Tchaikovsky’s heartfelt music usually makes me weep (it’s meant to)—those melodic, lyrical arias of unrequited love and missed chances. Ted Huffman’s new production for the Royal Opera makes me weep with frustration: he has made it ordinary. Nineteenth century grandeur has been replaced by twentieth century drabness (more Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes setting than tsarist Russia). Eugene Onegin needs to be larger than life, and here it’s not.
Hyemi Shin’s minimalist set design creates a cavernous emptiness (of the soul?) in which the protagonists, figures in a bare landscape, seem lost in an indifferent universe. It doesn't help acoustics. It is only front stage that the performers can be heard at their best. And the orchestra under Henrik Nánási seems timid rather than impassioned. The chorus is in fine fettle, though. That empty stage (few props, bring your own chair…) needs their volume.
I’m all for director’s theatre, but Huffman has interfered to little advantage. Spoiler alerts: Tatiana, in her long night of the soul, dictates her impetuous letter to Onegin to her sister Olga; Lensky is not killed by Onegin in the foolish duel but commits suicide, then picks himself up, takes a bow and walks off (what!); Tatiana has two children with Prince Gremin; Olga mounts the air-kissing (three times à la Russe) Onegin in open sexual abandon at Tatiana’s birthday party. Really?
Onegin’s ill-fated pleading with Tatiana in the final scene takes place on the Nevsky embankment where her children play with a ball thrown in for them by a stalking Monsieur Triquet, the former entertainer from Tatiana’s birthday party (Christophe Mortagne does sweet justice to his little French ditty), now a sinister deus ex machina figure. Aunt Olga is their minder.
Tatiana’s refusal of Onegin, though she still loves him, is diminished by the children’s presence. She is refusing him because of her noble character, exposing his arrogant ‘superfluous man’ pose.
Blond, tousle-haired bass-baritone Gordon Bintner is not a Chatsky (this bit of the libretto is cut) from Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit (so apt in this context), but more a young James Wilby, an Etonian type. He lacks “the visceral” that Brindley Sherratt, standing in for an indisposed Dmitry Belosselskiy, illustrates in his splendid Gremin aria of love for his wife Tatiana. The outstanding performance of the night.
Three arias get spontaneous applause: Tatiana’s fourteen-minute letter aria, Lensky’s soulful “kuda, kuda…” aria just before the duel and Gremin’s. Sherratt talks of “colouring the text’, and this is what I miss, but the singers are young—as are Pushkin’s teenage protagonists Tatiana, Olga and Lensky, and Onegin is not much older.
The opera is not really about catalyst Onegin, but Tatiana. Tchaikovsky is Tatiana, and Lensky, and Gremin, genuine love. He poured all his soul into music of such tenderness, lyricism and that particularly Russian melancholic quality. It is not a social satire, for which Pushkin was exiled to his country estate by the Tsar, but about how close happiness could have been… so close… That is what should break the heart.
Soprano Kristina Mkhitaryan’s Tatiana comes into her own in the final act. The highlight should have been the letter scene, but where’s the romanticism in pyjamas? Olga’s are even worse, short orange silk ones (design Astrid Klein), such a distraction. Avery Amereau, making her house debut, is an energetic Olga. There doesn't seem to be a credit for the surtitle translation, but one bit irks me as it does Olga, being called “a kid”—what’s wrong with “child”?
Tenor Liparit Avetisyan stands and delivers Lensky front stage (it could have been a semi-staged concert production) in his final aria. Earlier, he lands himself in a fisticuff brawl on the floor with Onegin—not at all comme il faut, even amongst country gentry—and slumps on the floor in a drunken stupor. Whilst Onegin plays the stud with Olga… no manners…
I can't hear Alison Kettlewell’s Madame Larina (in comfy slacks) very well, so her reminiscing duet with nanny Filipevna is lost on me, though Rhonda Browne (debut here) has her comic moments with Tatiana.
In the deep countryside with little to do, dreamy teenager Tatiana buries herself in reading romances (Samuel Richardson is mentioned amongst others in Pushkin), but soon discovers real life is not like that. Her mother and nanny sing of arranged marriages that become a habit, as Tatiana’s with Gremin will perhaps.
She has struck lucky with Gremin, an older man who loves her deeply. And she is grateful. Now a high society princess, she can turn the tables on Onegin, who thought himself above country folk.
Pushkin’s lengthy verse poem, so mellifluous, Tchaikovsky adapted himself with a little help from Konstantin Shilovsky—he poured himself into it. Three acts, seven lyrical scenes, split tonight into two halves of ninety-five and fifty-five minutes.