Met’s misguided new ‘Eugene Onegin’

Many of the characters in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin sing about their pasts and their regrets. Permit me to do the same about this opera.

I love both the music and the pathos of this tale about a rural maiden who falls in love with, but is spurned by, a sophisticated rake. She mends her wounded heart and sensibly weds a prince. Years later the cad turns up again, and this time he wants her.

I first saw Onegin at the Met in 1957, when the Rolf Gerard-Peter Brooke production revealed the lovely exterior of a country estate home with a tree that shed its autumnal leaves when a musical breeze blew through the orchestra. That’s what the libretto calls for: a garden of an estate on Russia’s inland steppes.

Then a 1997 production by Robert Carsen and Michael Levine gave us simple settings that portrayed the Russian countryside’s golden skies and vast open spaces. The glow of that production remained strong when I saw it in 2007 with Renee Fleming and Dimitri Hvorostovsky, and it should have been preserved beyond that.

Cooped up in a barn

But this season’s new production, directed by Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw, lacks a reason to exist. Almost all of its innovations are detrimental.

In the opening scene, for example, the audience is cooped up in an assembly hall— an enclosed shed that gave no indication of the mood-setting location.

Then followed the Letter Scene, where Tatiana supposedly lies awake in her bedroom and composes a love letter to Onegin. But in this production, she goes to bed in the same huge barn as the opening scene. It’s unbelievable.

Another miscalculation is the duel scene. I had never before seen this duel—one of the most famous moments in all of opera— fought with shotguns. This production mimics the Korean video game software that turns an iPhone into a shotgun, which is “pumped” by jerking the phone back and forth.

As the directors would learn had they read the Pushkin poem on which Onegin is based, duels usually were fought not to kill the opponent but to gain satisfaction— to restore one's honor by demonstrating a willingness to risk one's life. Deaths were uncommon (although Pushkin himself was fatally wounded in a duel with a French officer who had attempted to seduce Pushkin’s wife). Why would Onegin shoot to kill his close friend?

Lovesick adolescent

This being opera, traditionalists are more concerned with the voices than anything else. Happily, Anna Netrebko did her best singing in years as Tatiana, the lovesick adolescent who winds up becoming a princess. The role has few high notes and no coloratura, so Netrebko was able to concentrate on poignant lyrical singing.

Tenor Piotr Beczala was impressive as the impetuous Lenski, an icon of youth whose life is cut short. His voice was sweet and gentle, like his character.

Strong support came from Oksana Volkova as Tatiana’s flirtatious sister, Olga, and Larissa Diadkova as the nurse Filippyevna. Some other singers sounded wobbly, especially Alexei Tanovitski as Prince Gremin, who marries Tatiana. He lacked the sonorous low tones that are needed for his great aria about how love has changed his life.

The Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien looked elegant as Onegin and sang intelligently. But his voice and his presence are small-scale. He seemed more a bored cynic than the “fond deceiver” of Pushkin’s poem.

Where’s Dimitri?

Why could we not see and hear Dimitri Hvorostovsky, the world’s best Onegin, who is still on the Met’s roster? Like the production, this casting decision was an unnecessary change.

In addition to a sumptuous voice, Hvorostovsky brought something to Eugene Onegin that the new casting lacks. With his prematurely silver hair, he encapsulated the weary sophisticate who is bored by the homespun Tatiana and her rustic surroundings.

But in this production, Kwiecien and Netrebko looked like contemporaries of each other. (Actually, he’s 41 and she’s 42.)

Valery Gergiev’s slow and sluggish conducting exacerbated my annoyance.