! LENSKII Itak, do zavtra! Posmotrim, kto kogo prouchit! Puskai bezumets ya… no vy… Vy… beschestnyi soblaznitel’! ONEGIN Zamolchite… il’ ya ub’yu vas!… (Larina, Ol’ga, chast’ gostei uderzhivayut Lenskogo. Tat’yana plachet. Onegin brosaetsya k Lenskomu. Ikh razzhimayut. Onegin otkhodit v storonu, otvernuvshis’ ot Lensogo.) GOSTI Chto za skandal! My ne dopustim Dueli mezh nimi, krovavoi raspravy; Ikh prosto otsyuda ne pustim. Derzhite, derzhite, derzhite! Da, ikh prosto iz domu ne pustim. OL’GA Vladimir, uspokoisya, umolyayu! LENSKII Akh, Ol’ga, Ol’ga! Proshchai navek! GOSTI Byt’ dueli! (Lenskii ybegaet. Onegin tozhe pospeshno ukhodit. Ol’ga bezhit vsled za Lenskim, no padaet v obmorok, vse kidayutsya k nei.) 176

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now I must answer the insult! ONEGIN I am at your service. Enough! I have heard you out: you’re mad, you’re mad! And you shall be taught a lesson! LENSKY Till tomorrow, then! We shall see who will teach whom a lesson! All right, I’m mad, but you, you are a dishonourable seducer! ONEGIN Hold your tongue, or I’ll kill you! (Larina, Olga and some of the guests restrain Lensky. Tatyana is in tears. Onegin throws himself at Lensky; they are separated. Onegin goes to one side and turns his back on Lensky.) GUESTS What a scandal! We won’t allow them to fight a duel, shed blood in a dispute! We just won’t allow them to leave. Hold them, hold them, hold them! Indeed, they shall not leave the house! OLGA Vladimir, calm down, I implore you! LENSKY Oh Olga, Olga! Farewell for ever! GUESTS There’ll be a duel! (Lensky rushes out; Onegin also leaves quickly. Olga runs after Lensky, but falls fainting. Everyone rushes up to her.) 177

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Kartina vtoraya Teatr predstavlyaet derevenskuyu vodyanuyu mel’nitsu, derev’ya, bereg rechki. Rannee utro. Solntse eshcho nedavno vstalo. Zima. Pri otkrytii zanavesa Lenskii i Zaretskii uzhe nakhodyatsya na stsene. Lenskii sidit zadumchivo pod derevom, Zaretskii v neterpenii khodit po stsene. No. 17 Introduktsiya, stsena i ariya

[24, 25]

ZARETSKII Nu, chto zhe? Kazhetsya, protivnik vash ne yavilsya? LENSKII Yavitsya seichas.[25] ZARETSKII No vsyo zhe eto stranno mne nemnozhko, Chto net ego: sed’moi ved’ chas! Ya dumal chto on zhdyot uzh nas! (Zaretskii otkhodit k plotine i vstupaet v razgovor s mel’nikom, kotoryi v eto vremya pokazyvaetsya v glubine stseny, ukazyvaya emu na koleso, zhernova i t.d. Lenskii prodolzhaet sidet’ v zadumchivosti.)[6] LENSKII Kuda, kuda, kuda vy udalilis’, Vesny moei zlatyi dni? (Vstayot i podkhodit k avanstsene.) Chto den’ gryadushchii mne gotovit?[25] Ego moi vzor naprasno lovit, V glubokoi t’me taitsya on. Net nuzhdy; prav sud’by zakon! Padu li ya streloi pronzyonnyi, Il’ mimo proletit ona, — Vsyo blago: bdeniya i sna 178

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Scene II A rustic water-mill on the banks of a wooded stream. Early morning; the sun has barely risen. It is winter. As the curtain rises, Lensky and Zaretsky are already on stage. Lensky is sitting pensively under a tree, lost in thought. Zaretsky is pacing up and down. No. 17 Introduction, Scene and Aria 

[24, 25]

ZARETSKY What’s this? It seems your opponent hasn’t appeared. LENSKY He’ll be here any minute. [25] ZARETSKY Even so, it strikes, me as rather strange that he isn’t here; it’s after six. I thought he’d be waiting for us! (Zaretsky goes over to the mill and enters into conversation with the miller, who has just appeared in the background. The miller shows him the wheel, the millstones, etc. Lensky continues to sit in thought.) [6] LENSKY Where, oh where have you gone, golden days of my youth? (Rises and comes downstage.) What does the coming day hold for me? [25] My gaze searches in vain; all is shrouded in darkness! No matter: Fate’s law is just. Should I fall, pierced by the arrow, or should it fly wide, ’tis all one; both sleeping and waking 179

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Prikhodit chas opredelyonnyi! Blagosloven i den’ zabot, Blagosloven i t’my prikhod! Blesnyot zautra luch dennitsy I zaigraet yarkii den’; A ya, byt’ mozhet, ya grobnitsy Soidu v tainstvennuyu sen’, I pamyat’ yunogo poeta Poglotit medlennaya Leta, Zabudet mir menya, no ty… Ty! Ty! Skazhi, Pridyosh’ li, deva krasoty, Slezu prolit’ nad rannei urnoi I dumat’: on menya lyubil! On mne edinoi posvyatil Rassvet pechal’nyi zhizni burnoi! Akh, Ol’ga, ya tebya lyubil!… Tebe edinoi posvyatil Rassvet pechal’nyi zhizni burnoi! Akh, Ol’ga, ya tebya lyubil!… Serdechnyi drug, zhelannyi drug, Pridi! Pridi! Zhelannyi drug, Pridi! Ya tvoi suprug! Pridi! Ya zhdu tebya, zhelannyi drug, Pridi! Pridi! Ya tvoi suprug! Kuda, kuda vy udalilis’, Zlatye dni moei vesny! No. 18 Stsena poedinka (Zaretskii podkhodit k Lenskomu.) ZARETSKII A, vot oni! No s kem zhe vash priyatel’? Ne razberu! 180

