Julian Grant

Tatyana’s letter, treasured ever
as sacred, lies before me still.
I read with secret pain, and never
can read enough to get my fill.
Who taught her an address so tender,
such careless language of surrender?
Who taught her all this mad, slapdash,
heartfelt, imploring, touching trash
fraught with enticement and disaster?
It baffles me. But I’ll repeat
here a weak version, incomplete,
pale transcript of a vivid master,
or Freischütz as it might be played
by nervous hands of a schoolmaid:

Pushkin: Eugene Onegin. Chapter Three, verse 31: translated by Charles Johnston, 1977 rev. 1979.

Thus, in his verse novel, Eugene Onegin, does Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the man widely credited with the development of literary Russian, preface Tatyana’s nocturnal effusion to the man she has precipitously decided fate has meant for her; and it is this scene which Tchaikovsky wrote first when he started adapting Onegin into an opera, the scene that captured his imagination foremost, and possibly one of the most famous letter scenes in all opera – and no wonder.

It is very difficult to write about Tchaikovsky without succumbing to the sensational. Although an accrued mythology over the apparent inextricability of his life and works has been disproved by dispassionate research, the white heat of his best music seems, nonetheless, to impel one to ride roughshod over fact. The image of the troubled maestro endures – a hysteric and unconsummated homosexual whose mysterious death has given rise to conspiracy theories to rival those of JFK and Princess Diana. To be sure, nor has truth been served by Klaus Mann’s sensational 1935 novel Symphonie Pathetique and Ken Russell’s delirious movie The Music Lovers (1970); and yet, many of the best clues served up for such balderdash seem to have come right from the music itself. Dismissed as overheated, almost expressionist and at the same time schmaltzy, the music has suffered countless intellectual burials from a largely Germanic critical fraternity, which has lighted on suffering creativity distorted through the prism of Hollywood sensationalism: Tchaikovsky’s notes sound slapped onto paper in an out-of-body fever, which defies analysis. Well, no. Tchaikovsky’s scores are technically impeccable – both Mahler and Sibelius were in awe of his skill. Tchaikovsky’s life was one of iron-clad routine, of methodical daily output, closer to J.S Bach, or Haydn, than to anyone else. If you want to talk true creative chaos, just cast a glance in the direction of his contemporaries, Mussorgsky and Borodin, who, due to their chaotic working circumstances, left pitifully small completed outputs, and much else in ruins. As Radio 3’s recent survey of the complete Tchaikovsky showed everyone, much of the music of this most famous composer is not regularly played – notably there are ten operas, of which only two are in the repertoire – and much else that shows a range, versatility and variety that explodes the myth of the indulgent hysteric. Yet, discussion of his operatic masterwork, Eugene Onegin, is impossible without alluding to a most bizarre collision of life and art, occasioned by a letter.

In an operatic repertoire replete with letter scenes (think Le nozze di Figaro, La traviata, Werther, Madama Butterfly, Cyrano de Bergerac) Tatyana’s in Onegin stands out – it is not a device to carry a plot, but the wellspring of the action and psychology of the piece. Tatyana’s private confessional reveals all her naive vulnerability; then, at odds with the rules of social decorum, she actually sends it, only to be rebuffed, not unkindly and judgementally, but coldly and condescendingly, which is possibly even worse. The Pushkin quote above, indeed, gives a taste of the sharp social commentary which reveals so much about the values of the society in which these characters live – something that music, particularly 19th century Romantic music, simply cannot do: instead, Tchaikovsky imbues his characters with immense empathy and intuition, painting them from within, rather than relying on commentary from the world around them. That it convinces should be no surprise: the selfsame scenario was actually being played out in his own life.

In May 1877, he received an unsolicited letter from a stranger, Antonina Milyukova, a former Moscow conservatoire student, declaring that she had been secretly enamoured of him for some time; at the end of that very month, a singer, Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, suggested to Tchaikovsky that Pushkin’s work, already a literary classic in Russia, might be the basis for an opera. Tchaikovsky resisted at first, but then, adapting the poem himself, commenced with the letter scene; and while writing it, a second letter came from Antonina. Tchaikovsky, unable to bring himself to play a real-life Onegin to her Tatyana, agreed to meet her. By June, he had proposed marriage; and five weeks later, when they married, just over half of the opera was already written. This marriage was for Tchaikovsky, at best aspirational, possibly viewed by him as an attempt to scotch the increasing rumours of his homosexuality.

