October 17, 2004
Tchaikovsky's tangled history helped create 'Eugene Onegin'
By Peter Jacobi
A scene from IU Opera Theater's 1997 production of "Eugene Onegin." The opera is revived for this season beginning Friday at the Musical Arts Center. Courtesy Phot Letters from adoring women to passive men figure prominently in and around the opera "Eugene Onegin," or as composer Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky labeled it, the series of "lyric scenes in three acts," that the Indiana University Opera Theater offers as its next production beginning Friday at the Musical Arts Center.
A letter on stage and letters off.
In the passionate letter scene on stage, the smitten 17-year-old Tatiana effusively reveals her feelings to Onegin, whom she had met during his brief visit to her family's home: "Since the day that in the thought of God I came to life, I've lived for you! I feel that God has made you mine for life and for eternity! … Oh! Come to me. You will comfort me. You will be like a ray of hope to me, or you will destroy my dream. Alas! I am anxiously waiting, awaiting anxiously your word."
The self-centered, cold Onegin will respond with a rebuke: that it was inappropriate to write in such an unrestrained manner to a stranger and that he has no thoughts of marriage.
Off stage, in the life of Tchaikovsky, there come letters from Antonina Miliukoff, a former student at the Moscow Conservatory where he taught. "I won't be able to forget you or stop loving you," Miliukoff writes. "I don't want to look at any man but you … It is not the love of a moment but a feeling that has been growing for a long time. I simply cannot, and will not, destroy this feeling now." In a follow-up, she tells him: "I stay at home the whole day, wandering from one corner to another like a half-mad person … I cannot live without you and so, perhaps I shall soon make an end to myself. Let me look at you and kiss you so I may carry that kiss into the other world."
Tchaikovsky's correspondence is lost. He apparently did not answer the first letter. When he received the follow-up, he told a friend that he "had acted more basely than Onegin, and I became truly angry with myself for my heartless attitude towards this girl who was in love with me." He must then have written Miliukoff; we know not what, however.
Internally for Tchaikovsky, the happenings apparently resulted in a blend of reactions. He was, no doubt, alarmed because, as a homosexual, he harbored no like emotions for her. He also found in the situation, however, an opportunity because a liaison with Miliukoff could help ward off suspicions about his sexuality.
In the opera, Onegin's rejection leads, for him, to a continuing life of dissatisfaction and aimlessness and, for Tatiana, to an eventual marriage with a doting prince, a happy union she intends to honor even though, admittedly, she still loves Onegin. It is he, Onegin, who ends up yearning.
In the life of the composer, there was marriage, an unfortunate one never officially annulled but that kept husband and wife together only in short duration. The wedding, Tchaikovsky wrote his brother Anatol, was "ghastly spiritual torture." Physically, he admitted, "she has become absolutely repulsive to me." He looked to the future as a "dreary unbearable comedy."
Biographical details reveal that one evening, with thoughts of suicide, he wandered the streets and waded into the icy water of the Moscow River, shocked back to reason and a desire to live after all. A breakdown soon followed. Also, there came a realization that his wife, despite her letters, had no love for him, that "in her head and heart is absolute emptiness," as Tchaikovsky phrased it in a letter to his generous supporter and friend, Nadejda Von Meck. The composer and his wife never lived together again. She had affairs and a series of children, all placed in orphanages, and ended up in an asylum for the insane. He went on to live his solitary life, and it, also, would end tragically at too early an age, either from cholera, as long believed, or perhaps by his own hand, reportedly following conflict with peers who had learned through a letter of complaint to the czar about his involvement in a homosexual affair.
All this off stage tumult began to weigh upon Tchaikovsky as he was writing "Eugene Onegin," built on a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin. At first, when a friend suggested the idea of an opera based on the subject, he rejected the notion, thinking that the original, in poetic substance, lacked action. But on further thought, he reversed his opinion, determining that the Pushkin contained "a wealth of poetry, human quality, and simplicity."
Tchaikovsky retained much of the plot line. His librettists kept many of Pushkin's verses. But novel and verse differ substantially. Pushkin's verbal masterpiece is a social document, revelatory of the author's view of Russian upper class society. Tchaikovsky is much more the Romantic, taken by the interactions of the characters and their torments. "Where the heart is not touched, there can't be any music," he once explained.
"Eugene Onegin" is all heart. Its music holds poignancy and intensity and sweetness and tragedy. It is expressive of the various characters. It is ravishingly lush. It is melodic, as one would expect from a product of Tchaikovsky. The Russian actor, director, and producer Konstantin Stanislavsky, in a book he co-authored on opera, referred to the Letter Scene: "It would be difficult to find in any opera anywhere a scene of such profound passionate feeling and tenderness, one with such rich musical coloring, so penetrating in the revelations of thoughts, feeling, doubts, sufferings and joys of a young girl's first love as this scene."
Well, no matter what the situation or who the characters, Tchaikovsky's score captures the necessary flavor. The singers get to show off their technical and interpretive skills. The orchestral musicians have a chance to shine as well.
This will be the fourth time that IU Opera Theater has put "Eugene Onegin" into its schedule, the previous years being 1974, 1988 and 1997. Conductor David Effron will be in musical charge. Stage direction has been assigned to a guest, Yefim Maizel, who has an impressive portfolio of directorial assignments in the opera houses of Europe and of the United States (the Metropolitan, San Francisco and Santa Fe, among them).
Says Maizel: "What we love about Peter Tchaikovsky's music is its intense emotionality. His work takes us through a musical world where we experience the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy of the characters. They are completely open to us and are very vulnerable, and this makes their fates all the more endearing and poignant."
He and Maestro Effron will be working with two casts on sets by Robert O'Hearn. Althought a number of singers sought last spring to have this production done in the original Russian, those in charge opted for an English translation. Too bad. Music and the Russian language work so closely in this opera's score. But I've heard it done successfully in English a number of times, and the opera still works. It's the music that transcends.
'Onegin' is on again
WHAT: "Eugene Onegin" by Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky
WHO: IU Opera Theater production
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and Oct. 29 and 30
WHERE: IU's Musical Arts Center on Jordan Avenue in Bloomington
HOW MUCH: $15-$30, $10-$20 for IU students
INFO: Call (812) 855-2255.
School of Music
Bloomington, IN 47405-2200
(812) 855-1583
Last Updated:
10/18/2004
Comments: musicpub@indiana.edu
Copyright 2003, The Trustees of Indiana University