I've never read the Pushkin novel-in-verse, but here's the plot of this: Onegin is some guy. He meets a young woman, Tatiana, and they have a very brief interaction, after which she sends him a love letter, which he rejects. That's act one. Act two, he and his friend Lensky argue and he ultimate kills him in a duel. Act three, several years later, Onegin meets Tatiana again and decides he loves her after all, and she loves him too, but alas she's married and she's not going to leave her husband. So...sucks to be them, I guess.
There are, uh, several issues here, and I do realize that I'm approaching this from a twenty-first-century perspective and that the sensibilities of Pushkin are very distant from mine--and you know, that whole "dying in a duel" thing just accentuates that. BUT STILL. Okay first Onegin is meant to be a tragic romantic figure, apparently, but he's actually a huge douchebag: he rejects Tatiana in a super-condescending way, and then you know why he fights with Lensky? Because, in a fit of pique at Lensky having invited him to a party he doesn't like, he decides to make him jealous by dancing with his girlfriend. Admittedly, Lensky's reaction to this could fairly be described as over-, but that doesn't make Onegin seem any less douchey. Point being, I wanted him to fail and be unhappy, which I don't think anyone involved in the opera's creation was going for. And then you have the so-called relationship between Onegin and Tatiana: even by operatic standards, it would be difficult to overstate just how little interaction they actually have before she decides she's in love with him. I know it's opera logic, but opera logic failshere. The brief introduction to this production is by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has nothing to do with the opera per se, but who is definitelyRussian. "This opera touches anyone who has ever been in love, especially unrequited love," he declares, and guilty on both counts, but--nope! "I hope that after seeing this performance, you too will fall in love with this extraordinary opera," he continues. Questionable. Very questionable. I mean...do you really automatically like this if you're Russian? Don't Russians have twenty-first-century sensibilities too? Well, then again, it's not just Russians who like this, obviously, so I dunno.
Mind you, it doesn't help that I feel like this performance is perhaps a bit miscast: both Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming are operatic legends, but she feels a bit too, I don't know, knowing to be the naive country girl, and he plays the role really smugly, making the character even more unlikeable than it needs to be. The only one I really liked here was Ramón Vargas as Lensky, who generates the only sympathy and pathos in the opera, of which his pre-duel aria is probably the highlight.
I mean, the music's still good, but you kind of realize how much the libretto and music go together in an opera, and if there's no compelling drama, well, the music is going to seem less interesting too. I don't really understand why some people consider this so great, but they are wrong! Thus do I decree! The Queen of Spades is eleventy-seven times better. The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it. What?
I remember seeing this one long time ago but sadly long enough I don't remember much from it. Frankly I think I found this one mosty dull henc not very memorable :(
ReplyDeleteIt may be that Tchaikovsky accentuated the 'tragic romantic' aspects of the story; I haven't seen the opera, so I can't say. But the poem itself doesn't have that sensibility at all. Pushkin's biggest influence (which he himself acknowledged) was Byron's "Don Juan," which has some romantic aspects (the Haidee chapter) but generally is a bawdy, earthy comic poem that often makes a mockery of its hero. "Eugene Onegin" isn't as overtly comic, but it is pretty critical of its characters. I don't think he ever viewed Onegin as someone to admire -- he shows him as a pretty empty person. If there are any similarities between Pushkin and Onegin, they are used by the author as a form of self-criticism. Lensky is, indeed, more sympathetic, but he's also not intended, and does not come across at all, as a straightforward 'tragic romantic' type; it's implied that he's actually a pretty ordinary sort of person, who would have been destined for an ordinary provincial family life, for whom being a poet was just a youthful phase that he would have grown out of -- but, unfortunately, he ended up getting into this conflict before this could happen.
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I suspect that Tchaikovsky played up the romantic aspect of the story--as I understand it, that's what he did with The Queen of Spades as well.
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