There are operas that constitute the golden fund of humanity. Among them, "Eugene Onegin" is one of the first places.
We will take one of the greatest arias and listen to how it sounds performed by different singers.
The opera “Eugene Onegin” was written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in May 1877 (Moscow) - February 1878 in San Remo. The composer also worked on it in Kamenka. In May 1877, singer E. A. Lavrovskaya invited the composer to write an opera based on the plot of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.” Soon Tchaikovsky was carried away by this proposal and wrote the script and began writing the music overnight. In a letter to composer S.I. Taneyev, Tchaikovsky wrote: “I am looking for an intimate but powerful drama, based on a conflict of situations that I have experienced or seen, that can touch me to the quick.” The first production was on March 17 (29), 1879 on the stage of the Maly Theater by students of the Moscow Conservatory, conductor N. G. Rubinstein, Lensky’s part - M. E. Medvedev. Performance at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater on January 11 (23), 1881 (conductor E.-M. Beviniani).
In 1999, Basque sang in the restored performance Bolshoi Theater"Eugene Onegin" by Lensky. Here is what the newspapers wrote about this event: “It’s unlikely that anyone will deny that Lensky’s famous aria “Where, where have you gone” performed by Nikolai Baskov is the vocal pearl of the performance. He sits on stage alone - small and lonely. He doesn’t need neither gestures, nor facial expressions, nor stage competitions with more experienced partners. His voice and his reign here. lyrical soul. And no “Bravo!” clackers, no memories of the Jester’s lines from the “Royal Games” on TVC (“This is cool!”) will no longer overshadow our tender memories of the charming young tenor against the backdrop of the winter “Pushkin” Black River before the mortal duel at the Bolshoi Theater...” But there were and other statements. Baskov’s descent began with this role. First, listen to him, and then let’s figure out how Baskov turned out to be unnecessary on the opera stage in Russia?
How did the Basques come to live like this? In 1999, Spiegel was introduced to Baskov by G. Seleznev, Chairman of our State. Duma.
Baskov himself said that “...In fact, my career began thanks to him (Seleznev). Alexander Morozov, a composer, heard me in a military hospital and decided that his songs should be sung by a singer with a classical voice. We began to try something , and then I performed at the Theater Soviet army, where Gennady Seleznev and my future producer Boris Shpigel were. And then, at the request of Gennady Nikolaevich, Boris Isaakovich decided to take up my creative career."
Spiegel’s daughter, Svetlana, liked Basque, and in 2000 a SERIES of interesting reviews appeared on Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin” restored by B. Pokrovsky at the Bolshoi Theater.
In one of them, the Kommersant newspaper wrote, “The 1944 production was restored in the scenery of Peter Williams. Lemeshev and Kozlovsky became famous in this production in 1944. Today, the part of Lensky was sung by Bolshoi Theater intern Nikolai Baskov, better known as a box office pop singer.
The scenery was restored, but it was more difficult to restore the musical part to the same level. Although Nikolai Baskov is sitting in the same position and in the same suit that Lemeshev was sitting, that’s where the similarities end. The young singer has good vocal material and clear diction, but lacks school, which cannot be replaced by performances with a microphone. His colleagues sing no better and no worse; everyone lacks elementary precision, brightness, brilliance, and acting energy; the exception is the impeccable Hayk Martirosyan in the role of Gremin. Experienced conductor Mark Ermler conducts the opera very inconsistently: he either reduces the sonority of the orchestra to the limit, or muffles the singers; the pace of knitting, and the contrasts are too frank.
"Eugene Onegin", the first semi-premiere of the season, is entirely due to the merits of the previous management. Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who became artistic director of the theater in September, did not cross this production out of his plans for the season. This means that “Onegin” will go on, pleasing the eye and distressing the ear. Level opera troupe will soon be main problem new owners of the country's first stage."
The note was titled: “They repaired Onegin’s dress, but they couldn’t put in a voice.”
“I studied a little at the architectural institute, before that I took preparatory courses, that’s all...”
Graduated Russian Academy theatrical arts(GITIS), majoring in directing.
“I never had anything to do with opera. Neither me nor my parents. But it so happened by chance that at some conscious age, already in the early 1980s, I constantly went to opera performances. And, apparently, somehow this was deposited in me.”
The premiere of Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" staged by Chernyakov at the Bolshoi Theater in 2006 caused a big scandal. Singer Galina Vishnevskaya was outraged by this production and refused to celebrate her 80th birthday at the Bolshoi Theater, where she first sang in Onegin.
Using the example of Nikolai Baskov, we were convinced that
Today's opera world is often cruel and unfair. It is almost impossible to get into it, especially without influential patrons. Vocal skills alone are not enough here. You must have a good figure, a pleasant appearance, and at the same time have steel character And enormous power will.
And how well the Basques started with L. Kazarnovskaya in 2000 (Weber's Phantom of the Opera)!
The Basque sang Canio's aria superbly in the opera Pagliacci in 2008 in Greece. (We only perceive him as a clown in the show)
If Baskov has the willpower to resist vulgarity, then more than once he will sing in Vienna in my favorite hall, the Musikverein.
After Basque became the host of the TV show “Marriage Agency,” he NEVER escaped vulgarity. And he should NEVER sing in this great hall. How weak is man!
But he brought the most unconventional production of Eugene Onegin to Moscow to the stage of the Bolshoi Theater Latvian National Opera House. But that's okay. Latvians have always hated everything Russian, so they altered Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece in a modern way.
It’s disgusting to live when instead of culture... politics! - Our humorist M. Zadornov wrote in his blog. , speaking about this production of LNO.
The modern interpretation of Tchaikovsky's opera on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater is a proven move. The production of “Eugene Onegin” by Dmitry Chernyakov has sold out for the seventh year now. The Latvian version in Riga is no less popular; people come from all over the Baltics to see it. It is no less original: Evgeny goes to fashion presentations, Tatyana writes a blog. If in Chernyakov’s production the main character is the table, then Main image Latvian scenography - a huge transformable bed, which can be a table, a wooden platform, and a battlefield. It is here that the duel between Onegin and Lensky takes place. " A person spends a significant part of his life in bed, the director explained. - They conceive children there, give birth, sleep, have good and bad dreams, it is a place for joy, but at the same time for loneliness. And it is also a place of death. The bed in our Onegin is a symbolic image". says Andrejs Žagaris, director of LNO. An interesting personality, he was both a film actor and an entrepreneur, and now he has become the director of an opera performance.
It’s interesting that the Mikhailovsky Theater is now ruled by the “banana king” Kekhman. Theater, Universities, Nanotechnology, Medicine are now in the hands of managers. Where will they take our culture?
According to the director of the Latvian version Andrejs Žagars, in 50 years, the appearance on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater of Onegin with the latest model of telephone in his hands will be quite natural. This will mean that another page in the “encyclopedia of Russian life” has been turned. (How good it would be if Russian culture declined altogether - this is what Andreis meant) His “Eugene Onegin”, although he lives in the 21st century, is experiencing the same thing as in the 19th. “We are talking about the Tatyana and Onegin who live now. I think that in society there is such an image of Onegin, for whom parents created a material environment so that a person could study somewhere in London, Paris, America, did not realize himself there, and returned back,” explains the director.
As for the performing staff, they are absolutely wonderful in Riga's Onegin. In one of the first productions in the Riga theater, Tatyana was sung by the star from Azerbaijan Dinara Aliyeva.
You can listen to the entire opera performed by artists Latvian National Opera, and then we'll talk.
A very interesting line-up of performers was brought to Moscow from Riga. World-class star Christina Opolais, who has just made her successful debut at the Metropolitan Opera, will perform as Tatiana. The title role is played by the young Latvian singer Janis Apeinis. Lensky is sung by Czech tenor Pavel Cernoch, whose international career has become increasingly impressive in recent years. The role of Olga is played by the Polish singer Malgorzata Panko.
This performance was born on the stage of the New Riga Theater, it was staged by Alvis Hermanis, a director of a new kind, who declares: “Shakespeare is not an authority for me at all. He is interested in the manifestation of human nature only at the level of instincts. He does not rise above the three lower chakras. Revenge, envy, kill-love - everything is implicated in animal instincts. for his stories? If the boy’s mother got married, then why start killing his relatives in twenty minutes? Or “Othello”? It makes sense to do plays about him in the prison drama club. plays where characters strangle and kill each other when they have problems. Usually people don’t behave like that. I don’t understand the logic of their behavior. It’s completely foreign to me.” So why do they take and destroy the classics? What goals do these people pursue from culture? Alvis Hermanis's production of "Onegin" is neither a classic nor an innovative production of Pushkin's novel in verse, but ironic sketches that overthrow the great classic from his pedestal. Alexander Sergeevich appears as a sexually anxious primate with sideburns. But no one made an attempt on Pushkin’s poems - they are performed in the Latvian theater in Russian. All this is not harmless! Alvis Hermanis is a master of provocations. It works for the viewer who is disgusted by the mothball theater. Bold, ironic, often discouraging interpretations - this is how they work in this theater. Otherwise why would it be called new? It is clear that there can be no talk of an academic reading of the classics here. Harry Gailit, a theater critic from Latvia, writes in his review of Hermanis's play that it is a parody of Russians. Yeah, DON'T TOUCH RUSSIAN CULTURE, please.
On July 29th (premiere day) 2007, another festival misery was presented in Salzburg. It was Evgeny Onegin. Cast: Onegin - Peter Mattei Tatyana - Anna Samuil Lensky - Joseph Kaiser Olga - Ekaterina Gubanova Larina - Rene Morlock Filippevna - Emma Sarkisyan Gremin - Ferruccio Furlanetto Vensky philharmonic orchestra Conductor - Daniel Barenboim Director - Andrea Bret
Musically, the production looks good. Anna Samuil is very good in the role of Tatiana, Ekaterina Gubanova sounds convincing in the role of Olga. Onegin - Swedish baritone Peter Mattei - is perhaps the best foreigner today who dares to sing this part. The famous bass Ferruccio Furlanetto singing Gremin in the uniform of a Soviet general is quite colorful.
As for directing and scenography... Well, this is how they see us. The only thing missing is a bear drinking vodka from a samovar, but everything else is in abundance. It is believed that the action of the opera has been transferred to the 70s of the 20th century. See and judge for yourself
Well, a completely unconventional interpretation of the opera “Eugene Onegin” was proposed by the Polish director Krysztof Warlikowski, famous for his statement on modern theater : ." Art will be saved by homosexuals and Jews: they look at everything as if from the outside, this is very creatively fruitful. There is drama in this - not in a psychiatric sense, but in a purely theatrical sense.".
Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, having taken on the production of “Eugene Onegin,” either out of personal convictions or to attract attention, endowed Pushkin’s hero with an unconventional sexual orientation.
Now, for the German viewer, the “cherished monogram” OE should mean the initials of a Russian gay man who killed his lover in a duel.
It is precisely because of this annoying detail that Onegin and Tatiana do not have a good relationship at the Bavarian Opera. While the poor maiden mourns the unfulfilled dream of a melancholy homosexual, the hero of her novel is obviously not happy either, tormented by memories of his beloved man Lensky, who had to be killed in order, as the director told an NTV correspondent, to perform an “act of self-affirmation.” "It's like he's screaming: I'm not a homosexual!" - the Polish director explains to the Russian people the true meaning inherent in “Eugene Onegin”. I wonder if he wants to call himself the ideal reader for whom the great Russian poet wrote his novel in verse? And is this how Alexander Sergeevich imagined a fan of his work in the 21st century (if he imagined him at all)?
Apparently, fortunately, Pushkin could not even imagine the situation in which a love triangle would develop (!) almost two centuries after the book was written.
In addition to modern clothes and a TV on stage, which should create a relaxed atmosphere, the interior of the men's strip club at the Larins' ball also adds to the relaxed atmosphere. And all this - to the “gay” music of Tchaikovsky.
Well, why isn’t this a beautiful and correct interpretation of a work about the mysterious Russian soul?
But that's not all. The second act, according to unfortunate eyewitnesses, among other things, also includes a polonaise performed by cowboys, sending the viewer to the gay western "Brokeback Mountain". Obviously, according to Warlikowski, it is this masterpiece that should completely explain to the Germans the meaning of Eugene Onegin.
Krzysztof Warlikowski creates a world that has just tasted the fruits of the sexual revolution and is completely permeated by its currents (which is very much in harmony with Tchaikovsky’s sensual music). Tatyana, dreaming about Onegin, literally rolls on the floor, fiddling with her short nightgown. Explaining to Onegin in the garden, she hangs herself not metaphorically, but literally, on his neck, wrapping her legs around his torso. To entertain the guests gathered for Tatiana's name day, Larina Mama invites an ensemble of strippers. Their stripping act turns on the women (the mistress of the house stuffs the fee into the artists' underpants, patting them approvingly) and has a stimulating effect on Onegin.
Krzysztof Warlikowski in Eugene Onegin offers the love between Onegin and Lensky with a duel in a double bed and, in addition, Tatiana, a sex-crazed and marijuana-smoking woman (the last Munich premiere).
In the German play, Eugene (Michael Fole) rejects Tatiana's love not because he is satiated with female charms, but because he is attracted to men. He is openly jealous of Lensky for Olga, trying to upset his friend’s passion. And at the moment of a decisive explanation, Onegin presses a passionate and long kiss on Lensky’s lips. The duel takes place on a double bed. Outside the window, brave cowboys are having fun with an inflatable woman. The duelists take a long time to take off their jackets and shirts and sit on the bed. Lensky awkwardly reaches out to his friend. Shot. And Onegin looks for a long time with bewilderment at the body of his murdered friend, clutching his knee in a last tender embrace. Huge transparent windows are covered with blue velvet curtains. And around Onegin, cowboys with naked torsos dance to the sounds of a polonaise. Then they will tease the hero by staging an erotic fashion show in women's outfits - from evening dresses to swimsuits.
