![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnThe Pushkin verse-novel (4/5), the Tchaikovsky opera (4/5), the Met production of the opera (5/5), the Baden-Baden (1998) production of the opera (4/5)
My first introduction to Onegin was in college. One of my home teachers at the time (LDS term for "assigned male go-to/friend" — all active adult LDS are assigned as a "home teacher" (men) or "visiting teacher" (women) to others in the ward, and it is an AWESOME program which means you are guaranteed at least one or two instant friends, but this is not the post for it) was a dancer in a very highly-regarded ballet company, and he happened to mention that they were doing an absolutely amazing production of Onegin and that I should go see it. K was out of the country at the time, and I think I hadn't yet gotten to be friends with J, so I dragged my roommate.
She enjoyed it, but I was overwhelmed. It was the first professional ballet performance I'd ever been to, and it was wonderful. I don't remember anything specific about it now, but I remember that overwhelming thought of oh, oh, THIS is what dance is about, this is why people love it! I then went straight to K's bookshelf (which I was keeping at the time) and read her copy of Pushkin straight through. …I was underwhelmed, but it was nice enough, I guess.
Then I forgot all about it.
So, more than fifteen years later, I was browsing Simon Keenlyside clips on YouTube, as I do, and happened to notice he was in a production of Tchaikovsky's Onegin.
(It has not escaped me that I am sort of following the romantic line of the story. I tried a little to see if I could fit a duel in, but none of my friends are the dueling sort… And of course what with YouTube and Amazon and such, having an obsession is much friendlier now than it was back in the 90's.)
So then I had to read the book. I have the Charles Johnston translation, which I found it hard to get through. Ruffling through translations, I came to the conclusion I needed a prose translation, so I bought the Wordsworth Classics edition.
I feel extremely hypocritical about this, as I tend to get very irritated with prose or even non-rhyming translations of, oh, say, Dante, for an extremely non-random example. But the Divine Comedy is in essence a poem, if one that tells a complex story, and I feel like Eugene Onegin is a novel, if one that is written in verse. And I was able to enjoy the novel a lot more when I could concentrate on the novelistic parts of it. (I suspect it would be different if I knew Russian. I am starting to see why all these people learned Russian so that they could read Onegin.)
The novel is freaking awesome. Pushkin is full of trenchant observations about his characters and life in general. (His narrator-character, while he doesn't actually do anything plot-wise, is its own fully-fleshed-out and interesting character.) The characters are — well, they're all both kind of unlikable and kind of sympathetic. Onegin is a total jerk, of course! but he does love Lensky, and he's actually kind of sweet (if in a jerkish way) to Tatyana — I can think of all kinds of ways it could have gone a lot worse. Tatyana is, well, Bookish YA Protagonist, right? — except that Pushkin also points out how she's rather super-sentimental, at least before her marriage, which leads to her falling in love with Onegin… because… it's the thing for her to do.
(Interestingly, this translation translates one of the descriptions of Onegin's boredom as "depression," which — I have no idea how accurate that is. It doesn't seem to jibe with the rest of his character, though.)
Tchaikovsky does some amazing things with his source material. The Olga-Tatyana-Onegin-Lensky quartet near the end of the party is fabulous. The duet between Onegin and Lensky right before their duel — the reaching out during the duet, ending with "No, no, no, no," just twists my heart. The bit where Onegin talks about being bored and then suddenly mentions "a bloodstained ghost" — the music brings this out in a heartbreaking way, his continuing anguish over Lensky's death, a way which Pushkin isn't quite able to obtain with just words. (For those of you who like musicals, listening to the Chandos Sung in English version on Spotify is probably not the worst introduction to opera.)
Tchaikovsky also romanticizes the characters and events, which I really dislike. I kind of see why he had to romanticize the Onegin/Lensky blowup and make it public — otherwise there wouldn't have been that wonderful quartet, and it is wonderful — but given that the Pushkin text explicitly says that it's too bad Tatyana didn't know about it, it just rubs me the wrong way. And then there's the ending. Pushkin's Tatyana is, at the end — oh, I don't know, she's very correct, in both senses of the word. I love her ending speech a lot. And she does say she loves Onegin, but it's as an aside to her larger point, which is that she won't leave her husband. And in Tchaikovsky it becomes the centerpoint of her confession, and a romanticized excuse for an impassioned angsty duet. Which is a great duet! But still.
I also kind of hate Gremin's aria where he talks about how awesome love is (although it's beautiful and earwormy), because it points out that Tatyana didn't get that luxury, though I suppose that's the point of it.
The Fleming/Hvorostovsky version is available on youtube here, and about twenty minutes into it I went to Amazon and bought it, I loved it so much. Fleming does really well at playing girl!Tatanya, and her transformation to princess!Tatanya is believable and very well done. Hvorostovsky is tremendous and basically makes the opera. I was half in love with his Onegin halfway through, and when his bored nonchalance makes way to the pain of his duet with Lensky and his whole body language just changing as he acts out his anguished love for the princess, I fell completely and utterly for him. (And yet he's not likeable, which is exactly how Onegin should be.) And the end of the disastrous party scene, where he abortively reaches out to Tatyana as if to say, This is not what I meant, at all — AUGH. The duet between Ramon Vargas (Lenski), magnificent — and Hvorostovsky may well have just broken my heart totally. The last scene with Onegin and Tatanya, their voices, their acting, the stage blocking, is all just totally amazing, and I could probably watch that ten times in a row.