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have their appointed hour. Blessed is the day of care, blessed, too, the coming of darkness! Early in the morning the dawn-light gleams and the day begins to brighten, while I, perhaps, will enter the mysterious shadow of the grave! And the memory of a young poet will be engulfed by Lethe’s sluggish stream. The world will forget me; but you… You! You! Say, will you come, maid of beauty, to shed a tear on the untimely urn and think: he loved me! To me alone he devoted the sad dawn of his storm-tossed life! Oh, Olga, I loved you, to you alone I devoted the sad dawn of my storm-tossed life! Oh, Olga, I loved you! My heart’s beloved, my desired one, come, oh come! My desired one, come, I am your betrothed, come, come! I wait for you, my desired one, come, come; I am your betrothed! Where, where, where have you gone, golden days, golden days of my youth? No. 18 Duel Scene (Zaretsky returns to Lensky.) ZARETSKY Ah, here they are! But who’s your friend with? I can’t make it out! 181

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(Vkhodit Onegin i sluga ego Gil’o, nesushchii pistolety. Onegin klanyaetsya.) ONEGIN Proshu vas isvinen’ya! Ya opozdal nemnogo. ZARETSKII Pozvol’te! Gde zh vash sekundant? V duelyakh klassik ya, pedant; Lyublyu metodu ya iz chuvstva, I cheloveka rastyanut’ pozvolyu ya Ne kak-nibud’, no v strogikh pravilakh iskusstva. Po vsem predan’yam stariny! ONEGIN Chto pokhvalit’ my v vas dolzhny! Moi sekundant? Vot on — Monsieur Guillot! Ya ne predvizhu vozrazhenii Na predstavlenie moyo: Khot’ chelovek on neizvestnyi No uzh, konechno, malyi chestnyi. (Gil’o nizko klanyaetsya, Zaretskii kholodno otvechaet emu na poklon.) Chto zh, nachinat’? LENSKII Nachnyom, pozhalui. (Zaretskii otkhodit s Gil’o v storonu dlya peregovorov ob usloviyakh dueli. Lenskii i Onegin stoyat v ozhidanii, ne smotrya drug na druga.)[25] LENSKII i ONEGIN Vragi!… Davno li drug ot druga[26] Nas zhazhda krovi otvela? Davno li my chasy dosuga, 182

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(Onegin comes in with his manservant, Guillot, who carries the pistols. Onegin bows.) ONEGIN I ask your pardon. I’m a little late. ZARETSKY Forgive me! Where’s your second? Where duelling’s concerned, I’m particularly pedantic; I heartily approve of method and I don’t allow a man to be stretched out cold just anyhow, but according to the strict rules of the art, following the old tradition. ONEGIN For which we must praise you! My second? This is he: Monsieur Guillot. I don’t envisage any objection to my choice; although he’s not well known, still, he’s a decent fellow, of course. (Guillot bows deeply, Zaretsky returns his bow coldly.) Well? Shall we begin? LENSKY Let’s begin, if you please! (The two seconds withdraw to one side to discuss the conditions of the duel. Lensky and Onegin stand with their backs to each other, waiting.) [25] LENSKY and ONEGIN Enemies! Is it long since the thirst [26] for blood drove us apart? Is it so long since we shared everything, 183

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Trapezu, i mysli, i dela Delili druzhno? Nyne zlobno, Vragam nasledstvennym podobno, My drug dlya druga v tishine Gotovim gibel’ khladnokrovno… Akh! Ne zasmeyat’sya l’ nam, poka Ne obagrilasya ruka Ne rasoitis’ li polyubovno? Net! Net! Net! Net! (Zaretskii i Gil’o zaryadili uzhe pistolety i otmerili rasstoyanie. Zaretskii razvodit protivnikov i podayot im pistolety. Vsyo eto delaetsya molcha. Smushchonnyi Gil’o pryachetsya za derevo.) ZARETSKII Teper’ skhodites’![25] (Tri raza khlopaet v ladoshi. Protivniki, eshcho ne tselyas’, delayut chetyre shaga vperyod. Onegin, nastupaya, podymaet pistolet. V to zhe vremya i Lenskii nachinaet tselitsya.Vystrel Onegina. Lenskii shataetsya, padaet, ronyaet pistolet. Zaretskii podbegaet k Lenskomu i pristal’no vsmatrivaetsya v nego. Onegin tozhe brosaetsya k pavshemu protivniku.) ONEGIN (glukhim golosom) Ubit? ZARETSKII Ubit! (Evgenii v uzhase skhvatyvaet rukami golovu.)

184

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our meals, our thoughts, our leisure, as friends together? Now in anger, like hereditary enemies, we silently and cold-bloodedly prepare to destroy each other. Oh, should we not burst out laughing before we stain our hands with blood, and should we not part friends? No! No! No! No! (The seconds have loaded the pistols and measured the distance. Zaretsky separates the principals and hands them their pistols. Everything is done in silence. Guillot, in embarrassment, hides behind a tree.) ZARETSKY Now advance! [25] (He claps his hands three times. The adversaries, who have not yet taken aim, take four steps forward. Onegin, as he advances, raises his pistol. As he does so, Lensky begins to take aim. Onegin fires. Lensky staggers, falls and drops his pistol. Zaretsky runs to him and examines him intently. Onegin also rushes towards his fallen adversary.) ONEGIN (in a low voice) Dead? ZARETSKY Dead. (Aghast, Onegin clasps his head in his hands.)

