Onegin and Tatiana Programme Notes — Guido Martin-Brandis

(Programme notes written for my production of Onegin and Tatiana, Grimeborn Festival, 2018.)

Onegin and Tatiana

In thinking about Pushkin and Tchaikovsky's characters in the context of creating this show, it occurred to me that using projectors could help represent the incredibly vividly portrayed theme of psychological projection in Tchaikovsky's opera and Pushkin's novel. Both Tatiana and Onegin have radical and instantaneous transformations of their inner worlds triggered by the simple event of meeting another person in a particular time and place. Psychological projection is the denial of certain impulses or traits in ourselves and ascribing these things exclusively to others. We are perhaps most familiar using the word "projection" in a negative sense, for instance to describe a jealous husband, who suspects his wife of infidelity because he can't accept his own desire for extramarital affairs. But Eugene Onegin deals throughout with positive projections, that is, seeing another person as a paragon of goodness, wholeness, or even as the only possible source of happiness and redemption, i.e. a saviour figure. This is the sort of projection which a lot of religious writing is engaged in, and in the course of the drama both Tatiana and Onegin reach for spiritual metaphors when talking of each other.

Having pared back Tchaikovsky's opera to its two central characters, I knew I had to flesh out the narrative with other material, and I wanted to explore the inner worlds of Onegin and Tatiana in a way that was more explicit than 19th century operatic convention allowed. As well as narration and spoken dialogue I decided to use song repertoire, and for this I reached for the generation of composers after Tchaikovsky - Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and Rachmaninov who were born into a world of burgeoning interest in the life of the mind. The novels of that era and poems they chose to set are often richly psychologically suggestive, full of allusions to the world of dreams and the psyche, and it's no accident that they were all direct contemporaries of Freud and Jung, the two geniuses who articulated these ideas most fully in the language of science.

As such, I set the production in the late 1870's (think Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov), which was also the time when Tchaikovsky adapted Pushkin’s verse novel into a libretto and then composed the music in a fury of white hot inspiration. This had come about because of an eerie coincidence of life and art. Tchaikovsky received a secret declaration of love in the form of a letter from his pupil Antonina Miliukova, just two weeks before a friend suggested Eugene Onegin as the subject for an opera. Not wanting to act like Onegin, Tchaikovsky agreed to marry his student just two months later, despite his homosexuality, and the marriage proved an instant and catastrophic failure. Tchaikovsky felt immense guilt towards Miliukova, but simultaneously could not bear to live with her. He poured out these feelings into his opera, as life imitated art. His extraordinary affinity for Tatiana as a character is a classic example of projection in itself and caused him to create one of the greatest operas ever composed - there is nothing else like it in the repertoire.

I hope this show will be a good introduction to the piece for those who have never seen the full opera, and provide compelling new insights for people who know and love the piece. The drama of Onegin and Tatiana is tragedy domestic proportions. In it Tchaikovsky and Pushkin created one of the most moving portrayals of unrequited love we have.