This is the scene of the "duel" of Onegin and Lensky.
Lensky became Onegin's lover before the opera began, and then for some reason he switched to Olga, whom he intends to marry. Onegin completely loses his head from jealousy and decides to take revenge by courting Olga. It is clear that in such a situation he does not care at all about Tatyana’s feelings. The duel, if you can call it that, takes place in the hotel room, right next to the bed.
Is it worth guessing for what reason Onegin rejected “the soul’s trusting confession, the outpouring of innocent love”? The local Evgeniy (Michael Follet) - red-haired, well-groomed, with sideburns - with a grimace of genuine disgust, pushes away Tatyana who jumped on him, and even accompanies this with sanctimonious teachings: “Learn to control yourself.” During a quarrel in the Larins' house, Onegin tries to reconcile with Lensky (Christoph Strehl) with the help of a hot, passionate kiss, and the duel between friends takes place on the double bed of a hotel room.
After Lensky's murder, Onegin changes his sexual orientation and falls in love with Tatyana.
And these are drunken cowboys immediately after the duel. They depict, in all likelihood, Onegin's conscience.
Shot. And Onegin looks for a long time with bewilderment at the body of his murdered friend, clutching his knee in a last tender embrace. Huge transparent windows are covered with blue velvet curtains. And around Onegin, cowboys with naked torsos dance to the sounds of a polonaise. Then they will tease the hero by staging an erotic fashion show in women's outfits - from evening dresses to swimsuits.
So we saw that among the “killers” of culture Chernyakov still does not occupy the highest position.
Musical theater today ceases to be musical - this is another, already obvious, serious disease. This is especially pronounced in critical articles, where conductors are now only mentioned and the quality of the production is determined, first of all, by the name of the director and the presence of spectacularly shocking stage action. The director does not come from music. Music sometimes just bothers him. It doesn’t matter to him who sings and how. And the public began to go to the directors, not to the performers. The director-manager became the head of the theater. And the opera house is turning from a repertoire theater into an enterprise theater. It is also significant that criticism welcomes a situation where stage and musical interpretations have no common ground at all and exist in parallel. The indifference shown today towards musical content and the culture of opera performance, prompted conductors to humility and retreat into the shadows.
We've been talking about tenors, but I think it's appropriate to end by showing you my favorite final scene from the opera "Eugene Onegin" performed by Dmitry Hvorostovsky and Renee Fleming at the Metropolitan Opera. No one can do it better.
Rene Fleming, Dmitry Hvorostovsky, Ramon Vargas in P.I. Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" Recording - Metropolitan Opera (2007). Performers: Chorus and Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera Theater. In the main roles: Onegin - Dmitry Hvorostovsky. Tatiana - Renee Fleming, Lensky - Ramon Vargas. Opening speech by Svyatoslav Belza.
And I fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s music thanks to the film “Eugene Onegin” in the late 50s. Then I listened to this opera in Odessa, in the famous opera house, where the unforgettable Lemeshev sang Lensky.
Today everyone is talking about the future opera house often boil down to the problem of attracting young audiences to opera. And here another disease of the modern opera theater is clearly visible, expressed in the persistent desire to please young people, and in any way. If we sum up all the trends in fashion and trade, in the entertainment industry, in television and radio broadcasting, it has long been obvious that everything today is aimed at people under 25 and much younger, as if everyone else had already died and did not need clothes, food and attention. The teenager’s “outfit” penetrated into intonation and vocabulary, plasticity and facial expressions. Communication has become as fast as a teenager’s: slang, special terminology, sms, chat - everything is devoid of “complexity” and “complex subordination”. And all this together is characterized by amazing snobbery, based only on the feeling of the priority of youth. Although until modern times, the basis for snobbery was considered, first of all, knowledge. Somehow it even became shameful and indecent to restrain one’s instincts and desires, to grow up and become wiser, to operate with knowledge and emotional experience. The range of themes and ideas has narrowed to an energetic and cheerful teenager, devoid of the vibration of chiaroscuro, the feeling of life. Against the backdrop of all kinds of industries, the theater also changed its orientation - meaningful (not to educate, but to entertain) and formal (in no case should you talk about anything complicated, long, or at length). The main thing is that it is attractive, entertaining, extravagant and recognizable, like the brands of famous companies. The stage form of a fashionable opera performance, including scenography, today resembles a message to the public in the style of not even an SMS, but a chat that does not require a response, and in form - a showcase of a fashion boutique. And even more often, the production becomes an occasion for a vivid self-presentation, aimed not at dialogue and a lively response from the public, but at the desire to become instantly recognizable, according to the laws of gloss. It's sad. I can’t help but remember Spengler’s Decline of Europe, where he says that When a new civilization is born, the old culture dies.:-(
Lensky’s aria “Where, where have you gone…” (“Wohin, wohin bist du entschwunden…”) from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin”. Performed by Fritz Wunderlich. 1962Fritz Wunderlich is one of the most remarkable singers of the post-war generation. His life was interrupted at the age of 35 due to an absurd accident: he tied his shoelaces poorly and tripped on the stairs. Despite his early death, Wunderlich’s discography and repertoire were very extensive: operas, operettas, sacred oratorios, performances in the chamber genre - his vocal mastery is universal. Here is perhaps the best recording of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin available on video: the 1962 Bavarian Opera production with Wunder Lich as Lensky. Conceived by Pushkin as a parody, Lensky's grapho-maniacal epitaph to himself in Tchaikovsky's opera becomes the tragic culmination of the entire opera. Tchaikovsky turns Pushkin's text upside down - deprives it of its signature irony and author's detachment. The absurd Lensky seriously turns into a lyrical hero, the main exponent in the opera of the leitmotif of the entire work of Pyotr Ilyich - the impossibility of personal happiness.
Pushkin is actively present in Eugene Onegin. In addition to all the heroes of the novel, there is the character “author”. Narrator. He gives assessments, names Onegin my good friend. makes fun of Lensky. Remember, on the night before the duel Lensky indulges in writing? Here's how Pushkin talks about it: " Takes a pen; his poems, / Full of love nonsense, / Sound and flow. / He reads them out loud, in lyrical fervor, /Like Delvig drunk at a feast. / Poems have been preserved for the occasion; /I have them; here they are:"The following is the text from Lensky. And again the narrator's assessment: " So he wrote darkly and languidly / (What we call romanticism, /Although there is no little romanticism here / I don’t see it; what's in it for us?) / And finally, before dawn, / Bowing his tired head, / On the fashionable word ideal / Quietly Lensky dozed off;"Then Lensky is woken up and he goes to shoot himself. Yes, for Pushkin a duel is a common thing, he himself shot himself many times. You can sleep.
Tchaikovsky reinterpreted Lensky's poems, raising them to new heights thanks to the music. He wrote the opera after the death of the novel's author. The murder of the poet Lensky in the opera is associated by the listener with the murder of the poet Pushkin. Narrator's ratings before ("nonsense") And after ("sluggishly") Lensky's poems are not in the libretto. Pushkin's irony over the romantic poet disappeared, and the verses became truly tragic. Yes, Lensky, from Pushkin’s point of view, is not the strongest poet, but Tchaikovsky’s brilliant music put so much feeling into the dying aria! The poems were included in the opera almost unchanged, only some words are repeated, instead of “And think: he loved me” in the repetition “Oh, Olga, I loved you!” (Lensky dreams how Olga will come to his grave). The fact that Lensky turns to poetic images like “pierced by an arrow” (knowing full well that there is a duel with pistols) only speaks of his excitement before death - and sublimity of spirit, if you like. So, Lensky's aria. In the opera, he sings right at the scene of the duel.
Lensky's words are Tchaikovsky's music.
(short introduction first)
Are the golden days of my spring?
(slow lyrical tune, in the style of a romance)
What does the coming day have in store for me?
My gaze catches him in vain,
He lurks in the deep darkness.
No need; rights of fate law.
Will I fall, pierced by an arrow,
Or she will fly by,
All good: vigil and sleep
The certain hour comes
Blessed is the day of worries,
Blessed is the coming of darkness!
(major melody despite "tombs")
The ray of the morning star will flash in the morning
And the bright day will begin to shine;
And I - perhaps I am a tomb
I'll go down into the mysterious canopy,
And the memory of the young poet
Slow Lethe will be swallowed up,
The world will forget me; but you, you, Olga.
Tell me, will you come, maiden of beauty,
Shed a tear over the early urn
And think: he loved me!
He dedicated it to me alone
Oh, Olga, I loved you!
Dedicated to you alone
The sad dawn of a stormy life!
Oh, Olga, I loved you!
(music intensifies, reaching climax)
Heart friend, desired friend.
Come, come! Welcome friend, come, I am your husband!
Come, I am your husband!
Come, come! I'm waiting for you, dear friend.
Come, come; I'm your husband!
(and again the hopeless first two lines)
Where, where, where have you gone,
My spring, my spring, golden days?
Penetrating performance by Lemeshev. Lyrical and tragic.
Nov. 5th, 2015 05:49 pm (UTC)
Takes a pen; his poems,
Full of love nonsense
They sound and flow. Reads them
He speaks out loud, in lyrical heat,
Like Delvig drunk at a feast.
Poems have been preserved for the occasion;
I have them; here they are:
"Where, where have you gone,
Are the golden days of my spring?
What does the coming day have in store for me?
My gaze catches him in vain,
He lurks in the deep darkness.
No need; rights of fate law.
Will I fall, pierced by an arrow,
Or she will fly by,
All good: vigil and sleep
The certain hour comes
Blessed is the day of worries,
Blessed is the coming of darkness!
"Tomorrow the ray of the morning star will shine
And the bright day will begin to shine;
And I - perhaps I am a tomb
I'll go down into the mysterious canopy,
And the memory of the young poet
Slow Lethe will be swallowed up,
The world will forget me; notes
Will you come, maiden of beauty,
Shed a tear over the early urn
And think: he loved me,
He dedicated it to me alone
The sad dawn of a stormy life.
Heart friend, desired friend,
Come, come: I am your husband. "
So he wrote darkly and languidly
(What we call romanticism,
Although there is not a little romanticism here
I don't see; what's in it for us?)
And finally, before dawn,
Bowing my weary head,
On the buzzword, ideal
Lensky quietly dozed off;
But only with sleepy charm
He forgot, he's already a neighbor
The office enters silently
And he wakes up Lensky with a call:
“It’s time to get up: it’s past seven.
Onegin is surely waiting for us."
(True, Onegin overslept - that’s why he was late, and Zaretsky was indignant: “Well, it seems your enemy didn’t show up?” Lensky melancholy replies: “He will show up now.” Zaretsky leaves, grumbling. Lensky sings an aria.)
He finally found the plot that Tchaikovsky had been looking for for so long in May 1877. The composer was sitting with his old friend, the famous artist-singer Lavrovskaya. The conversation was about opera librettos, and Tchaikovsky listened with longing to the most impossible plots that Lavrovskaya’s husband innocently proposed. Elizaveta Andreevna was silent and smiled only kindly, stuffily; then suddenly she said: “What about Eugene Onegin?” The idea of turning Pushkin's poetic novel into an opera seemed ridiculous to Tchaikovsky, and he did not answer. Then, while dining alone in a tavern, he suddenly remembered Onegin, became thoughtful and suddenly became agitated. Without going home, he rushed to look for a volume of Pushkin; Having found it, he hurried to his room and re-read it with delight; then he spent a sleepless night writing the script for this wonderful, as he was now finally convinced, opera.
In his mind, the key plot points were determined by themselves. lines of the novel, forming those seven paintings that could “give an idea of the turning points in the fate of the main characters: 1) Evening in the Larins’ house and Tatyana’s first meeting with Onegin, 2) Tatyana’s night conversation with the nanny and her letter to Onegin, 3) Onegin’s harsh rebuke in the garden, 4) Birthday ball at the Larins and a sudden quarrel between Lensky and Onegin, 5) The duel and death of Lensky, 6) A new meeting between Tatyana and Onegin in the St. Petersburg “big world”, 7) The last tragic date.
These scenes fit naturally into the music and provided a logical development of the romantic line.
The very next day, Tchaikovsky went to his friend Shilovsky and began to persuade him to immediately write a libretto based on this script. “You won’t believe how excited I am for this story. How glad I am to get rid of Ethiopian princesses, pharaohs, poisoning, all kinds of stilts! What an abyss of poetry in Onegin! I am not mistaken; I know that there will be little stage effects and Movement in this opera. But the general poetry, humanity, simplicity of the plot, combined with a brilliant text, will more than make up for these shortcomings,” he wrote to his brother.
These days, Tchaikovsky seemed to rediscover Pushkin. Everything that had hitherto delighted him in Pushkin’s poetry, everything that had influenced him through the works of Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, that came through the stories and memories of the Davydovs—all this was revealed in the images of the novel, illuminating new creative paths for the composer.