185

D eistvie tret ’e Kartina pervaya Teatr predstavlyaet odnu iz bokovykh zal bogatogo barskogo doma v Peterburge. No. 19 Pol’skii[27] (Gosti prokhodyat polonezom cherez stsenu.) No. 20 Stsena i ariya knyazya Gremina (Onegin stoit u steny napravo, blizko k stsene.) ONEGIN (pro sebya) I zdes’ mne skuchno. Blesk i sueta bol’shogo sveta Ne rasseyut vechnoi Tomitel’noi toski! (Podkhodit blizhe k rampe.) Ubiv na poedinke druga, Dozhiv bez tseli, bez trudov Do dvadtsati shesti godov, Tomyas’ bezdeistviem dosuga, Bez sluzhby, bez zheny, bez del, Sebya zanyat’ ya ne sumel. Mnoi ovladelo bespokoistvo, Okhota k peremene mest, Ves’ma muchitel’noe svoistvo, Nemnogikh dobrovol’nyi krest! Ostavil ya svoi selen’ya, Lesov i niv uedinen’e, Gde okrovavlennaya ten’ Ko mne yavlyalas’ kazhdyi den’! 186

Act T hree Scene I One of the side rooms at a fashionable house in St Petersburg. No. 19 Polonaise [27] (The guests dance a Polonaise.) No. 20 Scene and Aria of Prince Gremin (Onegin stands by the wall on the right, downstage.) ONEGIN (aside) I’m bored here too. The brilliance and bustle of society cannot dispel my constant world-weariness! (He comes farther downstage.) Having killed my best friend in a duel, having no aim, no work, I have reached the age of twenty-six wearied by the idleness of leisure; without employment, wife or occupation, I’ve found nothing to which I could devote myself! Restlessness held me in thrall, the desire for constant change of scene, an extremely vexing trait, a cross that few would choose! I left my country estates, the solitude of woods and fields, where a bloodstained ghost confronted me every day! 187

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Ya nachal stranstvovat’ bez seli, Dostupnyi chuvstvu odnomu… I chto zh? K neschast’yu moemu, I stranstviya mne nadoeli! Ya vozvratilsya i popal, Kak Chatsky, s korablya na bal! [1879 version] GOSTI Skazhite, kto v tolpe izbrannoi Stoit bezmolvnyi i tumannyi? Kto on takov? Uzhel’ Onegin? Da, tochno! Vsyo tot zhe l’ on? Il’ usmirilsya, Il’ korchit tak zhe chudaka? Skazhite, chem on vozvratilsya, Chem nam on predstavitsya, poka? Mel’motom? Kosmopolitom? Patriotom? Garol’dom il’ khanzhoi? Il’ maskoi shchegol’nyot inoi? Il’ prosto budet dobryi malyi? Smotrite, smotrite! (Gosti tantsuyut ekosez. Onegin otkhodit v storonu. Vkhodit knyaz’ Gremin pod ruku s Tat’yanoi. Tat’yana usazhivaetsya na divan. K nei besprestanno podkhodyat gosti oboego pola i pochtitel’no rasklanivayutsya s nei.) GOSTI Knyaginya Gremina! Smotrite! Smotrite! Kotoraya?[28] Syuda, vzglyanite! Vot ta, chto sela u stola! Bespechnoi prelest’yu mila! 188

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I began to travel, aimlessly, going where fancy led me… And what happened? I found, to my disgust, that travel was boring, too! I returned and went, like Chatsky, straight from a ship to a ball! [1879 version] GUESTS Tell us, who is that man in the glittering crowd standing silent and gloomy? Who could he be? Is it really Onegin? Yes, surely! Is he just the same? Has he calmed his ways? Or is he still acting the eccentric? Tell us, what is he this time, what role will he play for us? The Melmoth? The cosmopolitan? The patriot? Childe Harold or the prig? Will he sport a different mask? Or will he be a stand-up chap? Look, look! (The guests dance an écossaise. Onegin goes off to one side. As it ends, Prince Gremin enters with Tatyana on his arm. She seats herself on a sofa. Guests come up to her continually and greet her with deference.) GUESTS Princess Gremina! Look! Look! Which is she?[28] Over there, look! The one who’s just sat down by that table. Her serene beauty is delightful! 189

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ONEGIN (Onegin pristal’no vsmatrimaetsya v Tat’yanu) Uzhel’ Tat’yana? Tochno!… Net!… Kak! Iz glushi stepnykh selenii? Ne mozhet byt’! Ne mozhet byt’! I kak prosta, kak velichava, Kak nebrezhna! Tsaritsei kazhetsya ona! (Tat’yana obrashchaetsya k okruzhayushchim, ukazyvaya vzglyadom na Onegina, k kotoromu podoshol knyaz’ Gremin.) TAT’YANA Skazhite, kto eto? Tam… s muzhem, Ne razglyazhu! GOSTI Chudak pritvornyi, Pechal’nyi, strashnyi sumasbrod… V chuzhikh krayakh on byl… I vot vernulsya k nam teper’ Onegin. TAT’YANA Evgenii? GOSTI On izvesten vam? TAT’YANA Sosed on po derevne nam. (v storonu) O Bozhe, pomogi mne skryt’ Dushi uzhasnoe volnen’e… ONEGIN (k Greminu) Skazhi mne, knyaz’, ne znaesh’ ty, Kto tam, v malinovom berete, S poslom ispanskim govorit? 190

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ONEGIN (examining Tatyana intently through his lorgnette) Can that be Tatyana? Surely… no!… What? From the backwoods of that village in the steppes? It’s impossible! Impossible! And how unaffected, how dignified, how perfectly at ease! She bears herself like a queen! (Tatyana turns to those near her and indicates with a glance that she is referring to Onegin, who has just been approached by Prince Gremin.) TATYANA Tell me, who is that… over there with my husband? I can’t quite make him out. GUESTS One who affects eccentricity; a strange, extravagant melancholic. He’s been travelling abroad… And now, here’s Onegin back with us! TATYANA Eugene? GUESTS Do you know him? TATYANA He’s a neighbour of ours in the country. (aside) O God, help me to hide the dreadful tumult in my heart!… ONEGIN (to Prince Gremin) Tell me, prince, do you happen to know who that is over there in the scarlet turban talking to the Spanish ambassador? 191

