The fact that the tempos of an opera house are slow has some advantages. The Liceu can thus afford to recover the production of Onegin with which it planned to inaugurate the 2020-2021 season, in the midst of a pandemic. It can celebrate the start of the current academic year, four years later – from September 27 to October 8, plus the Under35 function on the 9th – with the same enthusiasm and without seeming out of date. There are for that and for much more.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's take on Alexander Pushkin's acclaimed verse novel is high-voltage musically and plot-wise, a story of inflamed romanticism – while suffocated by social conventions – that the composer adapted in episodic format , with seven "lyrical scenes", as he himself called them. Tatiana, a peasant lady absorbed in reading and little interested in social life, falls in love at first sight with the dandy Eugene Onegin, the friend her sister's fiance brings to the community, and communicates it to him in a passionate letter of love all the fantasies of romantic love. But no matter how charming the young woman is, the newcomer, a free spirit, generates boredom and rejection...
This opera, which was premiered in 1879 by a group of students from the Moscow Conservatory, had not been performed in the Barcelona theater for 25 years, before causing a sensation and becoming one of the essentials in the repertoire. And the truth is that it arrives at a time of rising numbers at the lyrical coliseum: if during that pandemic season the Liceu had a budget of 38.5 million euros and 13,000 subscribers, today it has 52.6 million and 4,000 more subscribers, which, as the general director of the house, Valentí Oviedo, points out, it is an example of the exciting response that the institution's project has generated after the painful period of covid.
This co-production of the operas in Oslo (where it premiered in 2020), Barcelona and Madrid (which will arrive later) has Christof Loy as the stage director, guaranteeing a deep psychological work, which here does an exercise in reducing to minimalism all the expansive and excessive romanticism of the work, to get to the bottom of the emotional reasons that move the characters, in an abstract and timeless way.
"I like that it is explained like this, because it could happen today, but it could be two centuries ago, the set allows it", points out the Russian soprano Svetlana Aksenova, who alternates with Kristina Mkhitaryian in the role of Tatiana, while baritones Audun Iversen and Iurii Samiolov will bring Onegin to life.
Loy has for the fourth time the contribution of choreographer Andreas Heise, who, by the way, danced the role of Lenski in John Cranko's ballet. The German artist makes the opera permeated by stage movement and the dance reflects colors and nuances, to penetrate human emotions and allow the singers themselves to be contaminated by this vocabulary.
"The choreography invites the public to see the opera, not just to listen to it - points out the repositor, Victoria Bomann-Larsen -, since traditionally these arias, like the one in the letter, are very static, while here, working at the same time with singers and dancers, a magic is achieved and you can see the whole revolution taking place in Tatiana's head".
Loy does an emotional dissection of the characters in favor of the piece. This is an intimate work, a manual of romantic thought that still influences people today. And Onegin, moreover, hides a parallel with the life of Tchaikovsky and his wife. That there might not be a similarity between the missives that Antonina Miliukova sent to the composer and what Tatiana says to Onegin?” points out Víctor García de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu.
The Liceu Live platform will broadcast it on the 8th.