In this amazingly lively work, where the poet either very closely touches everyday life, then suddenly moves on to the most complex philosophical and psychological generalizations, Tchaikovsky found the key to the embodiment of modernity. Pushkin described the life and relationships of his heroes with almost homely ease, with that demanding directness with which they look at close, well-known people. But how far this look was from the usual everyday attitude towards the world around us! Having captured the features of his century, the poet was able to depict the fundamental properties of Russian society, was able to embody in his heroes the great beginning of the life of the people, to capture in their spiritual quest the development of the same powerful source that fed the noble images of the historical past. Tchaikovsky himself dreamed of this, and strived for this when he created his “Winter Dreams”, quartets, romances; The composer felt a similar ability to see, feel and generalize his surroundings in himself, but was not yet able to translate it into operatic images. Now, at last, the area of dramatic art that had been so necessary for him for many years had opened up for him.
Tchaikovsky's predecessors and contemporaries were inspired by Pushkin's tragic and fairy-tale works; Tchaikovsky’s thought was fertilized by the lyrical-philosophical and lyrical-everyday stream of the immortal “Onegin”.
Working on the opera put everything on hold for a while. Happy and difficult experiences dissolved in a feeling of enormous spiritual uplift, in a feeling of that completeness, that passionate concentration of feelings that usually accompanies inspiration. This state almost never left Tchaikovsky during those few months while Onegin was being created.
The composer had in his hands a completely unusual material for opera: for all its simplicity and artlessness, it was overwhelming with the richness of thoughts, feelings, shades, sometimes seemingly contradictory.
With the courage of a genius, Pushkin pushed the boundaries of the novel, arbitrarily combining lyrical, epic, philosophical and everyday sketches; unexpectedly shifting the author's point of view, he illuminated events from the inside, then from the outside - sometimes he seemed to move away from the plot in lyrical digressions, sometimes he brought his heroes closer to the reader, noting the subtlest shades in facial expressions, conversations, and states of mind. With these light touches, the poet gave such a living charm to his images, brought so much movement and life into the narrative that the music seemed to be born involuntarily while reading the novel.
But in reality, to create musical and dramatic images on this basis, to connect and unite speech intonations into generalized melodic structures, to give the free flow of chapters a new scenic unity - was a most difficult task.
“Just by reading Pushkin’s novel, the most attentive, sensitive, “sympathetic”, just by passion. Pushkin and the desire to convey musically his impressions of a literary work to the composer, it would have been impossible, without stylizing the era of the novel, but taking it with a generalized reincarnation in the conditions of Tchaikovsky’s modernity, to create such images of Tatyana and Lensky, even just them alone, with their intonation testing! — writes Asafiev, analyzing the opera.
And indeed, Tchaikovsky perceived and conveyed Pushkin’s novel not only as an enthusiastic reader, but also as an independent artist-thinker of the 70s. "He was able to embody in the opera his thoughts about the fate of a contemporary Russian woman and her struggle in life, to reveal her spiritual world, understanding of happiness, her ethical principles; he was able to find in Pushkin something “he himself experienced and felt” that he had yearned for in previous years years.
Reading “Onegin” through the eyes of a person of another era was already reflected in the fact that from the vast material that was equally actively “asking to be set to music,” the composer selected only the most basic, excluding much that was too closely connected with Pushkin’s time and environment, for example, the wonderful the girls' fortune telling scene or Tatiana's dream scene. Such episodes were a treasure for any opera composer, especially for Tchaikovsky, who managed to prove his ability to embody everyday and fantastic elements in “The Blacksmith Vakul.” But he avoided the temptation to transfer these scenes to opera; or perhaps it never occurred to him to dwell on them, and it did not occur precisely because he did not write illustrations for Pushkin’s novel, but created on its basis an independent dramatic narrative about Russian society.
Of the everyday pictures, only those that did not contradict the composer’s desire to bring the work closer to the present were included in the opera: situations, meetings, everyday relationships did not take the listener into the distant past; everything that happened on the opera stage could, in essence, have happened in the time of Tchaikovsky. Thus, the village ball in the Larins' estate, which Tchaikovsky transferred to the opera with all the characteristic features of life described in the novel, remained the same constant sign of landowner life in the 70s as, say, making jam; entered the opera and a brilliant ball in the St. Petersburg big world - its traditional features also remained unshakable for a long time. The scene of the Moscow debut
Tatiana, her meetings with countless aunts, Tchaikovsky, after some hesitation, rejected
True, at the insistence of the composer, when staging the performance, the features of Pushkin’s era were accurately reproduced in costumes and scenery. But the estate and capital architecture and even the costumes of the 20s at that time were perceived more as memories of childhood or youth than as signs of a bygone era; they were still in touch with the life of the 70s and, like Pushkin’s poems, imparted a special charm to the stage action.
So, Tchaikovsky wrote the opera, supplementing Pushkin’s imperishable images with his own thoughts and observations, own experience and knowledge of Russian life, embodying in art that significant thing that attracted and captivated him in modern people.
Just as Pushkin’s novel captured the character traits of his contemporaries, the traits of Russian girls and women whom the poet knew both in the days of their early youth and at the time of their mature heyday (images of the Raevsky sisters, neighbors in Trigorsky, Zinaida Volkonskaya), so in the opera The images of Tchaikovsky united ideas about persons who played a significant role in the life of the composer himself. The generalized appearance of the inhabitants of Kamensk, so akin to Pushkin’s Tatyana (memories of the youth of the elders of them, apparently, served as a living connection between the plans of the composer and the poet), the people whom the composer encountered during his social and artistic life, and finally, female types and the characters in the novels of his contemporary writers - Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov - all these impressions of real life and literature, layered one on top of the other, merged with the images of Pushkin and created, as it were, a new subtext that sounded in the long-familiar stanzas. This is how Tatyana arose a second time, Lensky and Onegin arose a second time - not only Pushkin, but also Tchaikovsky.
It is very difficult to renounce, even in small things, the original when dealing with such a work as Pushkin’s “Onegin”; but Tchaikovsky definitely had to do this in order to preserve on the opera stage the most imperishable and living thing in the novel - the feeling of the connection between art and modernity. Yes, he created a new Tatiana, although the young woman sings a duet in the style of the 20s and wears a costume from that era. And yet this is Tatiana of the 70s, without the superstitions and sweet “savagery” of Pushkin’s Tatiana, but with the same thirst for an active life and uplifting love. What was still an unconscious ideal for a girl of the 20s was revealed in all its strength to Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries, revealing the heroic determination of the Russian feminine character. Pushkin's brilliant insight, later picked up by Tolstoy, Nekrasov, and Turgenev, was embodied in Tchaikovsky's musical characterization.
In our theatrical and research practice, a mistake is often made: when analyzing and interpreting the opera “Eugene Onegin”, its images are literally compared with the images of the novel, forgetting that the music was written not by a contemporary of the poet, but by a person of the late 70s.
This returns the opera to what Tchaikovsky overcame with the boldness of his concept—it stylizes his work in the spirit of Pushkin’s era, not only in relation to costumes, everyday, architectural and pictorial aspects (which is both permissible and necessary), but also in the interpretation of thoughts, feelings and characters . Thus, the brilliant theme that characterizes Tatiana in the orchestral introduction is interpreted by most musicians as dreamy, sighing, romantic. But this interpretation, by its very essence, refers not to Tchaikovsky’s music at all, but to Pushkin’s description of Tatyana’s adolescence:
Dick, sad, silent,
Like a forest deer is timid,
She is in her own family
The girl seemed like a stranger.
She loved on the balcony
Warn the dawn,
When on a pale sky
The round dance of the stars disappears.
She liked novels early on,
They replaced everything for her;
She fell in love with deceptions
And Richardson and Russo.
True, Tchaikovsky, when writing the Scenario, himself wrote out lines in Pushkin’s volume that characterize Tatiana’s dreaminess and despondency. But this was only a consequence of the initial train of thought, the initial impulse, after which the artist’s plan turned in a different direction. Is it possible not to feel already in the first phrase of the introduction its hidden tension, effectiveness, as if the desire to break out of the vicious circle of sensations? Doesn't it reflect persistent work of thought rather than groundless dreams? And does not this spiritual anxiety find confirmation in the passionate frankness with which the same topic is presented in the further development of the introduction? Here one can rather talk about vital activity, will, than about timid girlish dreams, and the whole introduction carries with it a feeling of wary, impatient anticipation of a turning point.
This becomes especially clear when compared with musical material characterizing the patriarchal life of the Larins’ estate. An elegiac duet coming from the house, a peaceful conversation between a mother and a nanny busy making jam—after all, this is that gentle and inactive world that has long become too small for the spiritual needs of a Russian girl. It is no coincidence that in the first film Tatyana is almost silent. The few phrases that she utters in response to her mother and sister barely outline the stage outline of a young girl who does not yet know herself and her strengths.
But just as in the overture the orchestra spoke for her, so now the choir speaks: the drama and severity of a drawn-out folk song, flowing majestically in the distance (“My little feet hurt from work”), and the riotous joy of the dance that follows (“It’s so bridge bridge") disturb the serene peace of the quartet (“The habit has been given to us from above”); Peasant life with its work, grief and joy momentarily bursts into the fenced-off world of the Larins' estate, giving rise to an idea of a different scale of life, and thereby, as if anticipating the development of a further musical-psychological conflict. This is how Tchaikovsky summarizes Pushkin’s extensive characterization of the heroine: a description of Tatyana’s childhood, her adolescent dreams and unconscious feeling of a spiritual connection with the people;
the complex process of poetic revelation of character is reflected in the contrasting change of stage images - the restless fermentation of thoughts and feelings in the introduction, the patriarchal, seemingly unshakable life of the estate.
Everything the composer is into! This act brought Pushkin into the plan, only emphasizes the significance of the central image. The fate of the Russian woman, thoughts about the possibility of her free development spiritual qualities were unusually close to Tchaikovsky’s heart; he was attracted and excited by the combination of an inquisitive mind, a childlike faith in goodness and fearlessness in the face of life's trials, which he may have observed in the characters of his contemporaries. He sought to express all this in that “capital” scene with which he began writing the opera—in the scene of Tatyana’s letter.
When the third chapter of Onegin was first published by Pushkin, the heroine's letter caused excitement and controversy; Tatyana not only loved, she thought, and she confided everything that had accumulated in her soul over many years of spiritual loneliness to her chosen one. This gave the love message that depth, nobility and simplicity, that stamp of greatness of soul that captivated Pushkin’s contemporaries.
Now, in the 70s, the secondary “birth” of this scene in the opera again amazed the listener: Tchaikovsky’s music embodied the text of the letter with such purity, with such flexible intonation and rhythm, as if the melodies were born simultaneously with the text; at the same time, their active, rapid drawing reflected some new properties that changed the usual idea of \u200b\u200bthe image of Pushkin's Tatyana.
Tchaikovsky's music was not only noble in its sincerity, enlightened, poetic and sublime, it was active, dramatic, even powerful. The episodes, contrasting in mood, embodied a sharp change in thoughts, mobile and changeable, presented with ever-increasing emotional force. It was a stream of melodies, now restless, now as if intoxicated with determination, now full of trusting affection and solemn severity.
The freely developing recitatives connected Tatiana’s initial passionate recognition to herself (“Let me perish.”), her solemn, firm confidence in the significance of her feelings (“Another, there is no one in the world.”) and a trusting, enlightened appeal to her loved one (“You appeared to me in dreams."), creating a feeling of a single, continuously unfolding musical structure; and Tatiana’s sublime thoughts and stormy confusion were resolved in the finale of her monologue, stunning in its drama; the modest plea of Pushkin’s Tatyana—“Imagine, I’m here alone.”—here acquired the features of heroic exaltation, and the love confession in the mouth of the opera heroine sounded not only as a call to happiness, but as a call to a new life; Tchaikovsky emphasized this even more strongly at the very end of the scene, combining the final presentation of the love theme in the orchestra with the solemn image of the coming morning. In describing love and love confessions, opera has long possessed a rich arsenal of expressive means; Numerous shades of passion, tenderness, ecstasy, rapture, languor, delight, and torment were available to her. But never before has an opera stage revealed with such realism the spiritualizing, uplifting process that occurs in the human soul under the influence of love. Even in comparison with Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” with Gorislava’s inspired elegy and Ratmir’s aria intoxicated with passion, even in comparison with Natasha’s scene of despair in “Rusalka,” the scene of the letter was unheard of new.
It can be argued that in all operatic literature before Onegin we will not encounter such an interpretation of a love confession. Before Tchaikovsky, a lyrical solo scene of such a volume would have seemed unthinkable, especially since the composer abandoned any external animation of the action, and concentrated all the power of his talent on conveying the state of mind of a girl who fell in love for the first time. But, just like Mussorgsky in “Boris”, like Dargomyzhsky in “Rusalka”, like Rimsky-Korsakov in his fairy-tale operas, in “Mozart and Salieri”, Tchaikovsky, following Pushkin’s text, managed not only to embody the experiences of the character, but also only convey the mood of the scene, but reveal the ethical meaning of what is happening.
In this interpretation, unusual for the opera house, one cannot help but see a reflection of Tchaikovsky’s contemporary concepts and views: dreams of love and thoughts of activity, of active public life, about inner freedom and maturity were almost inseparable for girls of the 70s. And Tchaikovsky put a lot of this ideological passion, from a conscious desire to change his life, into the appearance of his heroine.
Perhaps one can understand the bewilderment that the new opera caused among adherents of the “inviolability” of Pushkin’s poetry, and those attacks on the composer’s “unceremonious” treatment of Pushkin’s text, which were so often heard in the pages of the critical press. The novel was already perceived by many as a “museum value” and Tchaikovsky’s attempt to capture the continuously developing beginning of life in opera could seem blasphemous.