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GREMIN Aga, davno zh ty ne byl v svete! Postoi, tebya predstavlyu ya. ONEGIN Da kto zh ona? GREMIN Zhena moya! ONEGIN Tak ty zhenat? Ne znal ya rane. Davno li? GREMIN Okolo dvukh let. ONEGIN Na kom? GREMIN Na Larinoi… ONEGIN Tat’yane! GREMIN Ty ei znakom? ONEGIN Ya im sosed! No. 20a Aria GREMIN Lyubvi vse vozrasty pokorny,[29] Eyo poryvy blagotvorny I yunoshe v rastsvete let, Edva uvidevshemu svet, I zakalyonnomu sud’boi Boitsu s sedoyu golovoi! 192

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PRINCE GREMIN Ah! It’s some time since you were last in society! Wait a moment, and I’ll present you. ONEGIN But who is she? PRINCE GREMIN My wife! ONEGIN So you’re married? I didn’t know! Have you been married long? PRINCE GREMIN About two years. ONEGIN To whom? PRINCE GREMIN To Larin’s daughter… ONEGIN Tatyana! PRINCE GREMIN Have you met? ONEGIN I’m a neighbour of theirs! No. 20a Aria PRINCE GREMIN Love is no respecter of age, [29] its transports bless alike those in the bloom of youth yet unacquainted with the world and the grey-headed warrior tempered by experience! 193

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Onegin, ya skryvat’ ne stanu: Bezumno ya lyublyu Tat’yanu! Tosklivo zhizn’ moya tekla; Ona yavilas’ i zazhgla, Kak solntsa luch sredi nenast’ya, Mne zhizn’ i molodost’, i schast’e! Sredi lukavykh, malodushnykh, Shal’nykh, balovannykh detei, Zlodeev i smeshnykh i skuchnykh, Tupykh, privyazchivykh sudei; Sredi koketok bogomol’nykh, Sredi kholop’ev dobrovol’nykh, Sredi vsednevnykh modnykh stsen, Uchtivykh, laskovykh izmen, Sredi kholodnykh prigovorov Zhestokoserdnoi suety, Sredi dosadnoi pustoty Raschotov, dum i razgovorov, Ona blistaet, kak zvezda Vo mrake nochi, v nebe chistom, I mne yavlyaetsya vsegda V siyan’e angela, V siyan’e angela luchistom! Lyubvi vse vozrasty pokorny… No. 21 Stsena i Ariozo Onegina I tak, poidyom, tebya predstavlyu ya! (Gremin podvodit Onegina k Tat’yane.) Moi drug, pozvol’ tebe predstavit’[10] Rodnyu i druga moego, Onegina! (Onegin nizko klanyaetsya. Tat’yana otvechaet sovershenno prosto, kak by im malo ne smushchonnaya.) 194

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Onegin, I shan’t disguise the fact that I love Tatyana to distraction! My life was slipping drearily away; she appeared and brightened it like a ray of sunlight in a stormy sky, and brought me life and youth, yes, youth and happiness! Among these sly, poor-spirited, foolish, pampered children, these scoundrels both absurd and boring, dull, fractious arbiters, among the pious coquettes and sycophantic slaves, amid affable, modish hypocrisy courteous, affectionate infidelities, amid the icy censure of cruel-hearted vanity, amid the vexing vacuity of calculation, thought and conversation, she shines like a star in the night’s darkest hour, in a pure, clear sky, and to me she always appears in the radiant, radiant nimbus of an angel! Love is no respecter of age… No. 21 Scene and Arioso of Onegin So come, I’ll present you to her. (He leads Onegin to Tatyana.) My dear, allow me to introduce [10] an old friend and relation of mine, Onegin. (Onegin bows deeply. Tatyana responds simply and with no apparent trace of embarrassment.) 195

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TAT’YANA Ya ochen’ rada… Vstrechalis’ prezhde s vami my! ONEGIN V derevne… da… davno. TAT’YANA Otkuda? Uzh ne iz nashikh li storon? ONEGIN O, net! Iz dal’nikh stranstvii Ya vozvratilsya. TAT’YANA I davno? ONEGIN Segodnya! TAT’YANA (k Greminu) Drug moi, ustala ya![28] (Tat’yana, opirayas’ na ruku Gremina, ukhodit, otvechaya na poklony. Evgenii sledit za nei glazami.) ONEGIN Uzhel’ ta samaya Tat’yana, Kotoroi ya naedine, V glukhoi, dalyokoi storone, V blagom pylu nravouchen’ya Chital kogda-to nastavlen’ya? Ta devochka, kotoroi ya Prenebregal v smirennoi dole? Uzheli to ona byla, Tak ravnodushna, tak smela? No chto so mnoi? Ya kak vo sne! Chto shevel’nulos’ v glubine 196

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TATYANA I’m delighted. We’ve met before. ONEGIN In the country… yes… a long time ago. TATYANA Where have you come from? From our parts perhaps? ONEGIN Oh, no! I’ve been abroad for quite a time. TATYANA How long have you been back? ONEGIN Only today. TATYANA (to Prince Gremin) My dear, I’m tired. [28] (Tatyana leaves on Prince Gremin’s arm, returning the greetings of the guests. Onegin follows her with his eyes.) ONEGIN Can this really be the same Tatyana to whom, tête-à-tête, in the depths of a distant countryside, I, in a fine moral outburst, once read a lecture on principles? The same girl, whom in her humble station I disdained? Was this really her, so poised, so self-possessed? But what’s the matter with me? I must be dreaming! What is stirring in the depths 197

