Double vision | 14 February 2013

This week has featured new productions at the Royal Opera and English National Opera of staples of the repertoire, both subjected to drastic rethinking. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the first production at the Royal Opera of the new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and on this showing I very much hope it will be the last. It has been reviewed coolly on the whole, but I haven’t read anyone being sufficiently abusive — adequately, that is, to the experience of sitting through a flawed but moving masterpiece that is systematically, though I’m sure involuntarily, slaughtered from the opening moments to the wretched close.

This is an opera that Holten loves, and he has made clear that he learnt Russian to get to the heart of it. The aching opening music, though under Robin Ticciati it doesn’t ache enough, is mimed, a fashionable but almost always bad idea. If you’ve looked down the cast list, you’ll have noticed that it includes two characters that the librettist and composer neglected in their version, Young Onegin and Young Tatyana, and once the opera gets under way we find that they are dancers, who act out, anyway some of the time, what their old selves sing, the opera in Holten’s version being a sad remembrance of things past. So while Krassimira Stoyanova sings her great Letter Song, her younger self is kneeling at a chair writing the letter, then semi-dancing round the stage.

Tchaikovsky is nothing if he is not involving; Holten, with this device, ensures that everything is distanced, refracted, with catastrophic and completely predictable consequences. The opera’s other most famous scene is the dawn duel between Lensky and Onegin, friends who have absurdly fallen out at a ball. Once again we get the two Onegins on the stage, the young one delivering the fatal shot, the older one standing by beseechingly and even putting a pistol to his own head, though he thinks better of it — he has to, since there’s another 45 minutes of the opera.