Fleming's Tatiana is definitely on the romantic side — in the last scene she looks at her wedding ring in despair, she keeps reaching out a hand to Onegin and pulling it back — it's quite heartbreaking, but it's Tchaikovsky's interpretation rather than Pushkin's (in my opinion). I see Pushkin's Tatyana as much more mature, much more determined on her course, but Fleming's Tatiana is not necessarily contradictory to that, of course — we don't see Princess!Tatyana sighing and going on and on in a lovelorn fashion in Pushkin, but she does cry over Onegin's letter, so there's that.
(I suppose it colors my opinion that I think both Onegin and Tatyana are right — Onegin is right that he and Tatyana would be a very poor match at the time she fell in love with him, and right (and even kind) to reject her from what would doubtless be a very unhappy marriage for her. Tatyana is right to be faithful to her husband. Yes, maybe Tatyana and Onegin could have been happier had Onegin been more grown-up at the time, but he wasn't, and so this is the best they can do under the circumstances. I feel like Tchaikovsky wants it to be a dooooomed romance and OH if she only left her husband they could be HAPPY and, um, NO. I guess Pushkin!Tatyana is supposed to be now stifled by conventionality etc. and to that I also say: but she was right. And, I mean, saying "what if Onegin had been mature" is a little like saying, "what if a magic unicorn came and hung out with Tatyana?" It wasn't the case.)
I dislike the casting of Prince Gremin as old and ugly, and like him much better as the amiable and reasonably-good-looking if perhaps foppish slightly-older man cast in this production (see e.g. 2:02:18) — he's not described in Pushkin (unless you equate him with the "fat" general pointed out at the end of Book 7), and the notes to my edition point out clues that he's not that much older than Onegin. And this makes a lot more dramatic sense to me. It's not that Tatyana is married to someone she can't stand, and she did consent to the marriage; it's that she isn't in love with him. (And I also like this production quite a lot, and I like Orla Boylan's interpretation of Tatyana a bit better than Fleming's, although I am not sure Glushchak's performance is quite as impressive as Hvorostovsky's Met performance.)
(I think this is the last of my August-ish queued posts. (Way behind on life; have I mentioned that?) This one I was saving because I was going to buy and watch the Keenlyside version first, but it's become clear that this is not happening for a very long time.)
My first introduction to Onegin was in college. One of my home teachers at the time (LDS term for "assigned male go-to/friend" — all active adult LDS are assigned as a "home teacher" (men) or "visiting teacher" (women) to others in the ward, and it is an AWESOME program which means you are guaranteed at least one or two instant friends, but this is not the post for it) was a dancer in a very highly-regarded ballet company, and he happened to mention that they were doing an absolutely amazing production of Onegin and that I should go see it. K was out of the country at the time, and I think I hadn't yet gotten to be friends with J, so I dragged my roommate.
She enjoyed it, but I was overwhelmed. It was the first professional ballet performance I'd ever been to, and it was wonderful. I don't remember anything specific about it now, but I remember that overwhelming thought of oh, oh, THIS is what dance is about, this is why people love it! I then went straight to K's bookshelf (which I was keeping at the time) and read her copy of Pushkin straight through. …I was underwhelmed, but it was nice enough, I guess.
Then I forgot all about it.
So, more than fifteen years later, I was browsing Simon Keenlyside clips on YouTube, as I do, and happened to notice he was in a production of Tchaikovsky's Onegin.
(It has not escaped me that I am sort of following the romantic line of the story. I tried a little to see if I could fit a duel in, but none of my friends are the dueling sort… And of course what with YouTube and Amazon and such, having an obsession is much friendlier now than it was back in the 90's.)
So then I had to read the book. I have the Charles Johnston translation, which I found it hard to get through. Ruffling through translations, I came to the conclusion I needed a prose translation, so I bought the Wordsworth Classics edition.
I feel extremely hypocritical about this, as I tend to get very irritated with prose or even non-rhyming translations of, oh, say, Dante, for an extremely non-random example. But the Divine Comedy is in essence a poem, if one that tells a complex story, and I feel like Eugene Onegin is a novel, if one that is written in verse. And I was able to enjoy the novel a lot more when I could concentrate on the novelistic parts of it. (I suspect it would be different if I knew Russian. I am starting to see why all these people learned Russian so that they could read Onegin.)
The novel is freaking awesome. Pushkin is full of trenchant observations about his characters and life in general. (His narrator-character, while he doesn't actually do anything plot-wise, is its own fully-fleshed-out and interesting character.) The characters are — well, they're all both kind of unlikable and kind of sympathetic. Onegin is a total jerk, of course! but he does love Lensky, and he's actually kind of sweet (if in a jerkish way) to Tatyana — I can think of all kinds of ways it could have gone a lot worse. Tatyana is, well, Bookish YA Protagonist, right? — except that Pushkin also points out how she's rather super-sentimental, at least before her marriage, which leads to her falling in love with Onegin… because… it's the thing for her to do.