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Dushi kholodnoi i lenivoi? Dosada?… Suetnost? Il’ vnov’ Zabota yunosti — lyubov? Uvy, somnen’ya net, — vlyublyon ya![11] Vlyublyon, kak mal’chik, polnyi strasti yunoi: Puskai pogibnu ya, no prezhde Ya v oslepitel’noi nadezhe Vkushu volshebnyi yad zhelanii, Up’yus’ nesbytochnoi mechtoi! Vezde, vezde on predo mnoi! Obraz zhelannyi, dorogoi, Vezde, vezde on predo mnoyu! (Onegin ubegaet. Gosti tantsuyut ekosez.) Kartina vtoraya Teatr predstavlyaet gostinuyu v dome knyazya Gremina No. 22 Zaklyuhitel’naya stsena (Vkhodit Tat’yana v utrennem elegantnom tualete s pis’mom v ruke.) [30] TAT’YANA O, kak mne tyazhelo! Opyat’ Onegin Vstal na puti moyom, kak prizrak besposhchadnyi! On vzorom ognennym Mne dushu vozmutil! On strast’ zaglokhshuyu tak zhivo voskresil! Kak budto snova devochkoi ya stala,[1a] Kak budto s nim menya nichto ne razluchalo!… (Plachet.) (V dveryakh pokazyvaetsya Onegin. On neskol’ko vremeni stoit, strastno vziraya na plachushchuyu Tat’yanu. Zatem bystro pod­ khodit k nei i padaet pered nei na koleni. Tat’yana smotrit na nego bez udivleniya i gneva, potom delaet znak, chtoby on vstal.) 198

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of my cold and slothful heart? Vexation, vanity or, once again, that preoccupation of youth – love? Alas, there’s no doubt, I’m in love, [11] in love like a boy, a passionate youth! Let me perish, but first let me summon, in dazzling hope the magic poison of desire, intoxicate myself with dreams! Everywhere, everywhere I look I see that beloved, desired image! Wherever I look, I see her! (Onegin runs out. The guests dance the écossaise.) Scene II The drawing room of Prince Gremin’s house in St Petersburg. No. 22 Final Scene (Tatyana, in elegant morning dress, enters holding a letter.) [30] TATYANA O, how distressed I am! Once more Onegin has crossed my path like a relentless apparition! His burning glance has troubled my heart and reawakened my dormant passion so that I feel like a young girl again [1a] and as if nothing had ever parted us! (She weeps.) (Onegin appears at the door. He stands for a moment gazing passionately at the weeping Tatyana, then runs to her and falls to his knees at her feet. She looks at him, evincing neither anger nor surprise, then motions him to rise.) 199

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Dovol’no, vstan’te!… Ya dolzhna Vam obyasnit’sya otkrovenno. Onegin, pomnite l’ tot chas, Kogda v sadu, v allee nas Sud’ba svela, i tak smirenno Urok vash vyslushala ya? ONEGIN O, szhal’tes’! Szhal’tes’ nado mnoyu![19] Ya tak oshibsya, ya tak nakazan! (Tat’yana stiraet slyozy i delaet znak, chtob Onegin ne preryval eyo.) TAT’YANA Onegin! Ya togda molozhe.[30] Ya luchshe, kazhetsya, byla I ya lyubila vas… No chto zhe, Chto v vashem serdtse ya nashla? Kakoi otvet? Odnu surovost’! Ne pravda l’ — vam byla ne novost’ Smirennoi devochki lyubov’? I nynche — Bozhe! — stynet krov’?, Kak tol’ko vspomnyu vzglyad kholodnyi I etu ispoved? No vas ya ne vinyu!… V tot strashnyi chas! Vy postupili blagorodno, Vy byli pravy predo mnoi. Togda — ne pravda li? — v pustyne, Vdali ot suetnoi molvy, Ya vam ne nravilas’… Chto zh nyne Menya presleduete vy? Zachem u vas ya na primete? Ne potomu l’, chto v vysshem svete Teper’ yavlyat’sya ya dolzhna, Chto ya bogata i znatna, Chto muzh v srazhen’yakh izuvechen; 200

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Enough, get up, I must talk to you frankly. Onegin, do you remember that time when, in the avenue in our garden, Fate brought us together and I listened so meekly to your lecture? ONEGIN O spare me, have pity! [19] I was so mistaken; I have been cruelly punished! (Tatyana wipes away her tears and motions Onegin not to interrupt her.) TATYANA Onegin, I was younger then, [30] and a better person, I think! And I loved you, but what, then, what response did I find in your heart? Only severity! Am I not right in thinking, that a simple young girl’s love was no novelty to you? Even now… dear God, my blood runs cold whenever I recall that cold look, that sermon! But I do not blame you… In that dreadful moment you behaved honourably, you acted correctly towards me. At that time, I suppose, in the back of beyond, far from the frivolity of social gossip, you didn’t find me attractive. Why, then, do you pursue me now? Why am I the object of such attentions? Could it be because I now frequent the highest circles, because I am rich and of the nobility, because my husband, wounded in battle, 201

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Chto nas za to laskaet dvor? Ne potomu l’, chto moi pozor Teper’ by vsemi byl zamechen I mog by v obshchestve prinest’ Vam soblaznitel’nuyu chest’? ONEGIN Akh! O Bozhe! Uzhel’, Uzhel’ v mol’be moei smirennoi Uvidit vash kholodnyi vzor Zatei khitrosti prezrennoi? Menya terzaet vash ukor! Kogda b vy znali, kak uzhasno Tomit’sya zhazhdoyu lyubvi, Terpet’ i razumom vsechasno Smiryat’ volnenie v krovi; Zhelat’ obnyat’ u vas koleni I, zarydav, u vashikh nog Izlit’ mol’by, priznan’ya, peni, Vsyo, vsyo, chto vyrazit’ by mog! TAT’YANA Ya plachu! ONEGIN Plach’te! Eti slyozy Dorozhe vsekh sokrovishch mira! TAT’YANA Akh! Schast’e bylo tak vozmozhno, Tak blizko! Tak blizko! ONEGIN Akh! TAT’YANA i ONEGIN Akh! Schast’e bylo tak vozmozhno, Tak blizko! Tak blizko! 202

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enjoys, on that account, the favour of the court? Could it not be that my disgrace would now be generally remarked and would confer upon you the reputation of a seducer? ONEGIN Oh! My God! Is it possible that in my humble pleading your cold look sees nothing but the wiles of a despicable cunning? Your reproach tortures me! If you only knew how terrible it is to suffer love’s torments, to endure and constantly to check the fever in the blood by reason, to long to clasp your knees and, weeping at your feet, pour out prayers, avowals, reproaches, all, all that words can express! TATYANA I am weeping! ONEGIN Weep on, those tears are dearer than all the treasures in the world! TATYANA Ah! Happiness was within our reach, so close! So close! ONEGIN Alas! TATYANA and ONEGIN Happiness was within our reach, so close! So close! So close! 203

