KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: ↑22 Mar 2020 17:58
Salmoneus wrote: ↑22 Mar 2020 03:05
Hmm, small problem arising from that Verdi: I'm now addicted to "Di Provenza il mar"...
I can't get enough of "Parigi, o cara" (It's also just so sad).
Now you've got me humming it.
I think the difference for me, though, is that that cantabile melody in Parigi o cara is much shorter than the one in Di provenza il mar, so it doesn't have time to burn into my ears the way the latter does.
-----------
Anyway, that was the first time I've watched Eugene Onegin. At first, I was surprised and a bit disappointed: I'm a big Tchaikovsky fan, and his lushness and flair for indelible memories should make him a great opera compose, but Onegin actively veers away from that Verdiesque style; it has relatively few big tunes, and the tunes that there are tend just to be intros for much longer arias (hence, the two most famous tunes in it are the two dance scenes). And in particular it begins with quite a 'sophisticated' sort of music, blending four female voices together with only suggestions of a tune.
But by the end, I really liked it. It's a good demonstration of how opera can be more than just an excuse for some songs, but an effective dramatic narrative in its own right, with a number of fantastic moments - Lensky's regrets and the duel scene, the sudden juxtaposition of the killing with the polonaise, and that great final section. I'm not so sure on the first couple of scenes, to be honest, and some of the arias could be trimmed, but overall a good story, and told in a way that non-musical theatre - or a novel - can't do. I think maybe what an opera like Onegin can do is convey a powerful mood
without having to convey detailed information the way a novel would have to in its verbal description, or straight theatre of film does in its emotive closeups - it can let characters be cold and distant without worrying that that would make them opaque to us, or it can even use its music to contradict its characters.
I was also really interested in it formally and thematically. It really felt like a stepping stone between something like La Trav (twenty years earlier) and the verismo works written twenty years later (although I don't imagine it was significant in any causal way, given Tchaikovsky's remoteness from the Italian music scene).
Thematically, the feminism of La Traviata is made much more explicit in Eugene Onegin (how reassuring - or perhaps disheatening - that so many of the great cultural achievements of a brutally misogynist era and culture are essentially criticisms of that culture from a female perspective). There's a lot of the same themes as La Traviata, but they've been stripped of their romanticism, made more tawdry and ordinary. Instead of a glamorous courtesan, the heroine/victim is an ordinary middle-class (by russian standards!) woman; instead of a headstrong and foolish but basically sincere arsehole boyfrind, it's a narcissistic, callous arsehole boyfriend. Instead of a paid relationship with a Baron, it's an arranged marriage with an old soldier. You can see the trend for grimy bourgeois life that eventually produces La Boheme. It isn't nihilistic, but it's cynical - that is, it's a disillusioned sort of romance. Encapsulated, I guess, in that ambivalent and unexpected final decision.
Indeed, in a way Onegin feels more modern than the verismo operas, which deck their stories in more arrestingly modern and dirty clothing, but generally challenge the assumptions of the genre less than Onegin does. For a start: verismo heroines are usually still murdered, or kill themselves, or die of tuberculosis. Their feminism - and their tragedy - rests on women being victims who deserve pity. Tchaikovsky's heroine, on the other hand - well yes, she is still in a sense a victim, and certainly she is to be pitied - but she's also a woman who, unlike most women in opera, ends by taking control (to some extent, at least in the moment) and deciding the course of her own life (even if it is within a constrictive cultural context that offers her few choices). And similarly, both the prostitution of La Traviata and the artistic world of La Bohème are - while tragic, and of course genuine in their reflection of real subcultures - nonetheless essentially escapist, for the audience in general and for women in particular (showing the freedom and danger that women could find by escaping from mainstream social expectations). Eugene Onegin, on the other hand, is an only-slightly-elevated exploration of situations that many of its audience members would actually have faced, and it centres around a woman who does not escape society (succesfully or tragically) but who has to find a way forward inside it, as the women in the audience were having to do (and I loved, incidentally, the conceit of starting the opera with the heroine's mother reminiscing about her own experiences - which could easily be a description of what happens to her daughter in turn; and likewise, I like the class implications of the way the nanny tries to share her own (more extreme!) story with the heroine, only to find that her privileged charge isn't really listening...)