However, if you carefully re-read the novel, you can establish that Tchaikovsky did not at all arbitrarily endow Pushkin’s image with the features of a new time, did not mechanically subordinate the poet’s plan to the needs of his era, but found a very subtle, but at the same time strong, connection between Pushkin’s time and his own directly in the very text of the work.
From the richest characteristics of Pushkin, he chose those significant features that turned out to be the most vital and gave the strongest shoots into the future, and somewhat weakened the features that limited the image of Tatyana as a phenomenon of the 20s. Thus, in his musical characterization he barely touched on the naive ability to indulge in illusions and, say, infatuation, typical of the appearance of a girl of Pushkin’s era. French novels. The other side of Pushkin’s characterization turned out to be decisive for him, not so concretely everyday, but unexpectedly strongly illuminating the inner world of the heroine. We are talking about those lines where Pushkin seeks to protect his inexperienced heroine from attacks:
Why is Tatyana more guilty?
Because in sweet simplicity
She knows no deception
And believes in his chosen dream?
Because he loves without art,
Obedient to the attraction of feelings,
Why is she so trusting?
What is gifted from heaven
With a rebellious imagination,
Alive in mind and will,
And wayward head,
And with a fiery and tender heart?
It is these last lines, this wayward head and rebellious imagination, that is, originality and independence of character, ardor of thoughts and feelings, living mind and will, that gave Tchaikovsky the main incentive for the musical interpretation of the image.
In this new lighting, the dramatic features in the heroine’s appearance appeared more clearly, the psychological colors thickened; Maybe that’s why Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s opera seems somewhat older than Pushkin’s. Her love is expressed more purposefully than the love of Pushkin’s heroine, her goals and ideas about life seem more definite, her actions themselves more conscious. This is not a girl, but a girl in all the prime of her spiritual powers.
This should not be taken as a loss of poetic spontaneity, so captivating in Pushkin’s heroine.
In Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana, the features of a different era, even a different social environment appeared: her consciousness was already awakened, and much of what Pushkin’s “mute” (Belinsky’s expression) Tatyana understood with blind instinct and only later explained to herself, having read books in Onegin’s library, was revealed to Tatyana Tchaikovsky from the first steps. This is clearly reflected in the interpretation of her attitude towards Onegin - not only in the scene of the letter, but also in that tragic moment for her, when Tatyana, choking with excitement, awaits Onegin’s verdict. In the novel, a confused, frightened girl ran into the garden and threw herself on the bench; She waits in vain, “for the trembling of her heart to subside, so that the glowing cheeks pass away.”
That's how the poor moth shines
And beats with a rainbow wing,
Captivated by the school naughty boy;
This is how a bunny trembles in winter.
Suddenly seeing from afar
Into the bushes of a fallen shooter.
This almost childish fear is replaced in the opera by a courageous “premonition of suffering.” In Tatyana’s wonderful adagio “Oh, why, with the groaning of the sick soul.”, following her impetuous appearance and the first, excited exclamation: “Oh, here he is, here Evgeny!” - pain, and reflection, and the determination to accept fate, no matter how cruel it may be. It would seem difficult to find a point of contact here with Pushkin’s interpretation, but the hint of the possibility of such an interpretation lies precisely in Pushkin’s words: “but finally she sighed and got up from her bench.” - they give rise to the idea of an internal turning point, that childhood fear of the unknown has been replaced by spiritual concentration.
In all further development of the image, Tchaikovsky follows the same principle: where the characteristics of Tatyana do not completely coincide with the appearance of a contemporary girl, he looks for the shades he needs in the subtext of Pushkin’s novel. Where Pushkin's text makes it possible to reveal the image in its entirety precisely in the direction in which the composer's dramatic sense developed it, Tchaikovsky greedily uses everything and molds his musical characterization almost literally according to Pushkin's plan.
This is how Tatiana’s intimate conversation with her nanny arose - a scene where the heroine’s modest appearance enters into a complex combination with the tension of her inner world and where the measured, simple-minded speech of the old woman, as if containing the comfort and warmth of the surrounding life, is intruded by the dramatic theme of awakening love.
This is how the waltz, charming in its restraint, arose, accompanying Tatiana’s appearance at a high-society ball: the very comparison of this new episode with the previous dance music, the contrast of the strength of sonority, orchestral colors, and rhythmic pattern, as if with one’s own eyes, depicts the scene described by Pushkin:
But the crowd hesitated
A whisper ran through the hall.
The lady was approaching the hostess,
Behind her is an important general.
She was in no hurry
Not cold, not talkative.
Everything was quiet, it was just there.
The relaxed, socially friendly melody of the waltz is so strikingly different from Tatyana’s previous impetuous musical characteristics that in itself it can give the listener an idea of the profound change that has occurred with the heroine. Tatyana’s meeting with Onegin is also embodied in the same laconic, deliberately restrained tones. Tchaikovsky here, obediently following the poet, emphasizes with the subtlest psychological touches the contrast between the old Tanya and the new, secular Tatiana:
The princess looks at him.
And whatever troubled her soul,
No matter how strong she was
Surprised, amazed,
But nothing changed her:
It retained the same tone
Her bow was just as quiet.
She asked,
How long has he been here, where is he from?
And isn’t it from their side?
Then she turned to her husband
Tired look; slipped out.
And he remained motionless.
The composer did not dare to change this scene, sculptural in its expressiveness, or to strengthen it, or even expand it, introducing a more extensive, more traditionally operatic depiction of the meeting. With the exception of one excited phrase from Tatiana that he added, Tchaikovsky reverently transferred the wariness and sad aloofness of the intonations of Pushkin’s text into the musical fabric.
In combination with this amazing accuracy of transmission, it may seem strange that the courage with which Tchaikovsky in the same picture decided to radically change the characterization of the new character - Tatyana's husband: Gremin, confessing to Onegin his love for his wife, speaking about her with a feeling of respect and admiration and boundless devotion, could not be the person whom Tatyana married involuntarily, only because for her “all the lots were equal.” Tchaikovsky’s Gremin, who was able to understand and appreciate Tatiana’s spiritual world, could not be”
!only a titled nonentity - a general who, following his wife, “raised everyone’s nose and shoulders higher.” The very motive of Tatiana's marriage in Tchaikovsky's interpretation takes on special meaning, different from Pushkin’s novel. Not passive submission to fate, but a consciously made decision could justify her choice and make Tatyana’s family life, if not happy, then meaningful. This circumstance plays an important role in the composer’s plan. Having strengthened and emphasized in the image of Tatyana those features that brought her closer to her contemporaries, Tchaikovsky, apparently, could not stop at the conclusion that Pushkin proposed: over 50 years, the demands of the Russian woman have grown, her view of the essence of family relationships has become more mature, and the role of her in public life and, without developing Pushkin’s concept, the composer could not have imparted to the image of his heroine the emotional completeness that the final scenes of the novel possessed in the perspective of the 20s. Not only the resigned fulfillment of duty, but also the consciousness of the inner justification of existence should have helped the new Tatyana to remain confident, calm and dignified in the secular environment she despised, should have helped her cope with herself at that moment when her girlish passion for Onegin flared up with the same force .
This new solution to the plot line was suggested to the composer not by Pushkin, but rather by romantic collisions in the works of Goncharov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, (“Cliff”, “New”, “Rudin”, “War and Peace”), where the reader in the final chapters becomes a witness a sharp but natural turn in the personal fate of the heroic. This ending was explained by the artists’ desire to contrast poetic dreams, impulses and quests with real life relationships and real tasks.
Borrowing this opposition characteristic of his era, Tchaikovsky at the same time did not commit violence towards the 20s.
Russian society of Pushkin's era knew people who were open, honest, and persistent, whose names were spoken with respect by their descendants. Such were the courageous participants in the Patriotic War, those “maimed in battle” heroes of 1812, who returned to peaceful life, armed with maturity and independence of views. The best of them openly expressed their hatred of the reactionary way of court life. Such were Nikolai Nikolaevich Raevsky and Vasily Davydov, loved by Pushkin, such were Orlov and Volkonsky, the husbands of Raevsky’s daughters.
This is how Tchaikovsky could see his Gremin. It is no coincidence that the composer put into his mouth accusatory lines from the end of the sixth chapter (these lines existed in the first edition of Onegin; later they were excluded by the author).
And you, young inspiration,
Excite my imagination
Revive the slumber of the heart,
Come to my corner more often,
Don't let the poet's soul cool down,
Harden, become hardened
And finally turn to stone
In the deadening ecstasy of light.
Among the soulless proud,
Among the brilliant fools
Among the crafty, the cowardly,
Crazy, spoiled Children,
Villains and funny and boring,
Stupid, affectionate judges,
Among the pious coquettes.
Among the voluntary slaves
Among the everyday fashion scenes,
Courteous, affectionate betrayals,
Among the cold sentences,
Cruel-hearted vanity,
Among the annoying emptiness.
Calculations, thoughts and conversations,
In this pool where I am with you
I'm swimming, dear friends.
Tchaikovsky, apparently, was attracted by the contrast of the poet’s heartfelt appeal to “young inspiration” and the angry, precise enumeration of the ugly sides of social life; this contrast formed the basis of Gremin’s aria: Tatyana in it is likened to inspiration (“She shines like a star in the darkness of the night in the clear sky, and she always appears to me in the radiance of a radiant angel”), and the enthusiastic description of her spiritual purity contrasts with the angry and contemptuous denunciation of secular mob.
Captivating with the noble smoothness of the melodic line, calmness and breadth of sound, Gremin’s monologue, characterizing the appearance of the prince, at the same time creates an atmosphere of significance surrounding Tatiana.
Dramatic role this aria in the performance is extremely important: it provides that preliminary psychological preparation, that “tuning”, without which Onegin’s unexpected love would seem unnatural in the opera; the complex analysis of a suddenly awakened feeling, developed by Pushkin over several stanzas, could hardly fit into the structure of a short dramatic scene, and, without Gremin’s aria, its motivation would inevitably have been reduced to the simplest - the fact that Onegin, seeing Tatiana as the queen of great society, felt a jealous and greedy desire to once again take possession of her soul.
In the seventh scene, the melodic material of this aria again plays a decisive role in outlining Tatiana’s appearance: in the large orchestral introduction that precedes her monologue, the same theme steadily sounds, clearly revealing a deep relationship with the initial theme of Gremin’s aria - the theme of his love (“Love is all ages are submissive"). True, here it appears in a minor key, and the slightly changed ending, which steadily returns the melody to its original sound, gives it a painfully sad tone. It also lacks the breadth of the Gremin melody, its free, open flow - it is compressed, closed in a narrow space, and the reverse melodic progression only strengthens this impression of constraint; the measured accompaniment, which gives Gremin’s aria so much confidence and dignity, here emphasizes the monotony of the construction. And yet we recognize the theme of Gremin's love, although it sounds here as a sad but persistent thought.
When Tatyana, as if involuntarily, utters her first words: “Oh, how hard it is for me!”, it seems that we have already followed her through a long and painful circle of thoughts: here is both the consciousness of her responsibility and the thought of the impossibility of overstepping the feelings of a loved one a person in pursuit of selfish happiness, and pain for the one to whom she pronounces her sentence.
Tchaikovsky found the theme of these reflections in the monologue of Pushkin’s heroine, in the words that Tatyana addresses to Onegin on their last date: “How can you be a slave to petty feelings with your heart and mind.”
Pushkin’s realistic method in this scene was expressed in the fact that instead of abstract reasoning about duty and honor, he showed how naturally these concepts are refracted in the soul and thoughts of a Russian woman, how stable is her sense of responsibility to the person with whom her destiny is connected, how deeply the consciousness of the inviolability of the family took root. Already in those distant days, when Tatyana Larina naively revealed her hidden thoughts in a letter to Onegin, she seemed to have foreseen her fate:
Souls of inexperienced excitement
Having come to terms with time (who knows?),
I would find a friend after my heart,
If I had a faithful wife,
And a virtuous mother.
Tchaikovsky’s interpretation did not change, but only brought it closer and made Pushkin’s farewell words, brilliant in their simplicity, more visible to his contemporaries: “... but I was given to another; I will be faithful to him forever.”
Thus, even Tchaikovsky’s most deviations from the literary prototype invariably arose as a result of creative “getting used to” Pushkin’s text.
The same can be said about other heroes of Pushkin’s novel and, first of all, about Lensky, this double of the image of Tatyana. Pushkin's characterization of the young poet, an idealistic dreamer who accidentally died in a duel, required the greatest artistic tact when transferring it to the stage. Any sensitive detail, any exaggeration could make Lensky's role overly pathetic, sentimental or purely idealistic. Any “lightening” of Pushkin’s image could only complement the circle of impetuous and exalted young men who, starting with Mozart’s Cherubino, established themselves in lyric opera.
But Tchaikovsky’s enormous dramatic talent, his ability to sculpt an image clearly and concisely, while preserving the richest number of shades, helped him cope with this most difficult psychological task.
Love for Pushkin, the ability to penetrate the secrets of his thinking, language and style, the ability to find the leading principle in countless contradictory, fleetingly thrown details saved the composer from wrong steps and made him feel Pushkin’s true attitude towards his hero, often hidden behind irony.
It seems that the poet examines Lensky somewhat from afar, simultaneously admiring the romantic ardor of young feelings and, at the same time, ironically rejecting it. Such duality of depiction in opera was unthinkable; it was necessary to choose one point of view, but at the same time preserve the vitality of the details that arose in the complex coverage of Pushkin.
