Michael Tanner: With seven scenes, Eugene Onegin really doesn’t need any more pauses

This year’s live relays of New York Met performances have a markedly Slav flavour, with Shostakovich’s rare The Nose next up, and later Dvorak’s Rusalka and, most interestingly, Borodin’s Prince Igor. It kicked off with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the most popular though not the finest of his operas. On the first night there were sustained protests both outside and inside the Met, against the Putin crony Valery Gergiev and against Anna Netrebko, a supporter of the plutocrat dictator. Odd that there aren’t more protests, when you think that people still get heated and even write books about musicians who stayed in the Third Reich, often acting courageously. There were no protests, alas, before the matinée that was broadcast. The production has had its own troubles, with the original director, Deborah Warner, withdrawing through illness, and Fiona Shaw taking over. There weren’t any particular signs that anyone was producing, actually. The sets are puzzling and, worse, take a long time to move, so that there were substantial, momentum-draining gaps between each of Tchaikovsky’s seven scenes, and the familiar sight for the cinema audience of stagehands moving cumbersome props around, while Deborah Voigt asked the performers what the opera means to them, etc. Those pauses, combined with Gergiev’s strangely cumbersome reading of the score, made for a lengthy performance of what, after all, is an opera Tchaikovsky wrote for students, almost a chamber piece. Gergiev said, when interviewed, that the Polonaise should be grand, but in his reading it wasn’t, just turgid. Most perversely, he took the great Letter Scene with such lengthy pauses that the feverishly mounting tension was drained, and Tatiana’s worries about what she should write were replaced by the impression that she was fighting sleepiness.

I hope this production of Onegin will restore its position as a work that is both straightforward and subtle

A scene from Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin                                                             Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

The usual trouble with Onegin is that the Letter Scene, being the most moving in the entire opera, makes the rest seem an anti-climax, the major flaw being the composer’s utter lack of sympathy with Onegin.