Eugene Onegin- Northern Arts Review
Opera North at Leeds Grand
Eugene Onegin- Northern Arts Review
Pushkin and I have a lot in common: we are both Russian men who died almost two hundred years ago. But apart from that obvious connection, we are both writers who are a little obsessed with characters who define the world around them by the ideals laid out in romantic novels. I won’t plug the book I currently have in the query trenches, but in it, I examine a Byronic heroine who cannot get close to the man she loves because she cannot risk shattering her illusion of him as the perfect Mr Darcy – safe, pastoral, trapped in the pages of flawless love (even if it is against his will and his reason). In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin (and later Tchaikovsky along with Shilovsky) examines what it is like for a shy young girl, obsessed with the love found in novels, to be confronted by the image of the Byronic hero, only to discover that moody, brooding and rebellious can easily become shallow, hurtful and self-centred. I love a good love story, and even more so when the writer puts the couple through their paces. Tchaikovsky gives us his thesis through Onegin’s poetic best friend Lensky: “life is no romantic novel… honour is but a sound, friendship an empty word”. And as Onegin proves, the Byronic hero is considerably less appealing when the consequences are real.
First performed in 1879, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, with the composer and Konstantin Shilovsky transforming the story into what Tchaikovsky referred to as a series of “lyrical scenes”. This new Opera North production, a co-production with Irish National Opera and Opera Queensland, is directed by Patrick Nolan, who has moved the action from imperial Russia to the Soviet Union of the 1980s. The updated timeline follows the USSR through Perestroika and into the emergence of the wealthy post-Soviet elite. The story tracks Tatyana, a shy young woman whose head is full of romantic novels, who falls hopelessly in love with Eugene Onegin, the sophisticated and rather jaded friend of her sister’s fiancé. When she confesses her love in a letter, Onegin rejects her, and his subsequent behaviour at her name-day celebrations sets in motion a tragedy involving his friend Lensky. Years later, when Tatyana is married and established in fashionable society, Onegin discovers that the tables have turned.
To see my full review, please visit Northern Arts Review
See you in the shadows my loves,
Sean x
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Sean Harper Sable
Sean Sable is a writer & fiction editor based in York, UK