Sergey Prokofiev diaries: 28 December 1912

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

276-277

text excerpt

At home I was dining with less gusto than usual, when Max telephoned suggesting that we go to the Artistic Opera Company, which had rented our Conservatoire Hall and was presenting Eugene Onegin. I dressed in a hurry, Max called for me in a taxi, and we got seats in the sixteenth row. This company's production of Onegin moved me to tears: Tanya and Olya were seventeen-year-old girls with plaits down their shoulders and simple dresses; Lensky was a fiery nineteen-year-old youth, and Onegin an ice-cold, reserved gentleman. The settings were enchanting, the mise-en-scène irreproachable, the ball scenes and the final scene so stylish and the whole look of the third and fifth scenes so beautiful that they provoked a storm of applause. The performance was of a studied simplicity, with some musical and scenic details that gave particular pleasure. It seems to me that the production as a whole must have been very much like what Tchaikovsky, to judge from his letters of the time, wanted so passionately (but hardly dared hope for) when he was writing Onegin. Vocally, the principal singers were not remarkable, but they were all decent. Among the details I noted particularly the quarrel between Lensky and Onegin, when the former calls the latter a dishonourable seducer and Onegin retorts, 'Be quiet, or I shall kill you!' Usually Onegin rushes at Lensky as if to attack him, the pair then having to be dragged apart. But in this production he preserves the contemptuous bearing of a gentleman, rapping out the words in such a way, or so I understood, as to suggest that the killing he refers to is not at that moment but will be on the morrow. This interpretation is far more arousing, as it makes clear that this is the moment when he decides that, come the duel, he will not spare Lensky. But overall, the aspect of the whole production that gave me the greatest pleasure was the composer Tchaikovsky, and I was overwhelmed by the genius of this opera.

excerpt from 'Sergey Prokofiev diaries: 28 December 1912' pp. 276-277 (341 words)

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