What was decisive for Tchaikovsky here, too, were not the external everyday signs of a romantic - “always enthusiastic speech and shoulder-length black curls,” but extreme gullibility, the spontaneity of Lensky’s youthful appearance:
He was a dear ignoramus at heart;
He was cherished by hope,
And there's a new shine and noise
Still captivated the young mind.
The purpose of our life is for him
Was a tempting mystery;
He puzzled over her
And he suspected miracles.
The thirst for love and goodness, the openness of all emotional movements became the basis of the dramatic interpretation of the role and were revealed with all their might already in the first love explanation with Olga. Not only the emotional structure, but also the rapid rhythm of Pushkin’s verse - the continuous stringing of lines, of which only the last makes one feel the conclusion of the thought - were transferred by Tchaikovsky to Lensky’s arioso, giving the melody a special spontaneity and lyrical elation:
Oh, he loved like in our summer
They no longer love; as one
The Mad Soul of the Poet
Also, love is condemned:
Always, everywhere one dream,
One common desire
One familiar sadness.
Nor the cooling distance,
“No long summers of separation,
This watch is not for the muses.
Nor foreign beauties.
No noise of fun, no science
Our souls have not changed,
Warmed by virgin fire.
Lensky appears in only three scenes in the opera, together creating a short story about a tense and tragic life. His role is laconic, but the unsurpassed melody of this part seems to combine the most important features with which Pushkin characterized the spiritual structure of his hero:
Always high feelings
Gusts of a virgin dream
And the beauty of important simplicity.
It is this combination - the charm of important simplicity with dreaminess and exaltation - that gives the music that characterizes Lensky such extraordinary captivation. It would be worthwhile to intensify the affectation a little, to make Lensky’s melody a little more “adult” and sensual (the scene with Olga in the first act), as the youthful confession would lose that extraordinary purity and trustfulness that illuminate the entire scene in the Larins’ estate with their light. / It would be worth it make Lensky’s intonation a little more courageous or pathetic in his explanation with Onegin at the ball, smooth out the boyish passionate nature of his accusations, as the stunning realism of the image would disappear. The artlessness of all intonations, the utmost realism of the interpretation would replace that light, affectionate irony. which Pushkin accompanies everything that concerns Lensky in the novel.
It should be noted that when creating the image of Lensky, Tchaikovsky faced a particularly difficult task - the need to dramatize not only the text, but also the storyline. In developing the relationship between Tatiana and Onegin, he almost entirely used Pushkin’s dramatized scenes—those where the action is resolved in dialogues or laconic descriptions of the characters’ condition. However, in Lensky’s characterization there were no such dialogues and monologues; except for the duel scene, all other vicissitudes of the relationship between Lensky and Olga, Lensky and Onegin are presented in a narrative manner. Tchaikovsky had to find dramatic elements in these narrative lines and concentrate the scattered details in several scenes placed side by side.
One can only be amazed at Tchaikovsky’s brilliant intuition, which allowed him to modify the structure of Pushkin’s chapters in the script, while preserving both the psychological motivations and those smallest details of behavior that make the images of the novel so vivid. So, for example, the description of the quarrel between Lensky and Onegin and their behavior before the duel in the novel occupies part of the fifth and the entire sixth chapter: the challenge to a duel occurs after the ball, Lensky still has time to see and reconcile with Olga before the duel; Pushkin describes in detail the hours spent by both friends before the fatal collision. The laws of the opera stage required that the conflict between friends be resolved right there, during the ball. Tchaikovsky had to piece together the disconnected details and descriptions of the characters’ thoughts and feelings.
Tchaikovsky included most of the sixth chapter (the one that describes the day following the name day and the challenge given to Onegin by Zaretsky) in the scene of Larin’s ball. He contrasted Lensky's excited state, his furious need to wash away the insult with blood, to Onegin's embarrassment and dissatisfaction with himself; he painstakingly collected everything that could psychologically justify jealousy and quarrel.
…. nimbly.
Onegin went with Olga;
Leads her, gliding carelessly,
And leaning over, he whispers to her tenderly
Some vulgar madrigal
And he shakes hands and bursts into flames
In her proud face
The blush is brighter. My Lensky
I saw everything: he flushed, he was not himself;
In jealous indignation
The poet is waiting for the end of the mazurka
And he calls her to the cotillion.
But she can't. It is forbidden? But what?
Yes, Olga already gave her word to Onegin.
Oh my god!
What does he hear?
She could.
Is it possible?
This description of Lensky’s jealous suspicions resulted in a direct conversation with Olga in the opera: “Oh, Olga, how cruel you are to me!”
The rapid change of thoughts, bewilderment, almost fear of the ease with which his friend and fiancée mocked his feelings are simply and excitedly conveyed in the music. In terms of speech, expressive and, at the same time, unusually melodic recitative phrases constitute one of the most attractive aspects of the vocal style of “Onegin”. These sorrowful phrases are woven into the design of a rapid and self-confident mazurka, and this further emphasizes the feeling of confusion and loneliness that gripped Lensky. It seems that the cheerful and indifferent stream of life rushes past him, pushing him out of its midst. Everything that Lensky sees around him - a motley, dancing crowd, Olga’s mother and sister, who, as it seems to him, do not notice the danger - everything seems hostile to him:
He thinks: “I will be her savior.
I will not tolerate the corrupter
Fire and sighs and praises
He tempted the young heart;
So that the despicable, poisonous worm
Sharpened the lily stalk;
To the two-morning flower
Withered still half-open.”
All this meant, friends:
I'm shooting with a friend.
In the sixth chapter of Pushkin’s novel, Lensky can’t think about anything else except a duel:
He was still afraid that the prankster
Didn't laugh it off somehow.
And the operatic Lensky in the fourth scene repeats his attempt to expose Onegin several times, becoming more and more persistent; he is supported by indignation, he feels like the only defender of Olga’s honor.
This fear, this passionate impatience with which Lensky strives to immediately cut the knot that has tied, is conveyed with extreme drama in the music - from the first remarks, still imbued with bitterness, to more and more indignation and, finally, to the gasping phrase - “You are a dishonest seducer ", after which there can be no return to the previous relationship.
Tchaikovsky contrasted Lensky's open, offensive line with Onegin's defensive position. Both Onegin’s behavior and his vocal text are based on those Pushkin lines that describe Onegin’s state of mind after Zaretsky gave him a challenge to a duel in the morning:
Eugene
Alone with your soul
He was unhappy with himself.
And rightly so: in strict analysis
Having summoned himself to a secret trial,
He blamed himself for many things:
First of all, he was wrong
What is above timid, tender love?
So the evening joked casually.
And secondly: let the poet
Fooling around; at eighteen
It's forgivable.
Evgeniy, loving the young man with all his heart,
Had to prove myself
Not a ball of prejudice,
Not an ardent boy, a fighter,
But a husband with honor and intelligence.
In the same morning reflections of Onegin after a quarrel, a new motivation for the duel comes into force - public opinion; It was this motivation that Tchaikovsky dramatized by making the quarrel public. The chorus, which intervenes in the opera in the relationship of both friends, is the reason for the sharp change in Onegin’s mood: at first he tries to restrain Lensky’s anger, to cool his excitement, but as soon as the quarrel is made public, as soon as he discovers around him the fussy and malicious interest of the people whom he despises , the usual pride and pride take over - Onegin feels nothing but embitterment. Thus, the chorus performs in the opera the function that in Pushkin’s novel is assigned to Onegin’s reflections on Zaretsky:
Besides - he thinks - in this matter
The old duelist intervened;
He is angry, he is a gossip, he is loud.
Of course: there must be contempt
At the cost of his funny words.
But the whispers, the laughter of fools.
And here is public opinion!
Spring of honor, our idol!
And this is what the world revolves on!
At the end of the scene, Tchaikovsky focused all the listeners' attention on Lensky's grief. The reason for the emergence of Lensky’s final arioso turned out to be Pushkin’s lines dedicated to Olga’s betrayal:
Coquette, flighty child!
She knows the trick,
I've learned to change!
Lensky is unable to bear the blow.
By embodying them on the opera stage, Tchaikovsky could continue the dialogue between Lensky and Olga, give Lensky a series of indignant short recitative phrases; but he needed to revive in the listener’s mind the feeling of his hero’s unblemished spiritual integrity and straightforwardness in love. And just as in the scene of Tatiana’s waiting in the garden, the composer, instead of a confused and excited state, “paints something deeper - he reveals the generalized meaning of Pushkin’s words in the arioso melody “In your house”, amazing in its depth of sound; resurrecting happy times minutes of Lensky's life, it seems to radiate light on his short-lived and ardent novel. The dramatic grain of this arioso (its text was composed by Tchaikovsky) is the bitterness of disappointment, the first clash of the untouched poetic soul with the vulgarity of the surrounding life. This is the culmination of the entire scene of the quarrel: gradually towards Lensky's voice. the voices of those present join in; among them, Tatiana’s melodic theme attracts attention with its suffering passion. The sound of these two voices - Lensky and Tatiana - stands out among the other parts of the ensemble in the breadth and completeness of the melodic line and unites them in a common experience - the collapse of hopes for happiness.
One of the peaks of the opera was the duel scene, created by Tchaikovsky as a summary of a number of the most significant episodes of the novel. Its script included everything that characterizes Lensky’s condition in Pushkin’s novel and his attitude towards Olga after the quarrel - his sleepless night, his poetry and, almost completely, a description of the duel itself. The enormous psychological material covered by Tchaikovsky is contained here in laconic and effective dramatic forms. The composer found support in the contrasting comparison of the tragic and everyday plans, so clearly evident in Pushkin’s novel: on the one hand, the high, elevated structure of Lensky’s spiritual world and the author’s philosophical coverage of his death, on the other hand, fidelity to the realistic details of the letter - a picture of a duel, in the smallest detail reproduced by Pushkin.
In this picture, Tchaikovsky showed the Lensky Soviet Union in a different aspect than before. Before us is no longer a young man - ardent, trusting, somewhat reckless in actions and thoughts - but a mature, formed character. It seems that his features, not yet fully defined in the first picture, here acquired complete completeness. This unexpected and, at the same time, such a natural flowering of personality is embodied in Lensky’s dying aria.
How did this aria, perfect in feeling and thought, come about, what prompted the composer to dramatize Lensky’s characterization, to give it in a new way? What did he rely on in his search for new means of expression that could convey his idea to the listener? We will find the answer to all this in Pushkin’s text, but we should remember that the composer’s stage concept was still an independent generalization of poetic material.
The sharp line that we feel in the opera between the duel scene and the previous scenes is a reflection of the well-known internal turning point outlined in Pushkin’s lines dedicated to Lensky’s state of mind after the quarrel. The morning meeting with Olga seemed to bring calm:
Jealousy and annoyance disappeared
Before this clarity of sight,
Before this tender simplicity,
Before this playful soul!
He looks in sweet tenderness;
He sees: he is still loved.
But it is precisely at this moment that Pushkin introduces the psychological motivation for the duel as a defense against any attacks on the purity of love: what was expressed by Lensky in a state of anger and indignation at the moment of the quarrel now confronts him as a life duty, as a principle, which he cannot change. An even deeper feeling of a serious spiritual turn could be caused by the description of the sleepless night spent by the young poet on the eve of the duel. Lensky's inspired elegy here is equivalent to Tatyana's letter; its meaning is not exhausted either by a love confession, or by mourning youthful dreams, or by the desire to look beyond the line of death - its dramatic essence is different, and it is precisely this that is embodied by Tchaikovsky in the aria: the composer revealed in it the process of internal growth of the individual, his self-affirmation, and philosophical awareness of life.
There seems to have never been any debate about the meaning and content of this elegiac aria by Lensky (“Where, where have you gone”): based on the ironic description dropped by Pushkin: “So he wrote darkly and sluggishly,” people are used to looking at it as some kind of conventional farewell to the golden dreams of youth. Hence its melody is most often characterized as hopeless, sad, and fatal. This interpretation often creates a need for stage performers to emphasize the gloomy colors dictated by the stage situation and the menacing music of the introduction. Hence the thick bluish twilight, the barely visible figure of Lensky sitting on a stone, the wide falling folds of clothing, the pale face - all this should inspire the listener with the idea of an inevitable tragic outcome. In fact, Tchaikovsky’s interpretation at the moment contradicts this concept, and the composer imagined Lensky’s aria not as an affirmation of death, but as an affirmation of life.
What is the relationship between Lensky’s aria and the text created by Pushkin?—In the novel we will again encounter that dual dimension that Pushkin so often applies in relation to his heroes, and to Lensky in particular. In this case, it concerns the genre of elegy itself: Pushkin twice touches on the issue of elegy in connection with Lensky’s writing and each time, ironically attacking this genre, still pays tribute to it with touching tenderness. In his younger years, elegy was unusually close to him, and the elegiac poems written in Kamenka show how important this genre was for the development of his lyrical talent. Pushkin is not mocking when he likens Lensky to the “inspired” Yazykov:
It’s not madrigals Lensky writes in Olga’s young album; His pen breathes with love, Does not coldly shine with sharpness; Whatever he notices or hears about Olga, he writes about it. And full of living truth, elegies flow like a river. So you, inspired by Tongues, in the impulses of your heart, sing, God knows who, and a precious set of elegies will one day present to you the whole story of your fate.
He appreciated in elegy its ability to convey sincere, inspired “outbursts of the heart”; he appreciated in its creators the ineradicable need to entrust others with their own pain, joys and sorrows. He extremely enriched the content and form of the elegy, endowing it with specific plot features.
