ONE OPERA - THREE ACTS - THREE DESPERATE LOVES!

Tchaikovsky's most popular opera tells the passionate story of no fewer than three characters whose lives are destroyed by a love which is doomed never to be requited.

First comes Tatyana, a shy and dreamy country girl whose head is full of romantic illusions. Knowing little of the real world, she falls head over heels in love with the moody and sophisticated Onegin and is devastated when he patronisingly rejects her.

Next we meet the poet Lensky, who overreacts when his beloved Olga is the object of Onegine's flirtatious advances and challenges him to a duel, in which Onegin senselessly shoots him dead.

Finally, love strikes lethally at Onegin himself. Returning from a lengthy trip abroad after the duel, he meets Tatyana again. She is now married to a Prince and is the toast of high society in St Petersburg. Onegin wildly declares his love for her, but she reminds him of the opera's often-repeated message - an orderly life within a stable marriage is preferable to a grand passion outside of it - and leaves him in despair.

These three tragedies are played out against a background of the whole range of life in Russia in the early years of the nineteenth century, from a peasant harvest festival to a grand aristocratic ball, and the opera shows us Tchaikovsky at the peak of his creative genuis, clothing the stories in beautiful, tuneful music which heaves with emotion and races away in the dances which are as melodic and spectacular as those in his best-loved ballets.

Act I. Eugene Onegin has been called from a wild life of pleasure to his sick uncle, of whose property he takes possession after the uncle’s sudden death. He has brought with him from the big city a profound satiety of all enjoyments and a deep contempt for the society of mankind in his solitary country seat. Here, however, he forms a friendship for a young fanatic, the poet Lenski. Through him he is introduced to Larina, a woman who owns an estate. Her two daughters, Olga and Tatiana, correspond to the double nature of their mother, whose youth was a period of sentimentality in which she allowed herself to be affected like others by Richardson’s novels, raved over Grandison, and followed the wild adventures of Lovelace with anxious thrills. Life later had made her rational, altogether too rational and insipid. Olga now has become a cheerful, superficial, pleasureful silly young girl; Tatiana, a dreamer whose melancholy is increasing through reading books which her mother had once used. Lenski is betrothed to Olga. Tatiana recognizes at her first sight of Onegin the realization of her dreams. Her heart goes out to meet him and in her enthusiasm she reveals all her feelings in a letter to him. Onegin is deeply stirred by this love; a feeling of confidence in mankind that he had not known for such a long time awakens in him. But he knows himself too well. He knows that every faculty as a husband is departing from him. And now he considers it his duty not to disappoint this maiden soul, to be frank. He refuses her love. He takes the blame on himself, but he would not have been the worldly wise man if his superiority to the simple country child had not been emphasized chiefly on this account. But Tatiana only listens to the refusal, she is very unhappy. Onegin remains her ideal, who now will be still more solitary, in spite of it.

Act II. Tatiana’s name-day is being celebrated with a big hall. Onegin goes there on Lenski’s invitation. The stupid company with their narrow views about him vex him so much that he seeks to revenge himself on Lenski for it, for which he begins courting Olga. Lenski takes the jest in earnest; it comes to a quarrel between the friends Lenski rushes out and sends Onegin a challenge. Social considerations force Onegin to accept the challenge; a dueling fanatic landlord, Saretsky stirs Lenski’s anger so severely that a reconciliation is not possible. This part in Pushkin’s work is the keenest satire, an extraordinarily efficacious mockery of the whole subject of dueling. There is derision on Onegin’s side, too, for he chooses as his second his coachman Gillot. But the duel was terribly in earnest; Lenski falls, shot through by his opponent’s bullet. (This scene recalls a sad experience of the poet himself; for he himself fell in a duel by the bullet of a supercilious courtier, Georg d’Anthès-Heckeren, who died in Alsace in 1895).

Act III. Twenty-six years later. Onegin has restlessly wandered over the world. Now he is in St. Petersburg at a ball given by Prince Gremin. There, if he sees aright, Princess Gremina, that accomplished woman of the world is "his" Tatiana. Now his passion is aroused in all its strength. He must win her. Tatiana does not love him with the same ardour as before. When she upbraids Onegin that he loves her only because she has now become a brilliant woman of the world it is only a means of deceiving herself and her impetuous adorer as to her real feelings. But finally her true feeling is revealed. She tells Onegin that she loves him as before. But at the same time she explains that she will remain true to her duty as a wife. Broken-hearted Onegin leaves her.