It was dismissed as slapdash and silly. But at least Tchaikovsky's version of Evgeny Onegin brings real feeling to Pushkin's cynical characters, says Catriona Kelly

Saturday February 7, 2004
The Guardian

For most Russians of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Evgeny Onegin was the best-loved

The primal force of desire: Eugene Onegin (William Dazeley) and Tatyanna (Giselle Allen) in Opera North's production of Eugene Onegin at the Grand Theatre , Leeds. Photo: Richard Moran

work of the culture's most venerated writer. Read and re-read from childhood, known partly or, indeed, completely from memory, it was the backbone of adult readers' experiences. Tatiana's naively courageous approach to Onegin, his rebuff and her dignified refusal to succumb when he eventually begins to return her feelings, were the best-known scenes in any text, haunting imaginations with their illusory substantiality in the way that Macbeth or Hamlet lived in the minds of their Anglophone contemporaries.

Yet Onegin was also oddly inaccessible, as is shown by the scarcity of imitations. The 14-line "Onegin stanza" invented by Pushkin had an afterlife in the 19th and 20th centuries, but inspired not one work of stature. And the idea that anyone might translate the text seems preposterous, so vital are the precise verbal details of the whole. In the words of Nabokov, "only a literal rendering of the text is, in a true sense, a translation" - even if, as his own version of Onegin showed, such a clinical rendering could only be unreadable.

Inevitably, adaptations of Onegin have also proved controversial - not least Tchaikovsky's "lyrical scenes in three acts" of 1879. Nabokov described it, in the commentary to his Onegin translation, as "silly" and "slapdash". Certainly, a formidable case might be made by any opera hater prepared to spend more time on the denunciation than Nabokov.

All Pushkin's characters, even Tatiana, have an edge of parody to them and are cut from books as much as from life. Onegin assails genre boundaries, not just because it is a "novel in verse", but because the narrative perspective and the stylistic conventions shift from one stanza - indeed, often one line - to the next. What Pushkin thinks of his characters, about morality, about art and about life in general, is never obvious: ironically for a book widely taught in the schoolroom, Onegin has no clear "message".

By contrast, Tchaikovsky's libretto presents the four central characters straight, and the capacity to feel becomes the ultimate good. Even Onegin moves between the cynicism so abundant in Pushkin's original and rapt lyrical confession: "With my soul, one to one,/ I'm not pleased with what I've done,/ I have joked too rashly,/ With this tender, shy passion," he sings at Tatiana's name-day party, after his blatant courtship of Olga has precipitated a challenge from Lensky that will end in tragedy. When Tatiana sings: "My fate is sealed/ I'll be true to him for ever", she is not speaking the language of Pushkin, but of 19th-century salon poets (one of whom, Konstantin Shilovsky, was Tchaikovsky's collaborator on his libretto).

In salon verse of this kind, the theme of hidden love accompanied by enforced social dissembling is ubiquitous, and souls, hearts and passions are made much freer than in the work of Pushkin, who, like many libertines, was something of an emotional puritan.

In order to imagine why Tchaikovsky's opera makes some Pushkin lovers seethe, one needs to imagine an operatic version of Pride and Prejudice, in which baritone Darcy sings to tenor Bingley, "O what a delight, a pair of fine eyes, in the face of a lovely girl", and a chorus of girls in pink muslin and ribbon trills, "A single man, a single man, must be in want of a wife!" Seeing characters from novels come to costumed half-life is always a shock, and it does not help when Tatiana - slim and ethereal in Pushkin's book - looks and sounds, as Russian sopranos often do, like an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic in a fog.

But, of course, for anyone who loves music, criticism of Tchaikovsky's opera in terms of its relationship with the original text is simply crass. What raises awe is precisely Tchaikovsky's sensitivity to opera's capacity for emotional fundamentalism, of articulating what is beyond language. In Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades or Britten's Turn of the Screw, the supernatural has a real presence denied in the texts from which the operas derive. This may be at the cost of philosophical subtlety - what happens is no longer a puzzle - but the compensation is a sense of pure terror, a raw encounter with the uncanny that takes us back to the roots of art.

