Eugene Onegin, Tiroler Landestheater, 26 April 2025

Images: Birgit Gufler
Onegin (Jacob Phillips), Sie (Eleonore Bürcher), Tatiana (Marie Smolka)

Eugene Onegin: Jacob Phillips
Tatiana: Marie Smolka
Lensky: Alexander Fedorov
Olga: Bernarda Klinar
Prince Gremin: Oliver Sailer
Mme Larina: Abongile Fumba
Filipyevna: Fotini Athanasaki
Zaretsky: Julien Horbatuk
Monsieur Triquet: Jason Lee
Captain: Stanislav Stambolov
Sie: Eleonore Bürcher
Precentor: Junghwan Lee

Director: Eva-Maria Höckmayr
Designs: Julia Rösler
Dramaturgy: Diana Merkel

Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Tiroler Landestheater (chorus director: Michael Roberger)

Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck

Matthew Toogood (conductor) 

Innsbruck is celebrated as a centre for early music and was, of course, a great centre for what was then contemporary music from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, as both capital of the Tyrol and Maximilian I’s Residenzstadt. (It is impossible to avoid his presence, even if for some eccentric reason one should wish to do so.) The Tiroler Landestheater is perhaps less well known to outsiders, but consistently offers adventurous programming in musical and spoken theatre as well as dance. This year’s opera programme ranges from Purcell (King Arthur) to Schoenberg (Von heute auf morgen, in a double-bill with I Pagliacci). I had initially thought I was coming to La clemenza di Tito, but confusion over dates left me with the perfectly acceptable substitute of Eugene Onegin. For devotees of a different kind of musical theatre, the musical Hair is on offer too. 

Eva-Maria Höckmayr’s new production of Onegin can be understood to offer three principal lines of approach: abstraction, feminism, and memory. The last of those is intrinsic to the work, yet is emphasised here in a staging introduced by an enigmatic woman styled simply ‘Sie’ (‘she’ or ‘her’) in possession of Tatiana’s letter or a copy thereof. I initially assumed this was Tatiana later in life, and indeed it might be, but I do not think that is ever rendered explicit in her spoken words. Perhaps it is better to think of her as an Everywoman, who could be archetypal or more specific, according to one’s particular standpoint. Often movingly portrayed by Eleonore Bürcher she observes and occasionally interacts—though the interaction is probably more on her side than that of the others. Memory is like that, though perhaps not entirely, at least in our imagination. Onegin and Tatiana look forward too, after all, accurately or otherwise. The abstraction of Julia Rösler’s set designs, combined with relative, slightly stylised historicity of her costumes likewise creates space not only for more than one standpoint but for their interaction in work and performance. Acts of dressing and undressing contribute further, similarly reminding us that this is both drama and theatre (which involves artifice, and in a postdramatic age may or may not involve drama). 

Tatiana, Onegin, Lensky (Alexander Fedorov)

The feminist or at least female angle is understandable and common to many stagings. No one should object, but I have my doubts with this specific work (whilst, I hope, retaining an open mind). The problem is not so much that this is an opera called Eugene Onegin, not Tatiana Larina. There are plenty of works whose title roles are not their central one; we do not complain that Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie, for instance. Nor is there any intrinsic problem with decentring a character; it can benefit all characters, the decentred one included, as for instance we saw in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Aix Carmen. Instead, the problem lies with Tchaikovsky having created an opera in which, unless one is careful, Tatiana (whose feelings are surely in large part a projection of his own) already overshadows the others. To my mind, a richer and more balanced dramatic treatment necessitates a little gentle help for Onegin to emerge, most likely (though not necessarily) bringing out the torment of his feelings for Lensky: important in themselves, but also because they and the situation created bring Lensky and Olga, arguably Prince Gremin, to life too. The score suggests, even straightforwardly tells us things Pushkin does not. Here, Lensky and Olga in particular seemed a little lost, abandoned even, as surplus to requirements. One can say, of course, that Tatiana deserves to be rescued from homosexual projection, to become her own character. That is a laudable aim, but I think it happens anyway in the third act, and the danger of overbalancing is greater. Still, this is a general issue I have with stagings of the work, not with this one, which pursues its approach with intelligence and a welcome openness.   