The desire for sociability and friendly interest made elegy the favorite material for the romance lyrics of Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, Varlamov and Gurnlev. By the time of Tchaikovsky, elegy, as an independent genre, had almost ceased to exist, but the elegiac mood, as a special intimate tone of an interview with a loved one, both in poetic lyrics and in music, was preserved for a long time, constituting one of the most charming features of Russian art. Tchaikovsky, who gave the genre of elegy in romances a completely different psychological direction (“Not a word, oh my friend,” “Dusk has fallen to the ground,” etc.), in Onegin for the first time after Glinka and Dargomyzhsky showed it both in its “pure” form and in dramatized. The first duet of Tatiana and Olga is a genuine elegy of the early 19th century, conveying the charm of Pushkin’s era and imposing a thoughtful and soft flavor on everything that follows. In the duel scene, this is a dramatic confession of the heart, a subjective statement that reveals to the viewer the sources of Lensky’s spiritual growth. The text of this elegy in itself is a complete work, and perhaps it is precisely, realizing its utmost artistic persuasiveness, that Pushkin provides a light ironic frame as a contrast:
his poems.
Full of love nonsense, They sound and flow. He reads them aloud, in lyrical fervor, like D[elvig] drunk at a feast.
These lines precede the elegy, and Pushkin concludes it with the following words:
So he wrote darkly and languidly [What we call romanticism.]
An ironic ending in the description of Lensky’s inspired state:
And finally before dawn. Bowing his tired head, on the fashionable word ideal, Lensky quietly dozed off. —
a somewhat arrogant grin, the words “dark”, “languid”, the fashionable word “ideal”, “love nonsense” - all this seems to show the poet’s careless attitude towards the path he has long abandoned. But after reading more carefully, feeling the music of Pushkin’s verse, one can hear an inner melody that reveals something completely different: poems that “sound and flow,” the poetic memory of Delvig, always dear to Pushkin, the lyrical fervor with which Lensky reads his poems, - all this gives a different emotional coloring to Pushkin’s lines, a tense, dramatic coloring, which in its entirety contradicts the statement about the love nonsense and lethargy of his poems. It was this melody that Tchaikovsky heard and actually embodied in Lensky’s aria.
Thoughts about the significance of life and love, rejection of death - this is what sounds in the elegene, which Lensky improvises in the opera in a moment of tense anticipation. Even Zaretsky’s everyday messages are unable to disturb this state of solemn concentration.
The aria is, as it were, a continuation of a whole string of Lensky’s thoughts, a conclusion from them. That’s why the question “Where, where did you go?” sounds so natural. - and so the theme simply arises - “What does the coming day have in store for me”; starting with a high, gradually fading sound, it slowly descends. (It is precisely this theme that is usually interpreted as the theme of doom. This seems to us erroneous - the calm, even enlightened character of the initial sounds, the softness of the falling movement does not correspond to this; in combination with a certain rapidity of development, this does not at all give the melody a mournful character).
The feeling of life is contained in the orchestral part preceding the aria, where the theme of the awakening morning is clearly outlined, and in the active change of thoughts, and in the excited melody that appears on the words “The ray of the morning star will flash in the morning,” and in the temperamental, passionate final theme “Dear Friend, welcome friend, come, I am your husband.” (the last presentation of this topic sounds almost triumphant). The dynamism of the aria, its enormous energy, fusing various melodic formations into a single stream and reaching its greatest strength in the final part, make Lensky’s elegy in the composer’s interpretation a statement of the optimistic beginning of life and represent a sharp contrast to the gloomy sound of the trombones in the orchestral introduction of the scene. The aria also contrasts with that ordinary plan; in KOTOPJM replicas of Zaretsky and Onegin are given, apologizing for being late; This contrast emphasizes the meaninglessness of Lensky’s death.
The duet following the aria further increases the tension: the pianissimo and slow movement of both voices, canonically following each other, the unexpected unification of enemies with one thought, one mood - all this attracts attention to the drama of what is happening on stage, makes us anxiously await the fatal outcome. The quiet but irrevocable refusal of both to reconcile marks the last final part of the scene.
Here, where Pushkin depicts direct dramatic action, Tchaikovsky completely follows him. Here he “at times, indeed, is an illustrator - an inspired, but literal interpreter of Pushkin’s dramaturgy.
“Now get together.”
Cold-bloodedly, not yet aiming, the two enemies walked with a firm, quiet, even four steps, four mortal steps. Then Evgeniy, without ceasing to advance, began to quietly raise his pistol. Here are five more steps taken, and Lensky, squinting his left eye. He also began to aim, but Onegin just fired. The appointed clock struck: the poet silently drops his pistol.
“The Four Mortal Steps”, firmly traversed by both, the terrible moment when Onegin begins to raise the pistol, fragmentary thoughts about love, confused and plaintively flashing through Lensky’s brain, a feeling of extreme tension - all this is recreated with such realism in Tchaikovsky’s orchestral music that the sound of the shot perceived with almost physical acuteness. For the last time, with all the orchestral power, now in protest, the melody of Lensky’s inspired elegy sounds, merging with the “funeral frame” of the march.
What feelings did the composer put into the music of the final bars, what did he want to convey to the listeners in his short afterword to the death of the poet? - His attention could also be attracted by those Pushkin lines where the feeling of immobility and devastation is figuratively conveyed:
The shutters are closed, the windows are chalked
Whitewashed. There is no owner.
And where, God knows. There was no trace.
and others where the poet protests against the destruction of life.
.Where is the hot excitement, Where is the noble aspiration of both the feelings and thoughts of the young. Tall, gentle, daring? Where are the stormy desires of love, And the thirst for knowledge and work, And the fear of vice and shame, And those cherished dreams. You, ghost of unearthly life. You, you saint of poetry!
The dynamics of the scene created by the composer, the power of life seething in his hero - all this convinces us that Tchaikovsky was inspired by those words where there is a protest against the rights of death, where the feeling of life wins.
Saying goodbye to Lensky, Pushkin spoke about two paths along which the young man’s life could unfold: he could become a poet and show the strength of his soul, mind and talent; but, perhaps, a different fate awaited him and, having survived the time of youthful dreams and impulses, he would have become accustomed to everyday life and lost the purity and brightness of his feelings. Tchaikovsky does not leave us this choice. Young Lensky, who in the first scenes had not yet lost the innocence of his adolescence, at the last moment, before his death, is given his full stature, |the full strength of his extraordinary spiritual and poetic [properties. Thus, Tchaikovsky decisively diverted his hero from the path on which his brilliant literary prototype could presumably have ended up.
Onegin remains the most controversial and “mysterious” in Tchaikovsky’s interpretation. This image, the only one in the opera, is still not fully revealed on stage (as opposed to the images of Lensky and Tatyana, which immediately found the correct interpretation). We do not know a single Onegin who would go down in the history of stage incarnation as Lensky and Sobinov did. Perhaps this is why Onegin’s part has long been characterized as the least expressive of all opera parts; Even such a deep connoisseur of Tchaikovsky’s dramaturgy as Asafiev mainly notes only shades of politeness, coldness, and irony in yen. Indeed, it is extremely difficult not only to perform, but even to describe this role and to analyze the musical material of Onegin’s part. Tchaikovsky managed to solve a very difficult problem here - he embodied on the opera stage a young, charming, intelligent man, full of strength and at the same time mentally devastated. And he embodied it in such a way that the listener believes in Tatiana’s love for Onegin - not because he has long been accustomed to believing it in Pushkin’s novel, but as a result of those sometimes inexplicable musical impressions that impart an organic quality to the very comparison of the characters of Tatiana and Onegin. If the opera hero were really only the cold, sophisticated, careless and courteous person that performers often portray him as, Tatiana’s love would seem false to the viewer and would not evoke sympathy. This is especially important to note in relation not to Pushkin’s Tatiana, but to the Tatiana of Tchaikovsky’s opera, more mature and more purposeful in her dreams.
What was Tchaikovsky's dramatic method in this case? Onegin’s spiritual emptiness is shown in the novel not at all by denying everything attractively human in him - no, we are faced here rather with the inferiority of attractive human traits; Onegin loves Lensky, understands him, even protects his soul from too cruel contradictions, but does not love him so much that this feeling is higher than his pride. Onegin is capable of pure emotional movements: having appeared at the Larins, he immediately feels the difference between inner world both sisters, clearly prefers Tatyana and finds a way to the soul of this withdrawn girl. Tatyana touches him, awakens a feeling in him, but this awakening is not strong enough to bring about a turn in his egoistic worldview, and the girl’s ardent love causes fear in him and, as a result, resistance. It is this deep Pushkin method that Tchaikovsky implemented in the musical embodiment of Onegin. Even in the lightest sketches of his appearance, the composer makes the listener feel the originality of his hero. We find Onegin, just like Lensky, at the moment of a certain mental shift - the moment of meeting Tatyana. It is barely outlined by the composer: the cursory and seemingly insignificant conversation between Onegin and Tatyana is overshadowed by the brightness of Lensky’s confession. And yet, in this almost watercolor-clean drawing, the conversations of people still distant from each other are clearly felt, Onegin’s affectionate interest and Tatyana’s sudden frankness. Further, in the scene in the garden, when Onegin reads a rebuke to Tatyana with enviable self-control, he least of all seems insensitive. His speech is not only noble - it has honesty and courage; behind the deliberate restraint there is a reluctance to betray one’s own, perhaps already overcome, confusion; but the fact that this confusion was experienced by Onegin is clearly revealed in the unexpected passionate rise of the melody in the words: “There is no return to dreams and years.” It would seem that Onegin’s main stage task is the desire to honestly say to Tatyana: “Feelings are ket.” But Tchaikovsky’s music contradicts this - there is a feeling, but the feeling instantly flares up and just as instantly goes out; rather, sympathy for her love, that is, a reflected feeling.
Did Tchaikovsky have the right to understand Pushkin’s plan in this way? Yes, he had, and there is a lot of evidence of this in the novel, more! than could be contained opera libretto. We will not touch upon those chapters where Pushkin gives a preliminary characterization of his hero, describing the path that he passed in his soulful development. Let's move straight to the moment when the hero enters the opera stage: behind us are the years spent on stormy delusions, unbridled passions and the “eternal murmur of the soul.” Onegin is one of those people who “no longer have charms”; love, which was once “labor, torment, and joy” for him, now does not captivate or excite him. Living in the village, he indifferently accepts its blessings and sorrows, and only Lensky serves as the connection between him and the rest of the world. In this half-empty state, not knowing where and how to apply his strength, Onegin meets with Tatyana. Her letter could not have been unexpected for him: in communication he was not at all the cold-blooded, lazy egoist that he felt himself to be; Pushkin devoted many lines to the excitement that he experienced when meeting people and, in particular, women.
Onegin could have foreseen that the proven charm of his mind, the ability not to seem, but to actually be attentive.
gentle, domineering or obedient will turn out to be fatal for Tatyana. But for him, the meeting with this spontaneous, ardent girl did not pass without a trace.
. having received Tanya's message,
Onegin was deeply touched:
The language of girlish dreams
I was outraged by a swarm of thoughts;
And he remembered dear Tatyana
Both pale in color and dull in appearance;
And into a sweet, sinless dream
He was immersed in his soul.
Perhaps the feelings of ancient ardor
He took possession of it for a minute;
But he didn't want to deceive
The gullibility of an innocent soul.
The dramatic grain that Tchaikovsky was always looking for, embodying the culminating moments in the state of his hero, is laid precisely here, in the description of the internal struggle that Onegin experienced, in the temptation of the feelings that arose for a minute. Pride, honesty, and innate nobility did not allow him to deceive Tatyana’s gullibility by not responding to her love with the same completeness. But he did not find, could not find in his devastated soul enough strength to suddenly open a new source of life. Traces of this internal struggle and embodied in the music of Onegin's aria. If we take this circumstance into account, not only the scene of explanation will be revealed more fully and dramatically, but also the further development of the relationship between Onegin and Tatyana. Pushkin continuously, albeit easily, “pedalizes” this theme of love, barely emerging in Onegin’s soul: it fleetingly appears even in the scene of the Larin’s ball, where the embittered Evgeniy takes revenge on Lensky for all the inconvenience of his appearance at the Larins’. His unexpected arrival and meeting with Tanya seems to re-tie the thread of a broken relationship:
Her embarrassment and fatigue gave birth to pity in his soul: He silently bowed to her, But somehow the gaze of his eyes was wonderfully tender. Is it because he was really touched? Or he, flirting, played naughty, either involuntarily, or out of good will,
But this gaze expressed tenderness: He revived Tanya’s heart.
Tchaikovsky did not take advantage of this detail of the relationship - the scene was too dynamic and noisy for it - but, imagining his sensitivity to Pushkin’s text, to any turn of thought, to any highlight thrown by the poet, we can assume that it entered as a subtext into his characterization hero and that the sprouts of feeling, which barely arose in Onegin’s heart and almost immediately died out, in Tchaikovsky’s concept retained life until that last scene, when a new meeting in completely different conditions suddenly revived them and made them bloom wildly.