Equally, Tchaikovsky's Onegin returns to the primal forces of desire that Pushkin's novel holds at bay through irony and layers of cultural reference meant to suggest dИjЮ vu. The setting for Tatiana's letter, for example, addresses not only what Pushkin's text tells us that she writes (stitched together, says the narrator, from phrases out of her sentimental reading), but also what she feels and cannot write (the physical and mental devastation that has overcome her).

The libretto's expression of emotion is often trite. The musical setting is intensely sophisticated, as shown in particular by the subtly modulated repetition of the "daydream" motif, first occurring in the overture, later evoked when Tatiana thinks of Onegin and again (with a more despairing intonation) when she encounters him in act three, at which point the melody has come to stand for her lost youth as well as her illusions.

Yet the emphasis on sentiment also gives the opera a psychological edge that is missing from Pushkin's novel. Here, the characters - Tatiana excepted - are either transparent (Olga, Lensky) or depicted in a fragmentary and hence enigmatic way (Onegin). By Tchaikovsky's day, expectations of prose fiction had changed: work on the opera began in 1877, just as Tolstoy finished writing Anna Karenina (itself, of course, a response to Onegin along the lines of: "What would have happened if Tatiana had said yes to Onegin?")

In Pushkin's Onegin, the novelistic impulse that the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin described as "polyphonic" - employing many diverse styles - is assigned to the narrator. Tchaikovsky takes this impulse right into his dramatic action. Passages that are, in a conventional sense, "operatic" - with massed strings in surging attack interspersed with meaningful pauses - occur in contexts where characters (Tatiana, Lensky) have had their perceptions of life overturned by Onegin, who emerges in the opera - his foppish manner notwithstanding - as essentially demonic, what a repeatedly highlighted word names as a "tempter".

It is not just the central conflict where this "polyphonic" impulse comes through. Each character has a separate sound realm. The gauche wonder of the characters at Tatiana's name-day party stands out against the assured delight in Princess Gremina expressed by those in the ball scene in act three. More importantly, Lensky's doomed love for Olga has a presence denied to the original, rather absurd, Lensky of the novel.

At the same time, Tchaikovsky is especially skilled in exploiting the capacity of a musical setting to work against what the characters think they are saying. Notable is the use of a darkly coloured setting for Tatiana's mother's commonsensical remarks on how habit is a substitute for happiness, to suggest, already at the beginning of act one, that imaginative escape is futile. Or the interweaving of Onegin's command to Tatiana to "learn to rule herself" with the fruit-pickers' taunts to curious young men ("Do not come and spy on/ Our young girls' games"), so that two kinds of rebuff - the smugly moral and the provocatively insincere - undercut each other.

Tchaikovsky's Onegin, then, is a melodrama in the most fundamental sense of the word: a drama expressed through music. This is quite a different kind of "manipulation of plot" from the narrator-dominated representation in the original. In Pushkin's Onegin, what emerges finally from the swerving digressions and shifts of mood is the isolation of the characters, their failure to communicate with each other. Tatiana's only direct contact with Onegin while they are still in the countryside is the painful scene when he rebukes her for having sent him her "artless confession". In the opera, the two - rather implausibly - have social contact before and after this scene.

But compensation for the genre-bound preclusion of silence and solitude lies in Tchaikovsky's handling of the collective scenes: Tatiana and Olga's duet at the beginning nicely parodies the drawing-room ballad genre that is the libretto's spiritual home; Lensky's outpouring of love to Olga is at once eloquent and conventional, just like his poetry in the novel. One could not - as in the case of Musorgsky's setting of Boris Godunov - claim that Tchaikovsky's opera is more successful in artistic terms than his literary model. But the opera is wholly successful as an autonomous work of art: emotionally direct, engaging, wide-ranging in its stylistic and musical resources, and a distinctively Russian contribution to the evolution of the opera in the late 19th century.

╥ Catriona Kelly is the author of A Very Short Introduction to Russian Literature, published by OUP. Welsh National Opera's new production of Eugene Onegin is in rep at the New Theatre, Cardiff (029-2087 8889), February 14-24, then tours.