Moreover, Höckmayr and Marie Smolka present an undeniably interesting, sympathetic Tatiana, especially in the first act, where we see her so shy, perhaps even emotionally crippled, that she can hardly bear look Onegin in the face, let alone touch him, in evidenf contrast with the existing warm relationship between Lensky and Olga. Smolka’s portrayal warmed as her character did, in general finely spun vocally and dramatically. Jacob Phillips’s thoughtful Onegin offered a trajectory of its own, always working with yet far from limited to the text. If it was not favoured by the production, its quality was such that it nonetheless had space to shine. Alexander Fedorov’s Lensky was ardent, involving, again to an extent that it overcame the challenge imparted by the production. Jason Lee’s Triquet brought a welcome sense of theatricality and ambiguity. Other parts were well taken, but for me the evening’s true discovery was Abongile Fumba, whose rich-toned, compassionate Mme Larina had me keen to hear her in more extended roles. Oliver Sailer's Prince Gremin rightly drew enthusiastic applause at the close.

Orchestra and chorus showed themselves flexible throughout. If, at times, Matthew Toogood’s tempi seemed a little slow, I suspect that was from a concern, successfully achieved, to assist a cast of mostly young singers grow into its roles rather than an overall conception. That such a work can be cast from company singers and that others will be too speaks of the ongoing worth of a system British ‘major’ houses have long since abandoned, to their – and our – detriment. For now, in the words of that celebrated Renaissance song by Heinrich Issac, ‘Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen,’ but I hope to return.

Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, 20 September 2019

Images copyright: Iko Freese / drama-berlin.de

Eugene Onegin – Günter Papendell

Tatiana – Natalya Pavlova

Olga – Karolina Gumos

Lensky – Aleš Briscein

Mme Larina – Stefanie Schaefer

Prince Gremin – Tijl Faveyts

Filipievna – Margarita Nekrasova

Zareski – Changdai Park

M. Triquet – Alexander Fedorov

Zaretsky – Changdai Park

Captain – Carsten Lau

Guillot – Yuhei Sato

Barrie Kosky (director)
Rebecca Ringst (set designs)

Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Simon Berger (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus (chorus director: David Cavelius) of the Komische Oper

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

What’s in a name? Should Tchaikovsky’s opera – which, as Barrie Kosky states in the programme booklet, should be considered alongside Pushkin, not as its musical translation – really be called Eugene Onegin at all? Or would Tatiana Larina be the more fitting title? Eugene and Tatiana, perhaps? It is a silly question, really; for one thing, no one is going to rename the work, although someone, I suppose, might write another. But names aside, there will probably always be something of a tension between the centrality ascribed by a production to the opera’s two principal characters; and also something, moreover, of a tension between Tatiana and Onegin on one hand and Lensky, if more rarely Olga, on the other. It is difficult to imagine a successful or indeed pretty much any unsuccessful production that did not involve such tensions, although Achim Freyer, in his bizarre staging for the Staatsoper Unter den Berlin, a few hundred metres away, may be said to have accomplished that in his very typical way.

Kosky’s 2016 staging for Berlin’s Komische Oper, in co-production with Zurich, offers an intriguing, convincing blend of the broadly yet never lazily conventional; the slightly symbolic; and the point of detail, even the incidental, made more than that. The latter first: as the opera opens, Mme Larina and the nurse, Filipievna are making jam. I am not sure that I even recalled that point of detail, though I am sure that I will now. The jam jar, however, returns at a crucial point – in Kosky’s staging, that is – as container for Tatiana’s letter to Onegin. Her nurse, affecting not to understand for whom it is intended, keeps dropping it, casting it aside, until she relents and sets that train of events in motion. ‘So what?’ you may ask. So nothing, perhaps; but I think not. For the jar and its contents take us back to the opening, an apparently carefree summer afternoon, save of course for beneath the surface. Things have changed – and have stayed the same; such tends to be the way with life. And the chorus of local girls, more than usually an emanation of Tatiana’s unconscious – replication and contrast in Klaus Bruns’s costumes lightly make the point – has all along been framing, voicing, goading.