Eugene Onegin

TAT’YANA No sud’ba moya uzh reshena, i bezvozvratno! Ya vyshla zamuzh. Vy dolzhny, Ya vas proshu, menya ostavit’! ONEGIN Ostavit’? Ostavit’? Kak, vas ostavit’? Net! Net! Pominutno videt’ vas, Povsyudu sledovat’ za vami, Ulybku ust, dvizhen’, vzglyad, Lovit’ vlyublyonnymi glazami, Vnimat’ vam dolgo, ponimat’ Dushoi vsyo vashe sovershenstvo, (padaet snova na kolena i skhvatyvaet eyo ruku) Pred vami v strastnykh mukahk zamirat’ Blednet’ i gasnut’: vot blazhenstvo, Vot odna mechta moya, odno blazhenstvo! (Postepenno voodushevlyas’, padaet snova na koleni i skhvatyvaet eyo ruku.) TAT’YANA (osvobozhdaya ruku, neskol’ko ispugavshis’) Onegin, v vashem serdtse est’[31] I gordost’ i pryamaya chest’… ONEGIN Ya ne mogu ostavit’ vas! TAT’YANA Evgenii, vy dolzhny, ya vas proshu, Menya ostavit’! ONEGIN O, szhal’tes’! 204

act three scene ii

TATYANA But my fate has already been decided, and irrevocably! I am married; you must, I beg you, leave me! ONEGIN Leave you? Leave you? What!… Leave you? No! No! To see you every moment, to dog your footsteps, to follow your every smile, movement and glance with loving eyes, to listen to you for hours, to understand in my heart all your perfection, (falling to his knees, he seizes Tatyana’s hand and covers it with kisses) to swoon before you in passionate torment turn pale and pass away: this is bliss, this is my only dream, my only happiness! (With growing passion he again falls on his knees before her and seizes her hand.) TATYANA (somewhat frightened, she withdraws her hand) Onegin, your heart knows [31] both pride and true honour! ONEGIN I cannot leave you! TATYANA Eugene! You must. I beg you to leave me. ONEGIN Oh, have pity! 205

Eugene Onegin

TAT’YANA Zachem skryvat’, zachem lukavit’! Akh! Ya vas lyublyu!… (Tat’yana v uvlechenii priznan’ya sklonyaetsya na grud’ k Oneginu. On obnimaet eyo. Potom ona, opomnivshis’, osvobozhdaetsya bystro ot ego obyatii. ) ONEGIN Chto slyshu ya? Kakoe slovo ty skazala? O, radnost’! Zhizn’ moya! Ty prezhneyu Tat’yanoi stala! TAT’YANA Net, net! Proshlogo ne vorotit’! Ya otdana teper’ drugomu! Moya sud’ba uzh reshena, Ya budu vek emu verna! (Ona otkhodit i v iznemozhenii saditsya.) ONEGIN (poryvisto strastno, stanovyas’ vozle neya na koleni.) O, ne goni! Menya ty lyubish’, I ne ostavlyu ya tebya; Ty zhizn’ svoyu naprasno sgubish’… To volya neba: ty moya! Vsya zhizn’ tvoya byla zalogom Soedineniya so mnoi! I znai: tebe ya poslan Bogom, Do groba ya khranitel’ tvoi. Ne mozhesh’ ty menya otrinut’, Ty dlya menya dolzhna pokinut’ Postylyi dom i shumnyi svet, Tebe drugoi dorogi net! TAT’YANA (vstav) Onegin, ya tverda ostanus’…[31] 206

act three scene ii

TATYANA Why hide it, why pretend? Ah! I love you! (Overwhelmed by her confession, she sinks on Onegin’s breast. He embraces her, but she recovers her composure quickly and frees herself.) ONEGIN What do I hear? What was that word you spoke? O joy! Oh, my life! You are again the Tatyana of former days! TATYANA No! No! You cannot bring back the past! I am another’s now, my fate is already decided, I shall always be true to him. (She tries to leave, but sinks down, overcome.) ONEGIN (kneeling before her, wildly impassioned) Oh, do not drive me away; you love me! And I will not leave you! You will ruin your life for nothing! This is the will of Heaven: you are mine! All your life has been a pledge of our union! And be assured, I was sent to you by God, I am your protector to the grave! You cannot refuse me. For me you must forsake this hateful house, the clamour of society – You have no choice! TATYANA (rising to her feet) Onegin, I shall remain firm… [31] 207

Eugene Onegin

ONEGIN Net, ne mozhesh’ ty menya otrinut’. TAT’YANA …sud’boi drugomu ya dana, S nim budu zhit’ i ne rasstanus’… ONEGIN Ty dlya menya dolzhna pokinut’ vsyo, vsyo! Postylyi dom i shumnyi svet, Tebe drugoi dorogi net! O, ne goni menya, molyu! Ty lyubish’ menya! Ty zhizn’ svoyu Naprasno sgubish’! Ty moya, navek moya! TAT’YANA …Net, klyatvy pomnit ya dolzhna! Gluboko v serdtse pronikaet Ego otchayannyi prizyv, No, pyl prestupnyi podaviv, Dolg chesti surovyi, svyashchonnyi Chuvstvo pobezhdaet! Ya udalyayus’! (Onegin khochet uvlech’ Tat’yanu, ona v velichaishim volnenii staraetsya vysvobodit’sya iz ego obyatii. Nakonets ona nachinaet iznemogat’ v bor’be.) ONEGIN Net! Net! Net! Net! TAT’YANA Dovol’no! 208

act three scene ii

ONEGIN No, you cannot refuse me. TATYANA …to another by fate have I been given, with him will I live and never leave him… ONEGIN For me you must forsake all, all – hateful house and social clamour! You have no choice! Oh, do not drive me from you, I implore! You love me; you will ruin your life for nothing! You are mine, mine for ever! TATYANA …No, I must remember my vows! Deep in my heart his desperate appeal strikes an answering chord, but having stifled the sinful flame, honour’s severe and sacred duty will triumph over the passion! I leave you! (Onegin tries to draw Tatyana to him; she struggles to free herself from his embrace, but her strength fails her.) ONEGIN No! No! No! No! TATYANA Enough! 209