Pushkin, exposing his hero, at the same time defends him in the eyes of the reader; he tries to be objective, not to belittle the real merits of Onegin, and, contrasting his militant mediocrity secular society, each time emphasizes the originality of his spiritual properties. Tchaikovsky also defended him. The music that characterizes Onegin in the final scenes is distinguished by such sincere power of passion, such purity and integrity of feeling and the striving of all desires towards a single goal, which involuntarily evokes reciprocal sympathy from the listeners; we forgive Onegin and his past cruelty towards Tatyana and the death of Lensky. j It is not a jealous thirst for possession of what is now inaccessible to him that draws him to Tatyana, but a passionate desire to preserve the fullness of the feeling of life that he experienced when he fell in love with her; she is the Goal of all his aspirations and dreams, she contains the hope of salvation. Overwhelmed by love, seeing no one and nothing, he throws himself at her feet with one desire, one hope - to be saved, to protect his feeling, his life from the horror of fruitless destruction. The memory of her former love and the sprouts of his own feelings, which he once mercilessly suppressed, give him the right to her, and Onegin defends this right with all the sincerity of an ill and desperate man. The listener cannot help but be captivated by the undulating, rapid movement of his melody - ardent, excited, even powerful in its passion; it leaves no room for doubt about his sincerity;
it seems that his only fear is not having time to express everything he wants, not being able to convince. Like Herman in the scene with Liza, he almost hypnotizes Tatyana with this rapid "manifestation of feeling, awakening a reciprocal passion in her soul. Tchaikovsky did not know how and did not like to portray only sensual passion; love in his view has always been a huge spiritualizing force. It is precisely against this that he cannot Tatyana resists when she confesses to Onegin that she never stopped loving him. But this is the only moment of her weakness: loving, she understands the futility of his hopes, the groundlessness of his love. The strength of new family ties, spiritual experience, and a conscious ethical beginning in life give Tatyana. support in the fight against newly flared passion. The tragic words of separation, her “Farewell forever” break the last connection between Tatiana and Onegin.
Having resolved the problem of embodying these three most complex characters, Tchaikovsky, basically, solved the problem of everything dramatic plan operas. Episodic faces - the nanny, the mother, Olga - stood before him from the pages of Pushkin's novel with such clear clarity that he almost did not have to contrast his own concept.
The greatest difficulties in turning Onegin into a dramatic work, and even more so into an opera libretto, should have been caused by crowd scenes, which in a narrative manner have a completely different purpose than in a dramatic one. But Pushkin’s novel provided the composer with enormous opportunities - entire scenes seemed designed for dramatic re-creation. Accuracy of descriptions, a lot of details characterizing and; the structure of life and the relationships of individuals, the unusually dynamic presentation of events, the ability in the general course of development of the storyline to highlight characteristic episodes, sometimes incidental, but nevertheless extremely colorful - all this excited the composer’s stage imagination and suggested to him the most organic path to dramatization of the work. The very Pushkin poems, the arrangement of phrases, the dynamics of the verbal text created a certain rhythmic and coloristic atmosphere and could help the composer find a number of scenically prominent musical touches.
This is how the wonderful scene of the Larinsky ball arose. The waltz, which seems to us the embodiment of naive fun, the waltz, with its bouncing, somewhat fussy melody, simplicity and sincere joy, could not have been born without Pushkin’s description of the festive bustle:
In the morning Larina's house is full of guests
All full; whole families
The neighbors gathered in carts,
In wagons, chaises and sleighs.
There is a hustle and bustle in the hall; there is anxiety;
Meeting new faces in the living room,
Barking mosek, smacking girls,
Noise, laughter, crush at the threshold,
Bows, shuffling guests,
The nurses cry and the children cry.
With the same stage brightness, Pushkin depicts the appearance of a company commander with a military orchestra, and the conversations of groups of guests, so vividly conveyed by Tchaikovsky in the choral parts—
Satisfied with the festive dinner, the Neighbor sniffles in front of his neighbor; The ladies sat down by the fireplace; The girls whisper in the corner;
Tchaikovsky received a completely finished scene in the stanzas of the fifth chapter, describing Triquet’s arrival and his performance in front of Tatyana:
Triquet,
Turning to her with a sheet in hand,
Sang out of tune. Splashes, clicks
He is welcomed. She
The singer is forced to sit down; —
in these lines, it seems, both the cutesy phrases of Triquet’s couplets and the cries of “bravo, bravo” that the admiring young ladies shower upon him in Tchaikovsky’s opera sound.
The rhythmic structure of the poems could not but influence the colorfulness of the dance episodes introduced by Tchaikovsky. It is worth comparing at least Pushkin’s description of the waltz and mazurka in the Larinsky ball scene in order to imagine what purely musical impulses, not to mention stage ones, arose in Tchaikovsky in connection with the text.
Suddenly, from behind the door in the long hall, a bassoon and flute were heard. Delighted by the music of thunder, Leaving a cup of tea with rum, Paris of the district towns. Approaches Olga Petushkov, Tatyana Lensky; Kharlikov, a bride of overripe years. My Tambov poet takes it. Buyanov rushed off to Pustyakova And everyone poured into the hall, And the ball glitters in all its glory.
This ironic, angular and cheerful “introduction” is followed by the very description of the waltz, characterized by its extraordinary smoothness and coherence of sound:
Monotonous and crazy, Like a young whirlwind of life, A noisy whirlwind of a waltz whirls; Couple flashes after couple.
And after that - a description of the mazurka with a sharp division of phrases in the middle of the line, with free transfer of accents, with a thunderous clap of the letter r, with dashing rhythm and choice of words:
The Mazurka sounded. It happened
When the mazurka thunder roared,
Everything in the huge hall was shaking.
The parquet cracked under the heel,
The frames shook and rattled;
Now it’s not the same: we, like ladies,
We slide on the varnished boards.
But in cities, in villages,
I also saved the mazurka
Initial beauties:
Jumps, heels, mustache
All the same.
Remembering Tchaikovsky’s music, the deafening run-up of his mazurka, against the backdrop of which Lensky and Onegin subsequently quarrel, its overt temperament, the laconic but infectious melody, one can understand that this melody was born in the closest connection with Pushkin’s text.
Obviously, the polonaise also arose in the scene of the St. Petersburg ball - in close connection with the visual and auditory picture of a high society reception, reproduced by Pushkin. In one of the lyrical deviations, in the eighth chapter, the poet brings his muse from the wild steppes of Moldavia to the prim world of the St. Petersburg high society:
Through the close row of aristocrats,
Military dandies, diplomats
And she glides over proud ladies;
She sat down quietly and looked.
Admiring the noisy crowded space,
Flashing dresses and speeches.
The phenomenon of slow guests
Before the young mistress,
And a dark frame of men.
I'll give it around, like around paintings.
She likes the harmonious order of oligarchic conversations, And the coldness of calm pride, And this mixture of ranks and years.
Let us finally note one more feature of the opera, organically connected with the creative reading of the novel - the feeling of nature, which found a very original and subtle embodiment in Tchaikovsky’s music: it is felt in everything - in the evening softness of the duet of Tatyana and Olga, in Lensky’s cozy remark - “I love I am this garden, secluded and shady,” in the feeling of the depth of this garden, arising thanks to the choral song of the girls, sounding sometimes close, sometimes in the distance, in the wonderful freshness of an early summer morning - in the scene of Tatyana’s letter, and, finally, in another morning - a winter one , gloomy, stern - in the duel scene.
There is no need to talk about detailed pictures of nature here—the epic stanzas of the novel remained outside the dramaturgy of the opera. Tchaikovsky did not expand the pictorial possibilities of the opera orchestra as widely as he could have done, following Pushkin’s landscapes: the modest construction of his lyrical scenes and the subtle modeling of characters would not have been reconciled with such self-sufficient picturesqueness. The composer found the only correct solution - he conveyed the feeling of nature in direct connection with psychological state their heroes.
The more you listen to the score of Onegin, the more amazing the depth of revelation of the novel’s ideas and images in it seems. Sometimes it is almost impossible to separate the intentions of the composer and the poet - the thoughts and feelings of great artists are so completely, so organically united; in the music of Onegin you feel not only the heroes of the novel, but also their creator himself. It seems that Pushkin's voice, his poetic thinking are reflected in the high lyrical atmosphere of the opera, in those subtle changes in the musical structure that seem to perform the function of lyrical deviations in the novel. It is impossible to prove at what point such musical “deviations” come into force, but I would like to draw attention to one of them: any unprejudiced listener will feel a compaction and, at the same time, some simplification of the musical fabric in the last two scenes of the opera. Each of the episodes in these paintings has laconicism, completeness, and clarity, which are usually inherent in mature, stable phenomena in art and life. The final paintings stand in the same relation to everything previous as the waltz that accompanies Tatiana's appearance at a high-society ball, in relation to the theme that characterized the heroine in the introduction.
This change in the general emotional structure means the onset of a new time in the consciousness of the heroes—the time of human maturity, and it is difficult to escape the thought that this technique, perhaps unconsciously, arose in Tchaikovsky in connection with that optimistic farewell to youth with which Pushkin completed the turning point sixth chapter of his novel:
So, my noon has come, and I need
I have to admit it, I see.
But so be it: let’s say goodbye together,
Oh my easy youth!
Thank you for the pleasures
For sadness, for sweet torment,
For the noise, for the storms, for the feasts.
For everything, for all your gifts;
Thank you. by you,
Among anxiety and in silence,
I enjoyed it. and completely;
Enough! With a clear soul
I am now setting out on a new path.
“The main thing is not words, but intonation.
Words grow old and are forgotten,
but the human soul never forgets sounds.”
From an interview with film director A. Sokurov.
“...All the immortals in heaven!..”
M.I. Glinka. Bayan's second song from the opera "Ruslan and Lyudmila"
performed by S. Ya. Lemeshev
“There are such works of art...about which one can write literary books, stimulated by their most intellectually human content, bypassing analysis, bypassing everything formal...” (Asafiev B.V. “Eugene Onegin.” Lyrical scenes by P.I. Tchaikovsky” // B. Asafiev. About Tchaikovsky’s music. “Music”, L., 1972, p. Boris Vladimirovich Asafiev, to whom these words belong, called the opera “Eugene Onegin” the “seven leaf” of the Russian musical theater, bearing in mind the naturalness of the growth of each of the seven lyrical scenes: the absence of any aesthetic pose - “truthful, simple, fresh.” There are no more in the repertoire of the Russian opera stage popular work. It would seem that it is known to the last note. One has only to say: “What does the coming day have in store for me?...” or “I love you...”, “Let me perish,” as those same sounds of music, “heartily” familiar from childhood, immediately begin to sound in one’s memory. Meanwhile, “... the music of “Eugene Onegin” evokes a lot in the mind and inspires us to think about a lot, and this perspective of its impact is one of the significant incentives for its viability,” Academician Asafiev concludes his research (Ibid., p. 156).
...From a letter from P.I. Tchaikovsky to his brother Modest dated May 18, 1877 about the script for “Eugene Onegin”: “Here is the script for you in brief: Act 1. Scene 1. When the curtain opens, the old woman Larina and her nanny remember the old days and make jam. Duet of old women. Singing can be heard from the house. This is Tatyana and Olga, to the accompaniment of a harp, singing a duet to a text by Zhukovsky” (Tchaikovsky P.I. Complete collection essays. T.VI. M., 1961, p. 135). Two details are noteworthy that do not correspond to the final version of the opera: 1) the order of the musical characteristics of the characters (the duet of old women - the duet of Tatiana and Olga); 2) the author of the text in the duet of the Larin sisters is Zhukovsky. As you know, the painting subsequently began with a duet of sisters based on Pushkin’s text. Judging by the composer’s correspondence, in less than a month “the entire first act in three scenes is already ready” (Ibid., p. 142). Consequently, changes were made to the script at the very beginning of work. What role did these seemingly insignificant amendments play in the formation of opera as an organic whole? Let's try to answer this question.
In the final edition of Onegin, Pushkin’s poem “The Singer” was used as the text of the duet, or rather its two stanzas - the first and last:
Have you heard the voice of the night behind the grove?
When the fields were silent in the morning,
The pipes sound sad and simple
Have you heard?
Did you sigh, listening to the quiet voice
Singer of love, singer of your sorrow?
When you saw a young man in the forests,
Meeting the gaze of his extinct eyes,
Did you sigh?
It was written in 1816 by a seventeen-year-old poet and is a typical example of an elegy from the early period of creativity. The question of the similarity of the style and language of Pushkin’s early poems, in particular “The Singer,” to Zhukovsky’s poetry is sufficiently covered in literary criticism (See, for example: Grigoryan K.N. Pushkin’s Elegy: National Origins, Predecessors, Evolution. L., 1990, p. 104: “Pushkin, following Zhukovsky, continues to develop the line of the so-called “sad” elegy... In the next two or three years, the sad-dreamy motives of Pushkin’s elegies become more and more similar in mood, in language, in the nature of the landscape. : “Since the magical dark night...” (“The Dreamer”, 1815), “The dreams of days gone by” (“Elegy”, 1817) The poem “Singer” (1816) seems to close the first elegiac cycle of Pushkin, in the depths of which an image is born. “singer of love, singer of his sorrow”). It seemed that in this case, replacing Zhukovsky’s opera with Pushkin in the libretto could not introduce anything fundamentally new? Tchaikovsky, pointing out in the original script - “a duet on Zhukovsky’s text” - gave the necessary outline of the image - sensitive, sentimental (In a letter to N.G. Rubinstein, he called this romance a “sentimental duet”. See: P.I. Tchaikovsky. Complete collection works. T.6, M., 1961, p.206). Probably, this could be something close to the duet from the second painting of “The Queen of Spades” (“Evening”), which, as you know, was written specifically based on Zhukovsky’s text. But, despite the artistic persuasiveness of this decision, the composer chose to use Pushkin’s early elegy as the “starting point” of his Onegin. Apparently, “The Singer” brought with it, in addition to the figurative structure and state, something else that was essential for the author’s plan.
