My favorite parts: Eugene Onegin
I rejected you once, but now you have enchanted me
Eugene Onegin. I was introduced to it as a 20 year old. A story of a pompous man who rejects a sensitive, beautiful woman and later realizes the folly of his ways ? It's not a very exciting plot at all (I was going through my La Clemenza di Tito phase here and there's an assassination attempt at least). At 20, I found Tchaikovsky music not appealing to my taste. Now I am 31, and Operavision released its new stream of Eugene Onegin. I feel like Eugene Onegin. I am the pompous man who rejected this sensitive, beautiful opera. This opera that I once considered so painfully boring - how wretched to have not realized it as a masterpiece all along!
Why do I love you?
I don't know why I love it now. The music is beautiful. The melodies haunting. The libretto is pure poetry. Russian is beautiful when sung:
To see you hourly,
to dog your footsteps, to follow
your every smile, movement and glance
with loving eyes,
to listen to you for hours, to understand
in my heart all your perfection,
to swoon before you in passionate torment
turn pale and pass away: this is bliss,
this is my only dream, my only happiness!
Perhaps I love it now because I discovered love! I discovered love during Covid lockdown so there was nothing else but dizzying passion to distract me (aside from my dissertation). I understand how it wholly consumes you, to fill your waking hours till you forget everything else in the world. Tatiana, the sensitive beautiful woman, sings about it so beautifully in her famous Letter Scene.
Letter scene
Having met Eugene Onegin, our Tatiana is obsessed and infatuated. She pours out her love confession on paper in one of the greatest scenes. My favorite part is the scene right before she starts writing. There's a tension of strings. Then she breaks it in this melody:
Let me perish, but first
let me summon, in dazzling hope,
bliss as yet unknown.
Life's sweetness is known to me!
I drink the magic potion of desire!
I am beset by visions!
Everywhere, everywhere I look,
I see my fatal tempter!
Wherever I look, I see him!
I love the "Life's sweetness is known to me" (or in the translation from Operavision which I prefer: I discover the rapture of life) part so much - the way the strings answers her and she repeats it again. It's full of this exuberant zest! It's dizzying the way the music feels so free. I don't know how to describe it but it reminds me of liquid being sloshed around in a jar almost.
Unfortunately, Eugene Onegin will reject her with a lot of condescension (ass).
Payback
But I think what makes this perfect is that it is repeated again in the finale of the opera. After many years rejecting Tatiana, Eugene Onegin is a miserable bloke (he killed his best friend in a duel). He comes to a ball and realizes that Tatiana is no longer this country girl but a woman married to a general. He falls in love with her and sings
He echos exactly what Tatiana proclaimed so many years ago.
But his happiness is short-lived. Tatiana rejects him. And so Eugene Onegin is alone.
Addendum
I came to the conclusion that East-European operas have different views of tragedies than Italian operas in my opinion. In Italian operas, I feel like death is tragedy. But from what I gather of East-European operas, I think their concept of tragedy is living through the consequences.