Eugene Onegin

ONEGIN O, molyu, ne ukhodi! TAT’YANA Net, ya tverda ostanus’! ONEGIN Lyublyu tebya, lyublyu tebya! TAT’YANA Ostav’ menya! ONEGIN Lyublu tebya! TAT’YANA Proshchai naveki! (Tat’yana ukhodit.) ONEGIN Ty moya! (Onegin neskol’ko vremeni stoit v nedoumenii, porazhonii otchayaniem.) Pozor! Toska! O, zhalkii zhrebii moi! (Ubegaet.)

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act three scene ii

ONEGIN Oh, I implore you: do not go! TATYANA No, I am resolved! ONEGIN I love you! I love you! TATYANA Leave me! ONEGIN I love you! TATYANA Farewell for ever! (She leaves the room.) ONEGIN You are mine! (He stands stupefied for a moment, plunged in despair.) Ignominy!… Anguish!… Oh, my pitiable fate! (He rushes out.)

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Select Discography For more detailed information of historical and off-the-air recordings of an earlier era, see Alan Blyth, ‘Eugene Onegin’, Opera on Record, ed. Alan Blyth (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 520–31 and Mark Swed, ‘Eugene Onegin’ (1881), The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera, ed. Paul Gruber ( London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), pp. 551–56. Year

Cast

Conductor / Orchestra

Label

Vassily Nebolsin Bolshoi Theatre

Melodiya

Eugene Onegin Tatyana Olga Lensky Madame Larina Filippyevna Prince Gremin Monsieur Triquet 1936*

Panteleimon Nortzov Glaphira Zhukovskaya Bronislava Zlatogorova Sergei Lemeshev Maria Botienina Konkordiya Antarova Alexander Pirogov Ivan Kovalenko

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Eugene Onegin

1937* and perhaps l944*

Panteleimon Nortzov Elena Kluglikova Elizabeta Antonova Ivan Kozlovsky Ludmilla Rudintskaya Vera Makarova-Sevenko Maxim Mikhailov Sergei Ostroumov

Alexander Melik-Pashayev (majority of the opera, 1937) / Alexander Orlov (Letter Scene and Act Three finale, 1944) Bolshoi Theatre

Naxos Historical

1948*

Andrey Ivanov Elena Kluglikova Maria Maksakova Ivan Kozlovsky Bronislava Amborskaya Fayina Petrova Mark Reisen Ivan Kovalenko

Alexander Orlov Bolshoi Theatre

Preiser

1955*

Dushan Popovich Valeria Heybalova Biserka Cvejic Drago Starc Mira Vershevich Melanie (Mila) Bugarinovic Miro Changalovich Stephan Andrashevich

Oscar Danon Belgrade National Opera

Naxos Historical

1955*

Yevgeny Belov Galina Vishnevskaya Larisa Avdeyeva Sergei Lemeshev Valentina Petrova Yevgeniya Verbitskaya Ivan Petrov Andrei Sokolov

Boris Khaikin Bolshoi Theatre

Melodiya / Preiser

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discography

1957*

George London Lucine Amara Rosalind Elias Richard Tucker Martha Lipton Belén Amparám Giorgio Tozzi Alessio De Paolis

Dmitri Mitropoulos Metropolitan Opera

Walhall (live and sung in English)

1970

Yuri Mazurok Galina Vishnevskaya Tamara Sinyavskaya Vladimir Atlantov Tatiana Tugarinova Larisa Avdeyeva Alexander Ognivtsev Vitali Vlassov

Mstislav Rostropovich Bolshoi Theatre

Melodiya / Le Chant du Monde

1974

Bernd Weikl Teresa Kubiak Julia Hamari Stuart Burrows Anna Reynolds Enid Hartle Nicolai Ghiaurov Michel Sénéchal

Georg Solti Royal Opera House

Decca

1979

Yuri Mazurok Tamara Milashkina Tamara Sinyavskaya Vladimir Atlantov Tatiana Tugarinova Larisa Avdeyeva Yevgeny Nesterenko Lev Kusnezov

Mark Ermler Bolshoi Theatre

Melodiya

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Eugene Onegin

1987

Thomas Allen Mirella Freni Anne Sofie von Otter Neil Shicoff Rosemarie Lang Ruthild Engert (-Ely) Paata Burchuladze Michel Sénéchal

James Levine Staatskapelle Dresden

DG

1990

Yuri Mazurok Anna Tomowa-Sintow Rossitza Troeva-Mircheva Nicolai Gedda Margarita Lilowa Stefka Popangelova Nicola Ghiuselev Michel Lecocq

Emil Tchakarov Sofia National Festival

Sony

1992

Thomas Hampson Kiri Te Kanawa Patricia Bardon Neil Rosenshein Linda Finnie Elisabeth Bainbridge John Connell Nicolai Gedda

Charles Mackerras Welsh National Opera

Chandos (sung in English)

1993

Dmitri Hvorostovsky Nuccia Focile Olga Borodina Neil Shicoff Sarah Walker Irina Arkhipova Alexander Anisimov Francis Egerton

Semyon Bychkov Orchestre de Paris

Philips

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discography

1996

Alexander Lebedev Elena Zeletskaya Olga Obuchova Farit Hussainov Ludmila Ladinskaya Galina Babitcheva Alexander Levitsky Vladimir Vasiliev

Samuel Friedman Novosibirsk State Opera

Brilliant Classics

2011

Vladislav Sulimsky Ekaterina Godovanets Irina Dolzhenko Dmitri Voropaev Irina Rubtsova Margarita Nekrasova Andrey Telegin Valentin Sukhodolets

Mark Gorenstein State Symphony Orchestra of Russia

MDG (live)

* mono

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Eugene Onegin on DVD, a Selection For more detailed information, including non-commercial and tele­ vision films, up to 2004, see Ken Wlaschin, Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 221–23.