One of the reasons for choosing Tchaikovsky could be the desire to preserve the “Pushkin tuning” of his work, which contributed to its formation as a “psychic unity” (B. Asafiev. Cited works. p. 156). Important here is the emerging arc from the elegy of a seventeen-year-old poet to the pinnacle of his work - the “novel in verse.”
Equally important in the semantic subtext of “The Singer” is its historical fate. Despite its obvious connection with the images and the very spirit of Pushkin’s era, it subsequently remained one of the most popular romance texts. Only during the period from 1816 (the year it was written) to 1878 (the year the Tchaikovsky opera was written) by different authors, including Alyabyev, Verstovsky, Rubinstein, 14 vocal works were written based on the text of Pushkin’s “Singer” (See: Russian poetry in Russian music, comp. M., 1966). There is little doubt that he was well known both to Tchaikovsky himself and to the first listeners of his opera. Echoes of a bygone era were intertwined with nuances introduced by many later interpretations. This kind of ambiguity of perception could also attract the attention of the composer.
It's time to pay attention directly to Tchaikovsky's music. The duet “Have You Heard” is considered to be a musical stylization. There is no unity among researchers in determining its stylistic source. Usually the styles of Varlamov, Alyabyev, Genishta, Gurilev, early Glinka, Field, Chopin and even Saint-Saens are cited as a model (See: Laroche G. Selected Articles, issue 2, Leningrad, 1982, pp. 105-109; Prokofiev S. Autobiography, M., 1973, p. 533; Asafiev B.V. Cited. The name of Alexander Egorovich Varlamov seems central in this series. In addition to the many obvious intonation echoes of the duet with the melody of Varlamov’s romances, among them there is one that can be called the “prototype” of the Onegin duet. This is a romance from 1842 based on the text by G. Golovachev “Will You Sigh”. Here is the poetic text in full:
Will you sigh when sacred love
Will the sound touch your ears?
And this sound, inspired by you,
Will you understand, will you appreciate it?
Will you sigh when in a distant land
The singer will die, enthusiastic about you.
And alien to everyone, silent, lonely,
Will he call upon your lovely image?
Will you sigh?
Will you sigh when the memory
Will you ever hear about him?
Will you honor his suffering with a tear,
Leaning your head on your trembling chest?
Will you sigh, will you sigh?
Even for an outside observer it is clear that Golovachev’s text is surprisingly similar to the text of “The Singer”. Before the gaze blurred by a sentimental tear - again the “singer of love”. An echo of Pushkin’s “will you sigh” sounds more sincere “will you sigh.” There is something mysterious about the proximity of these two texts. Although perhaps the matter was done without mysticism, and we are dealing with a rehash, a free version of Pushkin’s text, perhaps not the first and not the most subtle interpretation of it. But it was not by chance that we started talking about a prototype. If Golovachev’s text associatively sends us back to the past, 26 years ago, during the time of Pushkin’s youth, then the musical series of Varlamov’s romance also gives rise to direct associations, but only with the “future” with the duet of the Larin sisters. Suffice it to say that the intonation of a descending fifth with an adjacent sixth (d-es-d-g), which is familiar to any music lover as the title intonation “Have you heard,” sounds in Varlamov at the end of each verse on the words “will you sigh” (in e-moll it sounds like h-c-h-e).
In itself, the curious fact of the existence of a prototype romance could be classified as “thoughts about” if it did not shed light on the reality existing connection duet “Have You Heard” with another key number of the opera - Lensky’s dying aria from Scene V. (By the way, it is written in the same key as the aria - e-moll.) Its piano introduction is built on an independent theme, its outlines reminiscent of the main section of the aria “What the coming day has in store for me” - the same “naked” third tone-exclamation , the top of the tonic sixth, at the beginning and then the same descending series of sounds, “sliding” down in humble impotence.
In the very first vocal phrase of the romance (it is interesting to note its striking similarity with the melody of “Separation” - Glinka’s piano nocturne), the fifth tone of the tonality becomes the center of intonation attraction, which evokes Lensky’s short opening recitative “Where, where, where have you gone.”
Note that the opera “Eugene Onegin” was born 35 years after the romance was written and 30 years after Varlamov’s death. “Has Pyotr Ilyich heard Varlamov’s romance?” Probably yes. One of the composer’s close acquaintances, Alexander Ivanovich Dubuk, arranged it for piano, among many other romances. It is known that Tchaikovsky was familiar with his piano transcriptions - in 1868 he arranged for piano four hands such a transcription by Dubuc. (This was his arrangement of E. Tarnovskaya’s romance “I Remember Everything”). Based on these facts, we can speak with a high degree of confidence about conscious stylization.
However, genius, be it the genius of Pushkin or Tchaikovsky, is rarely content with simple imitation. So in this case, we are dealing with a very complex, rich in different shades of meaning, complex of intonations. Among them, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to one seemingly very distant parallel - the theme of Bach’s fugue in g minor from the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
This parallel will not seem so distant if we remember that Olga and Tatyana are ordered not to echo each other in sixths, as Liza and Polina will later do, but to compete in imitation, like the voices of invention or fugue. A brilliant commentary on this process is given by Sergei Vladimirovich Frolov in his study of Tchaikovsky’s dramaturgy: “Here we are faced with an amazing musical and dramatic technique of “starting up” an operatic performance, when in the first numbers, in the absence of any stage action, the audience is involved in a powerful event-psychological a field that keeps her in unprecedented tension throughout the rest. ...From the very first sounds of the number, one is alarmed by the nocturne-barcarolle genre and the funeral-march fanfare exclamation on the fifth tone in the accompaniment of the duet “Did you hear”, provided that the “bucolic girls” begin to sing almost in an imitation technique in a two-beat movement in eighth notes against the background of a three-beat pulsations in the orchestra, and in the second verse their already cluttered rhythmic fabric is supplemented by an imitatively organized patter of sixteenth notes in the part of the old women. And all this ends with the harmonic scheme of the beginning of Mozart’s Reqium hidden in the most vulgar textured “guitar” accompaniment to the words “The habit is given to us from above.” ...Isn’t it too much for a village to do nothing?” (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Research and materials, St. Petersburg, 1997, p. 7). The answer is obvious. Thus, initially conceived as an innocent stylization, the duet of sisters gradually outgrows the boundaries of sentimental style, acquiring depth and significance.
But let's return to the comparison of the duet and aria. The connection between them is manifested in the presence of figurative and lexico-grammatical leitmotifs: the texts of the duet and aria are united by the image of the lamented “young poet” - “singer of love” and the intonation of the question-doubt “have you heard” - “have you sighed” in the duet and “will you come Are you” in Lensky’s dying aria.
Tell me, will the maiden of beauty come,
Shed a tear over the early urn
And think: he loved me -
He dedicated it to me alone
The sad dawn of a stormy life!..
Heart friend, desired friend.
Come, come, I am your husband!
The rhythmic reading of both texts - a two-beat meter with a triplet inclusion - also brings these two numbers closer together. Intonationally, the duet and aria can be compared according to the principle of complementarity. The theme of the duet (or rather, the part of it that is assigned to the soprano) is all, with a few exceptions, intoned within the tonic fifth g-d. It is a kind of sound capsule, inside which the “centripetal” intonation development is opposed by “centrifugal” compression, as if above the established fifth range. It must be admitted that there is very little truly romance in it. The theme of the aria, on the contrary, is filled with romance intonations, the most expressive of which is the tonic sixth h-g. Thus, these themes, intonated in different zones of the minor scale, existing differently in different “territories,” nevertheless complement each other, forming a kind of symbolic unity. You can “hear” it in reality by comparing a fragment of the imitative roll calls of Tatiana and Olga on the words “have you heard - have you heard” and the reprise section of the aria on the words “tell me, will you come, maiden of beauty” (for convenience, the second fragment is transposed into g- moll).
Here we have a classical summation structure. The motifs flow into one another so flexibly that you forget about the distance separating them: from the beginning of the opera to the actual point of the golden ratio. This is unlikely to be a mere coincidence. Just as it is not customary to consider the complete intonation identity of Tatyana’s phrase from the scene of the letter “Who are you, my guardian angel” and the same fragment of Lensky’s aria as a coincidence. Most likely, this is real evidence of the painstaking work of Tchaikovsky the playwright, matching Beethoven’s motivic work. The value of the result is difficult to overestimate. A similar artistic problem was once solved brilliantly, but in a completely different way, by Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka in the famous scene of Susanin’s farewell to his children, where the hero’s “clairvoyance” is helped by the leitmotif technique. Susanin and Lensky?.. Why not, because “... the main thing is not words, but intonation. Words are forgotten, but the human soul never forgets sounds.” I remember here another well-known aphorism - musical and poetic: “... O memory of the heart, you are stronger than the mind of the sad memory...”. The poet, saying goodbye to life, appeals to the hearts that loved him, to kindred souls that sounded in unison... in a duet, in terzetto... And what next?
The poet's memory flashed
Like smoke across the blue sky,
About him two hearts, maybe
Still sad...
Is it not in these Pushkin lines from the seventh chapter of the novel that the true meaning of the duet “Have you heard” lies? Have you heard, have you sighed, will you sigh, will you come - all these musical and poetic motifs, being united by a bizarre network of associations, seem completely disconnected in time and space of intonation. A line from Pushkin's elegy of 1816; the title and refrain of the sentimental romance by Golovachev - Varlamov of 1842; a verse that the author, Pushkin, puts with an ironic smile into the mouth of his hero Lensky in a novel completed in 1831; and, finally, the same verse, raised to tragic heights in the aria of another Lensky - the hero of Tchaikovsky's 1877 opera. But for all their inconsistency, they are close in one thing - in each of them, sometimes timidly, sometimes more imperiously (tell me, will you come, maiden of beauty - this is how the voice of Sergei Yakovlevich Lemeshev can be heard) there is a call for sensitivity, a request for memory, a sigh for eternity .
So, the past, present and future are hopelessly mixed up in these “lyrical scenes”, in which our “sentimental” duet played an important role. Let’s imagine how it might have been perceived by the first listeners of the opera in March 1879 (The first attempt to collect and summarize materials regarding the first performances of “Onegin” was made by A.E. Sholp. See: A.E. Sholp, “Eugene Onegin” by Tchaikovsky. , p.5.). Public opinion was then agitated by talk of blasphemy against a national shrine. There were rumors about a letter from I.S. Turgenev to L.N. Tolstoy, which, in particular, said: “Eugene Onegin” by Tchaikovsky arrived in Paris in a piano score. Undoubtedly wonderful music: the lyrical melodic passages are especially good. But what a libretto! Imagine: Pushkin’s poems about characters are put into the mouths of the characters themselves. For example, it is said about Lensky: “He sang the color of withered life,” in the libretto it says “I sing the color of withered life,” and so on almost constantly” (Quoted from: Sholp A.E. “Eugene Onegin” // Turgenev I.S. Complete. collected works T.12, M.-L., 1966). Tchaikovsky was finished. The heroine was still Tatyana (at one time the composer even wanted to name the entire opera after her). But the hero was no longer Onegin, the focus shifted. Tchaikovsky believes that the real hero is Lensky - “the singer of love, the singer of his sadness.” forget that only 40 years have passed since the fatal Pushkin duel. Pyotr Ilyich was surrounded by people who knew Alexander Sergeevich personally. Count Pyotr Andreevich Vyazemsky, who mourned the early death of the Poet until the end of his days, was Tchaikovsky’s senior contemporary - he did not live to see the premiere. operas for just a few months. What kind of irony could we talk about?
The memory of the day of the premiere belongs to Modest Tchaikovsky: “The librettist’s courage, the falsification of the music, the reduction, and what’s even worse, the addition of Pushkin’s incomparable text with ordinary librett verses - all together, the vast majority of the public, whose spokesman was Turgenev in one of his letters, imagined before meeting with the music itself, it was daring, it turned forward against the composition, and the word “blasphemy” flashed through the hall (Sholp A.E. “Eugene Onegin”, p.9). It is not difficult now to imagine the state of the audience before the curtain rises. Everyone is waiting for Pushkin’s immortal poems to sound. The first lines of the poem - My uncle has the most honest rules... - are on everyone’s lips. The introduction sounds. The curtain has finally been raised. And what? A duet behind the scenes on a text that has nothing to do with the novel, although the text is Pushkin’s, well-known, heard many times in many musical interpretations. Under these conditions, it could well be perceived as the epigraph of the opera.
“An epigraph is an inscription placed by the author before the text of an essay or part of it and is a quotation from a well-known text, as a rule, expresses the main conflict, theme, idea or mood of the work being preceded, contributing to its perception by the reader,” the Brief Literary Encyclopedia (KLE) tells us , M., 1972, vol. 8, p. 915). It is curious that the idea of the epigraph could have been “suggested” by Pushkin’s novel in verse. Moreover, the text of the novel with its countless reminiscences, quotes, allusions, epigraphs and, finally, dedication could inspire the composer to introduce a hidden dedication to Pushkin into his opera, which became the duet “Have You Heard”. Precedents of this kind have already happened in Russian opera - let’s remember Bayan’s second song from Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila”:
But centuries will pass, and to the poor land
A wondrous fate will descend.
There is a young singer to the glory of the motherland
He will sing on golden strings...
And Lyudmila to us with her knight
Will save you from oblivion.
But the singer’s time on earth is not long
All of them are immortal in ne-e-demons!