A botched suicide attempt ensued, with the composer standing in the freezing Moskva river. He finally fled his wife in October, and was taken abroad to recover by his brother, Anatoly. The opera was so dramatically interrupted that it seemed it would remain a torso. Tchaikovsky suggested to his friend Nikolay Rubinstein, head of the Moscow Conservatory, that students should perform just the first four scenes (up to the midpoint of Act II); and this partial performance constituted the opera’s premiere in December 1878. Tchaikovsky, able to resume work, completed the entire score in February 1878, and he entrusted it to students for the premiere in March 1879

As if this melding of life and art were not enough, six months previous to starting work on the opera, in December 1876, Tchaikovsky had embarked on what was possibly the most intimate relationship of his life – conducted entirely by letter. He was put in touch  with Nadezha von Meck, the wealthy widow of a railroad  magnate, while doing some routine violin transcriptions of his works as a private commission for her. This tame introduction then gave rise to a most soul-searching correspondence, comprising 1,200 letters.

It was mutually agreed from the outset that they would never meet. When doing so, accidentally, once or twice, they merely doffed hats and passed one another, without a word. Paid a monthly stipend by his benefactress, he was freed up from his teaching duties; but, in 1890, she ended the relationship, stating that she could no longer afford to support him, even though he was, by then, highly successful and in no need of her money. Nevertheless, the termination of their correspondence devastated him, a feeling heightened by the mystery of her sudden silence.

Despite the fact that the subject matter of Onegin paralleled Tchaikovsky’s current emotional plight, the music does not jive with the Ken Russell stereotype of the composer. In fact, it is Tchaikovsky’s most restrained theatre work, and it was this subject that dominated the lunch I had with Vladimir Jurowski (Glyndebourne’s Music Director and the conductor of this revival of Onegin) on a rainy day near the Metropolitan Opera in New York at Christmas. In a well-known haunt for Met regulars that disconcertingly had an underlying odour more in keeping with the Larin’s country stables than urban Manhattan, the conductor shared his views on Tchaikovsky, and on Onegin in particular, which contextualize the piece in unexpected ways for non-Russians.

Conducting runs in the Jurowski family: Vladimir’s younger brother is about to debut, as he did, at Wexford and their celebrated father, Mikhail, was musical director of the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow,where the five-year-old Vladimir first encountered Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece in his father’s performance. Linking the Jurowskis to Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) actually informs insights into Onegin. After all, Stanislavsky on Opera devotes over 100 pages to Onegin; and his legendary 1922 production of the opera was in repertory until the mid 1990s. Not surprisingly, Vladimir Jurowski emphasizes the intimacy of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Lyric Scenes’, and wonders whether it would not be best presented as a chamber opera. The presence of the big peasants’ chorus and dance in Act I had actually been unknown to him until he heard it at the Bolshoy since Stanislavsky had always cut it. (He may have considered it alien to the ethos of the opera, but there was also a practical reason: Stanislavsky was actually staging the piece in his private residence where there was no physical space for a large chorus.) Of the extensive 19th century Russian operatic tradition, it is difficult to speak of a norm, when only three works regularly feature in the international repertoire. The most performed, possibly by virtue of its economy, is Eugene Onegin, followed by The Queen of Spades and Boris Godunov. Of these works, one might be fooled into thinking that Onegin is the most conventional of the lot – but not according to Jurowski. He sees it as a thoroughly modern work in advance of the 20th century ‘chamber opera’ aesthetic. Onegin, of course, contains choruses, dances and a full orchestra; after all, Tchaikovsky ‘tied in’ to the very 19th-century panoply of forces around which opera houses were structured. Stanislavsky has shown that the big choruses are of minimal importance. The one big showpiece dance that has no internal bearing on the drama, the Ecossaise in Act III Scene 1, was actually a later addition from 1885 (by which time the opera was in the repertoire of the Imperial Opera, St Petersburg, and had begun to be successful). That change is now being redressed, cut from the present production at Glyndebourne. Orchestrally, Onegin is the least extravagant of all of Tchaikovsky’s theatre scores, requiring no percussion apart from timpani, and only three trombones (no tuba), which are used minimally. Having done a chamber version myself for Scottish Opera-Go-Round in 2004, I can attest to just how little of the essential sound and the drama is lost when the score is reduced for pocket forces. The composer strived for an unaccustomed intimacy in this opera, as he revealed in a letter:

‘…How delighted I am to be rid of Ethiopian princesses, Pharaohs, poisonings, all the conventional stuff…I am not deceived: I know that there will be little movement or stage effects in this opera. The poetry, humanity, simplicity of the theme, combined with a text of genius, will more than make up for these shortcomings …’