Year

Cast

Conductor

Director / Company / Label

Bruno Bartoletti

Pier Luigi Samaritani Chicago Lyric Opera The Opera Lovers

Eugene Onegin Tatyana Olga Lensky Madame Larina Filippyevna Prince Gremin Monsieur Triquet 1985

Wolfgang Brendel Mirella Freni Sandra Walker Peter Dvorsky Jean Kraft Gwyneth Bean Nicolai Ghiaurov John Fryatt

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Eugene Onegin

1988

Bernd Weikl Teresa Kubiak Julia Hamari Stuart Burrows Anna Reynolds Enid Hartle Nicolai Ghiaurov Michel Sénéchal

Georg Solti

Petr Weigl Feature film using actors miming to the Solti recording, including Michal Docolomansky as Onegin and Magdaléna Vásˇáryová as Tatyana Decca

1994

Wojciech Drabowicz Elena Prokina Louise Winter Martin Thompson Yvonne Minton Ludmilla Filatova Frode Olsen John Fryatt

Andrew Davis

Graham Vick Glyndebourne Festival Warner Vision

1998

Vladimir Glushchak Orla Boylan Anna Burford Michael König Ineke Vlogtman Katja Boos Michail Schelomianski Thomas Morris

Gennadi Rozhdestvensky

Nikolaus Lehnhoff European Union Opera at Baden-Baden Arthaus Musik

2000

Vladimir Redkin Maria Gavrilova Elena Novak Nicolai Baskov Irina Udalova Galina Borisova Aik Martirosyan Alexander Arkhipov

Mark Ermler

Boris Pokrovsky Bolshoi Theatre TDK

220

eugene onegin on dvd

2007

Dmitri Hvorostovsky Renée Fleming Elena Zaremba Ramón Vargas Svetlana Volkova Larisa Shevchenko Sergei Aleksashkin Jean-Paul Fouchécourt

Valery Gergiev

Robert Carsen Metropolitan Opera Decca

2007

Peter Mattei Anna Samuil Ekaterina Gubanova Joseph Kaiser Renée Morloc Emma Sarkisyan Ferruccio Furlanetto Ryland Davies

Daniel Barenboim

Andrea Breth Salzburg Festival Premiere

2008

Mariusz Kwiecien Tatyana Monogarova Margarita Mamsirova Andrey Dunaev Makvala Kashrashvili Emma Sarkisyan Anatoli Kotscherga [Lensky sings Triquet’s couplets in this production]

Alexander Vedernikov

Dmitri Tcherniakov Bolshoi Theatre at Opéra National de Paris BelAir Classiques

221

Select Bibliography

For books in Russian, see Appendix D in Roland John Wiley, Tchaikovsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 501–27. Bayley, John, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) Binyon, T.J., Pushkin, A Biography (London: Harper & Collins, 2003) Briggs, A.D.P., Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (London and Canberra: Croom Hill, 1983) Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, 4 vols. (London: Gollancz, 1978–91) Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (London: Faber & Faber, 2006) Feinstein, Elaine, Pushkin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1998) Garden, Edward and Gotteri, Nigel (eds.), ‘To My Best Friend’: Correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda Von Meck 1876–1878, trans. Galina von Meck (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Orlova, Alexandra: Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

223

Eugene Onegin

Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (London: Lime Tree, 1993) Poznansky, Alexander (ed.), Tchaikovsky through Others’ Eyes, trans. Ralph C. Burr and Robert Bird (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999) Poznansky, Alexander and Langston, Brett, The Tchaikovsky Hand­ book: A Guide to the Man and His Music, 2 vols. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002) Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. Vladimir Nabokov, 4 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976) Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin, trans. Charles Johnston, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin, trans. Roger Clarke (London: Oneworld Classics, 2011) Tchaikovsky, Modest, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, ed. and trans. Rosa Newmarch (New York, NY: John Lane, 1906) Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, Letters to His Family: An Autobiography, trans. Galina von Meck (New York, NY: Stein and Day, 1981) Troyat, Henri, Pushkin: A Biography, trans. Nancy Amphoux (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974) Vickery, W.N., Pushkin: Death of a Poet (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968) Vitale, Serena, Pushkin’s Button (New York, NY: Fourth Estate 2000) Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973) Wiley, Roland John, Tchaikovsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

224

Tchaikovsky Websites* In English or with an English-language option

Tchaikovsky Researchwww.tchaikovsky-research.org Tchaikovsky Museum, Klinwww.cbook.ru/tchaikovsky 

[English version under construction as of October 2011]

Compositionsimslp.org/wiki/Category:Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyich

* The information on this page is liable to change, but links were valid at the time of publication in 2011.

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Note on the Contributors John Allison is Editor of Opera and Music Critic of the Sunday Telegraph. His publications include The Pocket Companion to Opera (1994). He has edited the Glyndebourne Festival programme books since 2000. Natalia Challis is a Lecturer in Russian at the Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her publications include The Singer’s Rachmaninoff (1989). Caryl Emerson is Professor of Slavonic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her publications include Boris Godunov: Transposition of a Russian Theme (1986) and The Life of Musorgsky (1999). Marina Frolova-Walker is Reader in Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College. She has written widely on Russian and Soviet music. Her publications include Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (1997). Roland John Wiley is Professor of Music at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively about Russian theatrical music. His publications include Tchaikovsky’s Ballets (1985) and Tchaikovsky (2009).

227

Acknowledgements We would like to thank John Allison and Erica Jeal of Opera, Charles Johnston, Mike Ashman and David Nice for their assistance and advice in the preparation of this guide.

229