Double trouble | 7 January 2016

It’s scene five of Kasper Holten’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Michael Fabiano’s Lensky is alone with a snow-covered branch and his thoughts. Well, not quite alone. At the other side of the stage stands the man he is about to face in a duel: his friend Onegin, who’s apparently arrived ahead of the appointed time and is listening to every word of Lensky’s anguished soliloquy. Except he isn’t: this is the Onegin of the present, looking back on a tragedy in his past. Or possibly imagining it? He can’t, after all, have heard Lensky’s words, for the practical reason that he wasn’t there. Can he? Oh, is that applause? The aria’s over.

The big idea behind Holten’s production — apparently tightened up since its 2013 debut — is this business with doubles. A pair of dancers represent ‘Young Onegin’ and ‘Young Tatyana’; graceful performers, well chosen for their physical resemblance to Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s Onegin and Nicole Car’s Tatyana. They pop up throughout the opera: Tatyana’s letter scene is acted by her double while Car, as her older self, watches, gestures at and ineffectively pleads with —what, exactly? Her own memory?

True, there’s a certain poignancy, an added emotional charge, in seeing a character react on stage to some of the most emotionally honest music Tchaikovsky ever wrote. There’s a literary rationale too: by presenting the drama as a series of memories Holten evokes the first-person narration of Pushkin’s novel, and points up the deliberately episodic nature of Tchaikovsky’s seven ‘lyrical scenes’ (Tchaikovsky refrained from describing Onegin as an opera). In the letter scene it sort of works, if you discount the feeling that Holten is muscling in to dictate the audience’s response at precisely the point where Tchaikovsky is straining with every last ounce of sincerity and expression to get into your heart on his own terms.