Looking backward, though, I was struck by its similarities not to La Trav but, further back, to Don Giovanni. The two operas are almost like the same story in two very different genres. Mozart's opera takes place in a realm that is superficially realistic, but still essentially mythological, whereas Tchaikovsky's begins from a place of realism. Mozart's cold-hearted rogue is diabolical, whereas Tchaikovsky's is only apathetical; Giovanni's victim is a picture of pristine, powerless innocence, whereas Onegin's is only a little naive at first (a little cynical later), and her powerlessness comes not from a gulf in class (Onegin looks down on her family as rustic, but the difference in status is not really so geat) but simply from being a woman. The final confrontation in Mozart is supernatural; in Tchaikovsky, psychological. Mozart's version, in effect, explores real issues by casting them high contrast - a posterized image; Tchaikovsky's tries to take them head on.
And then there's the decision not avoid a tight plot altogether. A lot of operas struggle to cohere narratively - it's hard to fit in too much explanation, as they're always running short of time - but Tchaikovsky chose not even to try: the opera was presented only as seven "lyrical scenes", moments extracted from the story. This frees him to concentrate on the essence of each moment, trusting us to fill in the gaps; and I think this actually works better than something like La Traviata, where the scenes still don't quite fit together (the sudden U-turn between the first and second acts!), but it's a bit more vexing because there's more of a feeling that they SHOULD fit together. Tchaikovsky's approach seems very modern, narratively speaking - and, strikingly, decades ahead of straight theatre (although I don't think it was that innovative per se for opera)
-------
As for the production, Hvorostovsky was clearly (musically and dramatically) born to play Onegin, but I also really liked Ramón Vargas as Lensky - not only did he find the music in the music, but he was really convincing in his acting. A big problem with opera is that the people with the right voice often can't project the right persona for the role (Fleming here was great musically, and well-suited for the final act, but never persuaded me she was a 16-year-old girl...), but I though Vargas really embodied his character - particularly tricky as Lensky is the character whose actions are hardest to explain (they're believable, that is, but they require the performer to convincingly escalate the situation very quickly).
The design was underwhelming. I loved the visual effect of the first act - a very minimalistic way to be absolutely Russian (a couple of pretend birch trees and a lot of dead leaves). I really liked the
idea of the first ball - a big crowd of dances packed into a tiny space, both realistic and symbolic of the way society constricts its members, and with male and female singers/dancers taking turns to freeze as their partners soliloquyse/dance around them. But visually it was cluttered and unimpressive, particularly on such a large stage. Similarly, I understand why they made the polonaise focus intently on Onegin - the incongruous music and the time shift are very much about his psychological state - but I kind of wish they'd at least had dancers in the background. You're doing an opera by the greatest ballet composer ever, you've got two big society ball scenes, and one of them is cluttered and compressed, and you don't even bother having dancers for the second? You're not using your resources to their max, there!
I'm also a little eye-rolly about the prologue idea: sticking Onegin looking sad over the overture. I get that modern opera productions are terrified of not giving the audience something to look at for five minutes - and sure, I understand that this is a valuable opportunity to fit in a little story. But the idea of having the protagonist looking back over their life silently in the overture is just so EASY. [eg the Met's version of La Traviata did the same thing]. In this case, it also misses the point: Onegin has his name on the show, but this isn't his story. And giving us Onegin first undermines the great - and subversive, and mythological - idea of beginning with the two older women. Why not just put them up there for the overture - or a brief look back at THEIR lives? Failing that, if you need one of the protagonists to be there, make it Tatiana!
------------
....aaaaanyway. Just felt the need to expound a little bit...