So too will the chorus, male and female, later on, as part of a more general pattern of contrasts and connections between public and private, indoor and outdoor, country and town; and the criss-crossing connections between those pairs of opposites. The fundamental setting, common to all scenes, is that of the meadow on which it all began: designer Rebecca Ringst’s simple, adaptable focus for development and memory. Franck Evin’s lighting works wonders in its partial transformations, highlighting (false or alienating?) community and Romantic loneliness, whilst never having us lose sight of where we are. So too, of course, do Kosky’s blocking and, more broadly, his story-telling. It does no harm for the ball to take place with torches outside for once; its stifling, tragic qualities are not lost. Only in the first St Petersburg scene is there an additional set design, but even then, the facade of Prince Gremin’s palace can, like all facades, readily be dismantled, so that we can turn to the inversion of our central pair’s fortunes and their resolution.

Like many directors, Kosky ignores the opera’s strong, at times overwhelming, homosexual subtexts: the ‘Romantic friendship’ between Onegin and Lensky and, of course, the figure of Tatiana herself as alter ego for Tchaikovsky, his fantasy of how a woman might feel and act. That, however, is simply not the concern of this particular production. For, in the programme booklet, Kosky expresses a preference for operas with ‘very simple stories and incredibly multifaceted themes and emotions – precisely as in Greek theatre,’ and also criticises composers who, over the past fifty years, have, allegedly, ‘simply set literature to music’. I am not quite so sure that it is as simple as that, nor that the comparison with ancient Greece is objectively meaningful in this case, as it certainly would be to Wagner; however, if it is to him, all the better. There is unquestionably a directness to Kosky’s telling of the story here, far from opposed to interpretation, but rather open to it, which works very well: as, say, in his Rusalka and his Pelléas, or indeed, harking back to Attic tragedy, in his Iphigénie en Tauride, all for the Komische Oper, yet sadly lacking in his Bayreuth Meistersinger. Whose opera is this anyway? Here, it conventionally, yet never stereotypically, moves from being Tatiana’s to Onegin’s; the latter character emerges in the reflection, the memories of the latter’s acts and emotions. That trajectory is delineated with a power only rarely achieved, at least in my experience.

Instrumental – or better, vocal – to that was Günter Papendell’s Onegin, thus perhaps rebalancing the scales slightly in that direction. To begin with, I felt somewhat nonplussed at the apparent woodenness of his portrayal, until I appreciated that it was a portrayal of woodenness, of coldness, to be humanly defrosted, as it certainly was during the course of the opera. This was a fine, memorable, and sophisticated conception of the role. It would be an exaggeration, indeed a vulgarisation, to say that Natalya Pavlova’s Tatiana moved straightforwardly in the opposite direction, but tension was present in that respect: the crossing of lines and lives that ultimately turns, we think, to tragedy. Her opening fragility, her heartfelt and beautifully sung Letter Scene, and her final struggle, seemingly achieved, for self-possession proved similarly memorable and sophisticated. Aleš Briscein’s Lensky was surprisingly coarse of tone to begin with, though it was an ardent performance; I could not help but wonder whether he were unwell. A spirited Olga in Karolina Gumos, a stylish and lively M. Triquet in Alexander Fedorov, a splendidly deep-voiced Gremin in Tijl Faveyts, and above all a richly expressive, compassionate Filipievna in Margarita Nekrasova had much to offer, in a typically strong company performance that had no weak links.

The chorus sang and acted well too, its stage direction always a Kosky strength. My sole, relative disappointment lay in aspects of Ainārs Rubikis’s conducting of the orchestra. At its best, especially in the middle scenes, there was a telling striving towards symphonism. Elsewhere, however, much was oddly hard-driven. There were striking disjunctures, moreover, between orchestra and chorus in the first scene. This was not, then, an Onegin to think of in the way of Semyon Bychkov’s (probably the best conducted I have heard in the theatre) or Daniel Barenboim’s (for Freyer, as mentioned above). This was Kosky’s Onegin rather than the conductor’s, yet it belonged as much to the singers and of course to their characters. That, I think, was a good part of its point: a point served well.