(Interestingly, this translation translates one of the descriptions of Onegin's boredom as "depression," which — I have no idea how accurate that is. It doesn't seem to jibe with the rest of his character, though.)
Tchaikovsky does some amazing things with his source material. The Olga-Tatyana-Onegin-Lensky quartet near the end of the party is fabulous. The duet between Onegin and Lensky right before their duel — the reaching out during the duet, ending with "No, no, no, no," just twists my heart. The bit where Onegin talks about being bored and then suddenly mentions "a bloodstained ghost" — the music brings this out in a heartbreaking way, his continuing anguish over Lensky's death, a way which Pushkin isn't quite able to obtain with just words. (For those of you who like musicals, listening to the Chandos Sung in English version on Spotify is probably not the worst introduction to opera.)
Tchaikovsky also romanticizes the characters and events, which I really dislike. I kind of see why he had to romanticize the Onegin/Lensky blowup and make it public — otherwise there wouldn't have been that wonderful quartet, and it is wonderful — but given that the Pushkin text explicitly says that it's too bad Tatyana didn't know about it, it just rubs me the wrong way. And then there's the ending. Pushkin's Tatyana is, at the end — oh, I don't know, she's very correct, in both senses of the word. I love her ending speech a lot. And she does say she loves Onegin, but it's as an aside to her larger point, which is that she won't leave her husband. And in Tchaikovsky it becomes the centerpoint of her confession, and a romanticized excuse for an impassioned angsty duet. Which is a great duet! But still.
I also kind of hate Gremin's aria where he talks about how awesome love is (although it's beautiful and earwormy), because it points out that Tatyana didn't get that luxury, though I suppose that's the point of it.
The Fleming/Hvorostovsky version is available on youtube here, and about twenty minutes into it I went to Amazon and bought it, I loved it so much. Fleming does really well at playing girl!Tatanya, and her transformation to princess!Tatanya is believable and very well done. Hvorostovsky is tremendous and basically makes the opera. I was half in love with his Onegin halfway through, and when his bored nonchalance makes way to the pain of his duet with Lensky and his whole body language just changing as he acts out his anguished love for the princess, I fell completely and utterly for him. (And yet he's not likeable, which is exactly how Onegin should be.) And the end of the disastrous party scene, where he abortively reaches out to Tatyana as if to say, This is not what I meant, at all — AUGH. The duet between Ramon Vargas (Lenski), magnificent — and Hvorostovsky may well have just broken my heart totally. The last scene with Onegin and Tatanya, their voices, their acting, the stage blocking, is all just totally amazing, and I could probably watch that ten times in a row.
Fleming's Tatiana is definitely on the romantic side — in the last scene she looks at her wedding ring in despair, she keeps reaching out a hand to Onegin and pulling it back — it's quite heartbreaking, but it's Tchaikovsky's interpretation rather than Pushkin's (in my opinion). I see Pushkin's Tatyana as much more mature, much more determined on her course, but Fleming's Tatiana is not necessarily contradictory to that, of course — we don't see Princess!Tatyana sighing and going on and on in a lovelorn fashion in Pushkin, but she does cry over Onegin's letter, so there's that.
(I suppose it colors my opinion that I think both Onegin and Tatyana are right — Onegin is right that he and Tatyana would be a very poor match at the time she fell in love with him, and right (and even kind) to reject her from what would doubtless be a very unhappy marriage for her. Tatyana is right to be faithful to her husband. Yes, maybe Tatyana and Onegin could have been happier had Onegin been more grown-up at the time, but he wasn't, and so this is the best they can do under the circumstances. I feel like Tchaikovsky wants it to be a dooooomed romance and OH if she only left her husband they could be HAPPY and, um, NO. I guess Pushkin!Tatyana is supposed to be now stifled by conventionality etc. and to that I also say: but she was right. And, I mean, saying "what if Onegin had been mature" is a little like saying, "what if a magic unicorn came and hung out with Tatyana?" It wasn't the case.)
I dislike the casting of Prince Gremin as old and ugly, and like him much better as the amiable and reasonably-good-looking if perhaps foppish slightly-older man cast in this production (see e.g. 2:02:18) — he's not described in Pushkin (unless you equate him with the "fat" general pointed out at the end of Book 7), and the notes to my edition point out clues that he's not that much older than Onegin. And this makes a lot more dramatic sense to me. It's not that Tatyana is married to someone she can't stand, and she did consent to the marriage; it's that she isn't in love with him. (And I also like this production quite a lot, and I like Orla Boylan's interpretation of Tatyana a bit better than Fleming's, although I am not sure Glushchak's performance is quite as impressive as Hvorostovsky's Met performance.)
(I think this is the last of my August-ish queued posts. (Way behind on life; have I mentioned that?) This one I was saving because I was going to buy and watch the Keenlyside version first, but it's become clear that this is not happening for a very long time.)
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 04:40 am (UTC)