Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin

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Cat No: 8110216-17

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Release Date: 11 January 2002

Label: Naxos - Historical / Naxos Historical

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 2

Barcode: 636943121627

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: TCHAIKOVSKY

Description
Pyotr Il’yich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)Eugene OneginCultural resonances are strange phenomena. To Russian audiences, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s great opera Eugene Onegin must be redolent of all those nineteenth-century Russian novels and plays replete with country estates, marriageable girls and bored young men of good family. For any Russian, there must be the added tension of knowing that the story’s originator Pushkin met the same fate as the poet Lensky, being killed in a duel. For English-speaking audiences, on the other hand, the tale cannot escape being refracted through the equally ironic and satirical but irresistibly comic vision of Jane Austen, with Tatiana, Olga, Onegin and Lensky as tragic counterparts to Elizabeth, Jane, Darcy and Bingley. Which just goes to show what a universal work of art Pushkin’s verse novel is — and opera lovers are urged to read it. As for the musical treatment, subject and composer were here perfectly matched; and Tchaikovsky prepared his own libretto, with a little help from his friend Konstantin Shilovsky. The work was composed in less than a year. Although Tchaikovsky was a little taken aback when the singer Elizaveta Lavrovskaya suggested the subject to him in May 1877, his innate feeling for the stage and his lyrical impulses were in tune with Pushkin’s bitter-sweet story from the start; and he managed to write a ‘number’ opera with plenty of telling moments for individual singers, while, like Verdi in La Traviata, creating an almost symphonic framework for the action. Another parallel with La Traviata is that Eugene Onegin is really a chamber opera, set on a large stage only for the sake of the party scenes, which provide ironic backdrops for climactic moments. This being Tchaikovsky, the spirit of the dance is never far away; but there are also authentic folk elements in the country scenes to offset the sophistication of the town scenes. The orchestra has much to do, both supporting and commenting on the stage action, and the writing for woodwind and solo horn shows all Tchaikovsky’s mastery. Little wonder, then, that for more than a century Eugene Onegin has been the most popular Russian opera. Tchaikovsky himself saw his assembly of ‘lyrical scenes’ as an ensemble piece. He made a point of entrusting the première on 29th March 1879 to the students of Moscow Conservatory, but like all great music it needs the attention of the best professionals. Despite its reliance on soloists with big reputations and voices to match, the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow has always been the ensemble company par excellence. Admittedly its first staging of Eugene Onegin in 1881 was not the success everyone had hoped for — not until the opera was mounted by the Imperial Opera of St Petersburg in 1884 did it break through to popularity — and subsequent Bolshoi productions have tended to be passed down from revival to revival as if graven on stone. Even so, the
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