Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin is such a staple of the repertoire these days that it is worth emphasising that it was not always so. A British opera lover born in 1892 and dying in 1967 would know Tatiana's letter scene and Lensky's aria from concerts and recordings, but would have gone a lifetime without the chance to see a stage performance in this country. It was only with Michael Hadjimischev's 1968 Glyndebourne production and Peter Hall's 1971 version at Covent Garden that Onegin began to become the fixture it is today.
How things have changed. This spring alone, there are at least three significant Onegin revivals in this country—the late Stephen Pimlott's at Covent Garden, James Macdonald's for Welsh National Opera and Graham Vick's at the Glyndebourne festival. Complete recordings of Onegin, rare in the old days, now abound, as do DVDs. The Metropolitan Opera just released a fine new version, starring Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
What is it about Onegin that makes it now such a core work? It is easy to say that it is simply a great opera—which it is—and leave it at that. But if so, why did Tchaikovsky's operas remain in the shadows throughout the 20th century while his orchestral music and ballets were pillars of their respective repertoires? It is not as if Onegin is a difficult work to understand, either musically or dramatically.
But the reason Onegin is so successful today is because it has such a modern sensibility. Much of the opera's emotional modernity is, of course, less the doing of Tchaikovsky than of Pushkin, on whose verse novel of 1833 the composer based his 1879 opera. Pushkin's tale, "half droll, half sad" as he himself put it, is a work of much sharper psychological insight than the more romantic aspects of Tchaikovsky's score might imply.
Pushkin's great insight is that people get their emotional lives wrong very easily but are still capable of experiencing considerable happiness. In that sense, the contented Madame Larin is as important a character as her discontented daughter Tatiana. Pushkin's novel is not a tragedy. It is essentially a story about people who deceive themselves. Onegin and Tatiana do this in spades and most of the other characters follow suit to some degree—but, with the exception of poor Lensky, killed by Onegin in a stupid duel, life goes on. Eugene Onegin, it has often been said, is an open-ended novel. It is also very witty.
Some of this is lost in Tchaikovsky, but not all. Tatiana's letter scene, which was the first part of the story that Tchaikovsky set to music, is a glorious outpouring of romantic excitement. But the audience knows from Onegin's brief appearance and Larina's reflections that the heroine is making a catastrophic mistake. Later, Onegin repeats the mistake just as disastrously. But that's life. This is an opera in which, as in the plays of Chekhov, no one ends up living the life they meant to.
One must not diminish Tchaikovsky's achievement. The composer took immense care in his treatment of Pushkin—even if initially he envisaged a happy ending (which he later, rightly, rejected). Both the novel and the opera are triumphs of style. The opera's seven "lyric scenes" connect in subtle ways which reflect the structure of Pushkin's eight chapters. Just as the story is full of echoes and balances, so is the composing. And Tchaikovsky brilliantly recreates the conversational metre that is such a feature of the original.
Eugene Onegin owes its popularity partly to its marvellous score, but also to the fact it is so emotionally truthful. Onegin is a wonderfully inconsistent character, like so many men in Russian fiction. Tatiana matches him inconsistency for inconsistency. I used to indulge myself sometimes by imagining that life could be an opera like Tristan und Isolde. But the truth is that life is much more like Eugene Onegin: half droll, half sad.
Women rule at the Philharmonia
At a concert by the Philharmonia Orchestra in February I noticed something new. Most of the string players, as well as a majority of each string section other than the double basses, were women. I counted to make certain. Sure enough, 34 of the 59 string players that evening were female. Is this a first among British symphony orchestras? I think it must be.
It certainly made a contrast with the orchestra I listened to the following evening. In the Vienna Philharmonic, there were just three women among the 62 string players—plus another two women in other sections. By Vienna's standards this is, of course, a social revolution. But they still have a long way to go before they can compete with the Philharmonia. And even further before they can rival the all-female Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators in Some Like It Hot. That's the movie in which Sweet Sue delivers the memorable line: "This is Sweet Sue saying goodnight, reminding all you daddies out there that every girl in my band is a virtuoso, and I intend to keep it that way." As I say, a long way to go.
