Tchaikovsky as Dramatist

(response to the Metropolitan Opera's production of EUGENE ONEGIN, opera by Tchaikovsky from the verse novel by Pushkin.)

I've seen EUGENE ONEGIN only twice, enough to know its dramatic shape well and its music only vaguely. I know it mostly by its a remarkable dramatic effect. Like tremors, the drama may leave structures standing, but it is felt deeply.

Its plot is minimal, something like this: girl tells boy she loves him; boy cares for nothing and no one; girl rebuffs boy when he realizes too late what he has missed.

The mood is autumnal, highlighted in the Met's abstract design by falling leaves that carpet the stage during act one. Acts two and three take place at two different soirees, represented in each act by a rectangle of straight-backed chairs within which the party-goers dance... though the rectangle is larger and the chairs are more plush in act three. During the preludes to the each scene, the director shows us the boy Onegin, now middle-aged, looking back on the events of his life with regret.

Tchaikovksy expertly focuses us on these people, and makes us care. He leads us into the opera with wistful and slow - moving music. During intermission, the audience who saw the show live via satellite at movie theatres got a glimpse of a rehearsal, when the conductor calls the music "dangerous" because it's so simply constructed -- a single phrase repeated in a sequence of pitches -- that the orchestra must use shadings of tone, dynamics, and emphasis to bring it alive.

Tchaikovsky sets each act with a social group, elevated at each act: peasants working at harvest, then provincial gentry, and finally, high society at a palace.

The action, such as it is, happens quickly. Music and words tell us immediately that the stranger Eugene Onegin "is the one" when Tatiana and we first see him; Onegin's speech destroying her hopes is direct and curt (and, in this production, we see Tatiana slowly crumpling her love letter to him behind her back). In act two, his flirtations drive his best friend to a rash challenge in just a couple of dances, and we believe it. The duel in which Onegin kills his best friend takes one minute or less to accomplish.

Yet Tchaikovsky takes time to make these points of action meaningful. After a fond nurse puts Tatiana to bed, we see Tatiana's long night awake to write a love letter to the man she's just met, and we see the sun rise. We appreciate her courage and her certainty in her feelings. In act two, there's an odd intrusion as a lightweight French singer interrupts the party to sing a banal and fruity lyric to Tatiana. It seems like a mere comic relief, but Tchaikovsky is achieving something dramatic, here: everyone's watching Tatiana, including the man who rejected her, and the words are all about her blessings and beauty, and she's bravely enduring not just one verse, but an encore. It's an effect that takes time, and nothing obviously dramatic is happening, but we feel it. Before the duel, Tchaikovsky takes time for Lensky to remember his happy childhood and happy love while he waits for Onegin to show up. The duel over, Onegin turns away in regret.

At that point, this director skips to Act Three without intermission. Dressers change Onegin's costume in full view during the glorious and grand prelude to the party at the palace. Now it's years later, and Onegin tells the audience that his life has been a bore, traveling and caring for nothing, but always haunted by the fact that he killed his best (only?) friend over a meaningless flirtation. Immediately, Tatiana enters the party. We and Onegin learn how Tatiana has matured into a gracious and wise lady, not by hearing her, but by hearing the adoring guests as she silently greets them in the background. Tchaikovsky gives her husband Prince Gremin a long aria of affectionate appreciation for her.

In all these instances, Tchaikovsky achieves drama by evoking context swiftly, and probing inner action patiently.

I understand that Pushkin's original novel is satirical, and we do see signs of that in the libretto. But instead of laughing at the girl Tatiana for the romance novels that she takes so seriously, or laughing at her brother in law Lensky for his jealousy, we sympathize.

Finally, we all feel Onegin's regret, what might have been if he had been less wrapped up in his own ego.