Vladimir Jurowski points out that Tchaikovsky’s concern with all aspects of his opera resulted in his preparing the piano version of the score for rehearsals. Such is its detail that it could almost stand in its own right, without sounding like a reduction from orchestral score when played. Tchaikovsky’s original tempo markings were actually amended by Eduard Nápravník (conductor of the first professional production of Onegin at the Imperial Opera, St Petersburg in 1884), who tended to make them more extreme and obviously contrasted and dramatic. Tchaikovsky’s originals were superseded in the first, and many current published editions of the score, and are more seamless and consistent with his intimate and restrained vision of the opera. Jurowski takes great pains to reinforce Tchaikovsky’s conception of his opera more ‘like a watercolour’ and draws a parallel between it and the muted, evocative mood landscapes of the contemporary painter Isaak Levitan (1860-1900).

Jurowski argues that Tchaikovsky effected an operatic revolution in Onegin by fashioning a score that is the most anti-symphonic of all his major works – a kaleidoscope of art-songs, a fragmented song cycle, some of which last only a bar or two, here and there. Such an approach is most discernible perhaps in the final duet of the opera, when Onegin returns to try and claim the now-married Tatyana, with their sparring actually a sequence of apposite lyric moments that finally coalesce in tone and tonality at the closing moments. For all this, the opera’s consistency of tone and inspiration do not make it an obviously revolutionary rethink of the operatic problem. What Onegin has in common with the more explicitly experimental 19th-century Russian operas (Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina, Prince Igor, Sadko) is an episodic dramatic construction. Such was the veneration accorded to Pushkin’s poem that Tchaikovsky could assume prior knowledge of his audience, who would fill in the dramatic lacunae for themselves. The fact that so many 19th century Russian operas were based on literary works that survive in their own right as classics in Russia today is probably a by-product of the need to espouse a national cause and create a body of work outside the dominant German, Italian and French musical tastes of the time.

Even though both Tolstoy and Turgenev regarded Tchaikovsky as Russia’s leading composer from the mid-1870’s on, there was some censure in literary circles of Tchaikovsky’s temerity in adapting such a treasured literary masterpiece for his opera. Turgenev criticized Tchaikovsky’s habit of using verbatim Pushkin’s descriptions of characters for their own dialogue. Perhaps one should not attach too much importance to opinions of writers – however great – on the workings of music, as they tend to be more ignorant of this non-verbal medium than a composer would be of words.

Tchaikovsky certainly kept his distance from such writers. There is an amusing anecdote of Turgenev and Tchaikovsky unknowingly sharing a train. When a mutual friend discovered both in separate compartments, Turgenev showed a great desire to meet Tchaikovsky, but the feeling was not mutual. Tchaikovsky, intimidated, took refuge in a third class compartment, in fact, refusing to disembark until everyone had left in order to avoid a meeting. He also did his best to escape an encounter with Tolstoy, even though he was aware of the esteem in which the great writer held him. On one occasion, Tolstoy actually refused to leave a building when he knew Tchaikovsky was in it; and when they did finally meet, he proceeded to lecture Tchaikovsky at length on the heinous dramatic ways of Wagner.

Still, the shared aesthetic of this later generation of artistic figures is instructive. Not for Tchaikovsky was the objective clarity, facetiousness and cruelty of Pushkin’s observations on the characters. Such a stance did not really resonate with the 19th century musical aesthetic; possibly Stravinsky or maybe Shostakovich could have done it justice. In inhabiting the rural milieu and expressing the tenderness and vulnerability of the characters, by divesting Pushkin of his brittleness, Tchaikovsky transports us to a world that, if we were to invest it with a literary parallel, is closer by far to Turgenev or – as Jurowski sees it – to the world of Chekhov.

Chekhov, though 20 years younger than Tchaikovsky, was boundless in his admiration for the composer. One of opera’s great ‘might-have-beens’ was a collaboration between the two. Chekhov’s brother Mikhail refers to a lengthy and amicable meeting; and Tchaikovsky’s literary brother, Modest (who was to write librettos for The Queen of Spades and Iolanta), mentions in his correspondence that the subject chosen was Bela, the first book of another seminal Russian literary classic, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. Like Onegin, but more proactive, Lermontov’s hero, Pechorin, is another example of the Byronic antiheroic ‘superfluous man’; and in common with these flawed fictional characters, Jurowski imagines Tchaikovsky ‘conceiving himself a sinner’, unworthy of happiness. In contrast to the literary giants evoked above, Tchaikovsky’s non-judgemental stance on the characters in Onegin makes the the opera seem more modern, enigmatic, and – maybe – Chekhovian.

