Evgenij Onegin

Place: Teatro Regio Torino. Organizer: Teatro Regio Torino Evgenij Onegin | Pëtr Il'ič Čajkovskij Tchaikovsky never entertained any illusions about the subject he wanted to set to music for his fifth opera, Evgenij Onegin by Aleksandr Puškin. On several occasions he shows awareness of the presence of «very few scenic effects, very little movement» in a libretto made up of many «lyrical scenes» (as he would later subtitle the opera) from life in nineteenth-century Russia, from the preparation of jams in the countryside to a searing farewell dialogue in a palace in Saint Petersburg. What interests him is the strong «inner drama» so well expressed by Pushkin’s verses, verses that he in fact largely preserves. He is interested in the characters and their human condition: Onegin’s restlessness, Lensky’s «poet’s soul», and above all the feelings that stir a woman: «I am in love – he confesses – with the character of Tatiana», and anyone who knows the life of Tchaikovsky can imagine why he felt so close to the melancholy girl, noble in spirit and destined to see all the love that overflows from her remain unrequited. It is no coincidence that the “letter scene” in which she is prota