Tchaikovsky's opera, based on Alexander Pushkin's much-admired and influential Russian classic verse novel, premièred in Moscow in 1879 and remains one of the most popular operas in the world.
The combination of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky is irresistible. The music, conducted by Alan Buribayev, is beautiful, tender, honest and heart-breaking, without being sentimental.
Tatjana falls in love with Eugene Onegin because she naïvely thinks he is the ideal romantic hero. He is in fact an arrogant, selfish, world-weary cynic. Impulsively, she pours her heart out in a long letter, asking him to marry her. He turns her down.
Seven years later, he returns from his aimless travels abroad and is amazed at her transformation from innocent girl to sophisticated woman. Now married to a Prince, she rejects him as he had rejected her and he is devastated.
The opera needs singers who can act as well as sing and gets them in Marco Arturo Marelli’s elegant and stylish production. Iurii Samoilov is Onegin. Aistė Piliba is Tatjana. Tigran Hakobyan is Lensky. Matti Turunen is Prince Gremin.
High spots include Tatjana’s long letter and final duet with Onegin plus the deeply moving love arias of Lensky and Gremin, the former all pain, the latter all joy.
There is drama when Onegin openly flirts with Tatyana's sister Olga and Lensky, her lover, jealous, overreacts and challenges Onegin to a duel, which in this production Onegin does not want to fight and tries to stop by grabbing Lensky’s pistol.
Director Marco Arturo Marelli has designed the set, the costumes and the lighting. The artificial setting, with its exceptional tall sloping walls and doors and sloping floor plus its large empty space devoid of furniture, gives the opera a black and white, dreamlike quality, which is pictorially very effective.
P.S. Tchaikovsky received a love letter whilst he was writing the opera and, not wanting to be cruel like Onegin, he married the girl. The marriage was an absolute disaster.
Finnish National Theatre’s Eugene Onegin can be watched free on the OperaVision channel.