Pyotr Tchaikovsky didn’t want his new piece to premiere at the opera house in Moscow. He thought staging it there, in the style of grand opera, would ruin it. He didn’t want the big sets, or the famous singers who sang too loudly and acted badly. So he insisted the premiere take place at the Moscow Conservatory, with a smaller budget, less prestige and students playing the leads. He even refused to call it an opera. Instead, he titled it “lyrical scenes”. Yet the work has become Tchaikovsky’s most celebrated musical drama – and a standard of the operatic repertory.
Eugene Onegin, based on Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, is a story about unrequited love. It’s about love that is poorly timed or never spoken. It’s about the longing that eats at you from the inside and the devastation that haunts you years later. It’s about the roles we are meant to play in life that don’t fit us. It’s about not knowing yourself, not even knowing your own feelings. Lastly, it’s about making mistakes and living with the consequences.
The story centres on four young characters living in the countryside: Eugene, who arrives after inheriting his rich uncle’s estate; his best friend, Vladimir Lensky, who admires Eugene to the point of hopeless jealousy; and two very different sisters, Tatyana and Olga Larina, who pursue love in opposite ways. Tatyana falls for Eugene at their first meeting. That night, she writes to him, expressing her feelings. Then, in an excruciating scene, Eugene tells her he just isn’t the marrying type. They meet years later at a party, where Eugene realises, too late, that he loves Tatyana after all.
We experience their inner lives through Tchaikovsky’s brilliantly psychological music, which brings us inside their thoughts in such a personal way that the music can feel almost invasive. The love story ends badly, but also – at least according to operatic standards – ambiguously. We don’t know exactly what happens to Eugene, Tatyana and Olga at the end. We imagine that they will somehow pick up the pieces and move on.
Tchaikovsky lived his public life in the closet, but his homosexuality was known to close friends, and he often confided in his younger brother Modest, who had more open same-sex relationships. Modest tried to talk Pyotr out of writing an opera based on Onegin. He thought the story was too intimate, the action too subtle for the opera stage. Pyotr agreed with his brother for a while, but then reread Pushkin’s novel and identified so strongly with the character of Tatyana, and with the letter she writes to Eugene declaring her intimate feelings, that he decided to adapt it.
Around the same time, Modest also tried to steer his brother away from a sham heterosexual marriage, which he was contemplating in an attempt to stop the rumours about his sexuality. Pyotr wrote back to his brother: “I am now going through a very critical period of my life … I have decided to get married. It is unavoidable. I must do it, not just for myself but for you, Modest, and all those I love. I think that for both of us our dispositions are the greatest and most insuperable obstacle to happiness, and we must fight our natures to the best of our ability.”
He went on: “Surely you realise how painful it is for me to know that people pity and forgive me, when in truth I am not guilty of anything. How appalling to think that those who love me are sometimes ashamed of me. In short, I seek marriage or some sort of public involvement with a woman so as to shut the mouths of assorted contemptible creatures whose opinions mean nothing to me, but who are in a position to cause distress to those near to me.”
Shortly after Tchaikovsky started writing the music for Onegin, he received love letters from a female student – and his life and the opera he was writing began to strangely mirror each other. He decided, rashly – and in a deliberate negation of Eugene’s response to Tatyana – to marry Antonina Milyukova, the woman who had written to him. Almost immediately, though, the marriage fell apart, and Tchaikovsky suffered a nervous breakdown.
The first time I fell in love, it was with another boy at my university. We crossed paths in the doorway at a friend’s party – he was walking in and I was walking out – and we shared a look. It was enough. We spent the next week ignoring everyone else’s messages. Fucking, cuddling, laughing, confiding our secrets, sharing our favourite albums and half sleeping. At the end of the week, we were forced back to our normal lives, but somehow what we had found together spilled out into the following weeks and then months.
It was complicated. He was complicated. Charming, but hard to read and hard to reach when we weren’t alone together. He was in the closet, except to a few friends, so we played an intricate game of “Who can see us together?” I started to see the fragility of it, the probability that it was impossible.
But when it ended, I experienced despair like never before. I stopped eating until my friend forced me to eat his meals with him. I started recording my thoughts in a diary. I hadn’t realised that I had a part of me that could hurt so badly. The act of writing it down helped. I also got a tattoo. The pain of the needle felt appropriate. I was marking this event, this thing that had happened to my body, on my body.
Two years passed. On New Year’s Eve, I ran into him at a party, in the kitchen. Part of me broke all over again. Eight years later, we found ourselves at another party. When we spoke I realised, to my astonishment, that I no longer had feelings for him. Those feelings had been buried, mercifully, by time.
A new production of Eugene Onegin opens this week at Covent Garden in London, which I’m directing. I see theatre as, primarily, an act of collective imagination. We each bring our own stories to this one story. It’s fascinating to me that each viewer experiences the same show differently – how crucial their own imaginations and experiences are to nourishing the ideas that text, music, movement and design can only suggest.
I had the tattoo removed, by the way. It no longer made sense on my body.
Eugene Onegin is at the Royal Ballet and Opera, London, 24 September to 14 October
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