Contrast Pushkin and Tchaikovsky’s treatment of Lensky in the famous duel scene. He comments on the limpness and cliché of Lensky’s final poem, and after he is dead reflects, not on the loss of a great poet but:

Perhaps however, to be truthful,
he would have found a normal fate.
The years would pass; no longer youthful,
he’d see his soul cool in its grate;
his nature would be changed and steadied,

he’d sack the Muses and get wedded;
and in the country, blissful, horned,
in quilted dressing-gown adorned,
life’s real meaning would have found him;
at forty he’d have got the gout,
drunk, eaten, yawned, grown weak and stout,
at length, midst children swarming round him,
midst crones with endless tears to shed,
and doctors, he’d have died in bed.

Pushkin: Eugene Onegin. Chapter Six, verse 39: translated by Charles Johnston, 1977 rev. 1979.

Tchaikovsky transforms Lensky’s poem into an outpouring of such sincerity that it transcends sentimentality by hinting at something rather more universal.

Not that Tchaikovsky’s muse plucks only at a single string in this opera. Rather, he is able to counterpoint the sincerity of young love’s anguish with something like Pushkin’s detachment in the opening scene, when Tatyana and Olga sing a mournful ballad of unrequited love offstage, while Madame Larin and the nurse, Filipyevna, mordantly reminisce of their youthful crushes, fuelled by the then-in vogue novels of Richardson and Grandison, soon effaced by the realities of their arranged marriages. Tatyana’s effusions in the letter scene are also carefully offset against the slightly more comical tale of Filipyevna’s courtship; and her urgency and impatience in getting Filipyevna to deliver the completed letter is beautifully contrasted with her nurse’s down to earth non-comprehension of events. It was this side of Tchaikovsky – down to earth and grounded – that so appealed to Stravinsky, rather than the hyper-heated emotional figure of cliché and legend.

The title character of the opera, the cold and worldly Onegin, who at age 18 is already in a state of terminal ennui, is not granted the great lyrical effusions of Tatyana and Lensky. Some commentators have seen this as a weakness, as if such a character were outside Tchaikovsky’s range. Yet surely the reticence and urbanity of the character has a source, and it is instructive to read a description of the composer himself by another composer, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, on meeting Tchaikovsky when he came to Cambridge in 1893 to be awarded an honorary degree:

‘…….Tchaikovsky reminded me, in more ways than one, of his countryman Turgenev, whom I once met at Madame Viardot’s (celebrated Parisian singer, composer and teacher) He had none of the Northern roughness, was as polished as a Frenchman in his manner, and had something of the Italian in his temperament… For all the belief which he had in himself, he was to all appearances the acme of modesty.’

Onegin, significantly, has no music of his own for the sudden onset of passion that grips him, when, years after his rejection of Tatyana, he encounters her again as a married sophisticate in the salons of St Petersburg. Instead, he appropriates Tatyana’s outburst of self-revelation from the letter scene (which of course he never heard); and in doing so, Tchaikovsky makes him appear slightly bogus, almost a figure of ridicule, but poignantly highlights the character’s inability to voice his own feelings. There is tragedy in being a hollow man.

Finally, Tchaikovsky translates Pushkin’s tantalizing final dissolve into 19th century operatic terms by refusing to manufacture a conventional operatic conclusion. This is in contrast to The Queen of Spades, where Pushkin’s novel has the lead characters live on and Tchaikovsky’s opera dispatches them in highly melodramatic fashion. Consider how Herman Klein, an English singing teacher who met Tchaikovsky at the Cambridge doctorate ceremony, explained away the reasons for Eugene Onegin’s failure in Britain in 1892: ‘Remember … in opera we like a definite denouement, not an ending where the hero goes out at one door and the heroine at another …’

She went – and Eugene, all emotion,
stood thunder-struck. In what wild round
of tempests, in what raging ocean
his heart was plunged! A sudden sound,
the clink of rowels, met his hearing;
Tatyana’s husband, now appearing…
But from the hero of my tale,
just at this crisis of his gale,
reader, we must be separating,
for long… for evermore. We’ve chased
him far enough through wild and waste.
Hurrah! let’s start congratulating
ourselves on our landfall. It’s true,
our vessel’s long been overdue.

Pushkin: Eugene Onegin. Chapter Eight verse 48: translated by Charles Johnston, 1977 rev.1979.

Julian Grant 2008

This article appeared in the 2008 GLYNDEBOURNE programme