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The Yale University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order, if, in its judgement fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. 137 C.F.R. §201.14 2018 OPERA 101 A COMPLETE GUIDE TO LEARNING AND LOVING OPERA FRED PLOTKIN lit nI' 11- NEW YORK EUGENE ONEGIN • 297 • . • and an outsider; he was an individual against society as compared with the Enlightenment hero, an individual who enjoyed freedom in society. 10. Love, the most universal human feeling, has been described by poets and artists since the beginning of time. Lovers may be in love, but they may not be able to understand or explain it. Through the EUGENE ONEGIN centuries, love has been explained in political and religious terms, in erotic or Platonic, tragic or comic terms. In the middle of this cen- ROMANTIC OPERA tury, prior to the so-called sexual revolution, much love was defined as forbidden love. Nowadays, artists, writers, and musicians often express love in terms of the inability of lovers to communicate; love, therefore, is diminished or denied because it cannot be expressed. In other circumstances some of us politicize love in search of the right to express it. Love in the era of Romanticism was idealized and made noble in s you know, Romanticism was the great artistic movement both its exalted and tragic contexts. Lucia di Lammermoor is a of the nineteenth century. Two works that we have studied, prime example of Romanticism's tragic view of love. Tannhäuser, ALucia di Lammermoor and Les Contes d'Ho ffmann, are which we will study later, uses the redemptive power of love to suffused with Romantic images and ideals. Whether in music, litera- bring peace to tormented characters. ture, or the visual arts, Romanticism emphasized a departure from In our first six operas and most others you will ever encounter, the values of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, which love serves to color relationships between characters. There is pater- favored reason in philosophy and classicism in literature, music, nal/filial love between Rigoletto and Gilda, who also has a virginal and the visual arts. With Romanticism, instinct became preferable love for the licentious Duke. There is jealous, erotic love between to reason. Fantasy and sentiment became exalted virtues in the cre- Tosca and Mario and idealized, unrequited love between Lucia and ative artist. Emotionalism replaced the sharpened wit that charac- Edgardo. " Rosina and Almaviva have a playful, flirtatious love. terized the temperament of the eighteenth century. Country life and Donna Anna and Don Ottavio have a sterile love; Donna Elvira is pastoral settings were a popular theme among the romantics, as filled with wild, obsessive, hormonal love. Don Giovanni, the fa- were dreams and the supernatural. mous lover, is a narcissist who really only loves himself; his claim to One of the things that lay underneath the grand theories of Ro- love all women is actually a means to see his own reflection in them. manticism was a change in attitudes about the nature of love. Hoffmann's loves are blind, unrealistic, or doomed. Beethoven's Fi- Romanticism, for many people, represented a return to simpler delio is a paean to marital love. In all of these operas, the love times and more traditional ways of love. Many Romantics consid- among various characters is part of a larger context in which the ered Don Giovanni one of the first works of their movement, insist- stories are built. Love is a given that then serves to push the story in ing that it was a moral fable about loveless sexual excess. While other directions. For example, the fact that Gilda loves the Duke Romanticism might be viewed as a fundamentally conservative leads to the opera's inevitable tragic conclusion. movement, there were Romantics, such as Wagner, who were rebel- Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin is a rather special opera. In it, love lious. To some artists and thinkers, a Romantic hero was a rebel is the theme, not a pretext for launching the action. Its characters 298 • OPERA 101 EUGENE ONEGIN • 299 and situations are all about the many aspects of love. In other 1877. The marriage quickly failed; Tchaikovsky suffered a nervous words, love is the reason we care about these characters and what collapse and himself attempted suicide. Somehow, though, none of happens to them. Eugene Onegin was written by a composer who this turmoil impeded the composition of Eugene Onegin. drank deeply at the well of Western European culture. Tchaikovsky As with the echoes of Offenbach's life in Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1840-1893) loved Italy and the music of Mozart and was exposed and the sad coincidence of Donizetti's going insane a few years after to most of the artistic currents of his time. Yet he never disregarded composing Lucia, there is a special poignancy when the tragic his profound Russian roots and the special, highly sentimental way events in the life of a composer parallel those of an opera he has that Russian literature and music could express love. created. We cannot help wondering how much of his own life and His opera was inspired by a poem by Alexander Pushkin (1799- feelings he brought to a role. Did his sufferings make for greater art? 1837), which was written in 1831, in the early years of the Roman- This is what we asked ourselves about the character of Hoffmann. tic movement. Tchaikovsky first approached the subject forty-six And this is what Tosca reflects on when she sings "Vissi d'arte, vissi years later. While Pushkin wrote the poem with cold, ironic detach. d'amore" ("I lived for art, I lived for love"). ment, making Onegin almost a Don Giovanni—type antihero, Tchai- Tchaikovsky understood the anguish and the bliss of love even if kovsky found different elements in the story and imbued it with he did not achieve much happiness in his own love life. This is why warmth and pathos. Pushkin's writings come from deep in the Rus- he could read the rather ironic language of Pushkin's poem and find sian soul and are as well known to Russians as Shakespeare is to the passion and longing in it. So taken with it was he that he sat down in British. Pushkin provided literary sources for many great Russian one feverish night after reading it and composed Tatyana's famous composers, including Glinka (Ruslan and Ludmilla), Tchaikovsky letter scene even though he had not yet sketched the form of the (Mazeppa, The Queen of Spades), Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov, opera in musical and dramatic terms. It was this scene that struck a probably the greatest Russian opera), and Rimsky-Korsakov (The chord of recognition in the composer, who at the time was receiving Golden Cockerel, Mozart and Salieri). missives from Antonina Milyukova. Pushkin had a lot in common with Onegin; he was bright and Tchaikovsky realized that some of the language in the poem dashing but became very jaded and cynical. Coincidentally, he died could provide the direct speech in key passages for the libretto, but in a duel, as does the poet Lensky, Onegin's friend and rival in the the narrative voice of the poem had to be removed and replaced by story. Tchaikovsky identified less with Onegin than with Lensky dialogue among the various characters. The composer entrusted the and Tatyana, the heroine of the opera. She is someone who suffers job to Konstantin Shilovsky, although he later made substantial from a yearning to love someone who rejects her. Lensky, who is a changes and additions to Shilovsky's text. He also realized that this relatively ordinary person in the poem, in the opera is the incarna- would not be an opera in the traditional sense but a series of what he tion of doomed creative talent. Tchaikovsky felt strongly about called "lyric scenes." In fact, the score refers to Eugene Onegin as both characters and their longings. He was struck by the fact that "lyric scenes in three acts." Although there is a dramatic progres- important events in his life in the late 1870s coincided with inci- sion to the story, each of the "lyric scenes" is richly suffused with a dents in the opera. He was receiving passionate love letters from a distinct mood and flavor. It is the composer's great achievement young woman, Antonina Milyukova, whom he scarcely knew. One- that he manages to evoke in music the emotional feelings of longing gin rejects Tatyana's declarations of love with tragic consequences. and repressed desire that are central to the characters. Notice Tchaikovsky felt that if he rejected Milyukova, she would commit throughout the opera how the sounds from the orchestra and the suicide (as she threatened to do in one of her letters). The composer, voices are different than what you have heard before. The scale of who was a homosexual, decided to marry the young woman in July this opera is very intimate and opens up only in the dance sequences.