‘Eugene Onegin’, an opera that did not want to be an opera

Tatiana’s unrequited love for Onegin and his broken friendship with Lenski (whom she will kill in a duel) are the two main lines along which this opera, premiered in Moscow in 1879, runs. Christof Loy wanted to continue, in his staging on stage, Tchaikovsky’s indications to consider ‘Eugene Onegin’ an “intimate drama.” «I wanted -says the German director- to return to the essence, to what Tchaikovsky wanted, whose intention was to write an opera that was very far from what was called the ‘grand opéra’, a work for conservatories and not for great stages. There was a moment when it went in the wrong direction and the work began to be interpreted in a more grandiose way. I wanted to go back to the initial idea, and it has helped me a lot to read about the work of Stanislavskywhich in its Moscow Art Theater, in the 1920s, made a very famous production that guaranteed this intimacy.

“As I studied and learned more about the work,” says Lloyd, “I discovered that in the first part Tchaikovsky is less interested in the protagonist and focuses more on what we could call ‘his victims‘: Tatiana and Lenski. The duel produces a very important change in the perspective of the work. Onegin enters what we could call Dante’s hell, and has to face his bad conscience. The first part is staged in a realistic, almost cinematic way (always with a poetic and theatrical touch) and the second part focuses more on Onegin’s inner world. I want to make him a real person so that we feel how painful his fall is. “He suffers as he matures and realizes that he has to pay the consequences of his actions.”

Gustavo Gimeno speaks about the score, who returns to the Teatro Real after directing, in 2022, ‘The Angel of Fire’, by Prokofiev. «Tchaikovsky wrote ‘Eugene Onegin’ with great love. A phrase that he said has stuck in my mind: ‘If the public received even a tiny part of what I felt while composing this work, I would consider my task accomplished.'” It is, he continues, music “of apparent simplicity, which reminds me at certain moments and in a certain way of Mozart or Schubertwhere the lines are perfectly outlined, in a very classic and symmetrical way. It is a work of great intimacy, with little artifice. Yes there are bright moments, but they are not the majority. Here is also the greatness of this music that, with that economy of gestures and those classic lines, achieves extraordinary depth, emotions and beauty.

Gimeno praises the work of Christoph Loy, which for him, he confesses, has been a revelation and has allowed him to discover aspects of the score. «The first two bars of the opera are a good example of Tchaikovsky’s intentions; In very few notes, only with the strings, you get the feeling that it describes practically all of the emotions of the work; “You can perceive the desire, the melancholy, the frustration, the search… It is a wonderful score.”