The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (73 page)

Vašek is entranced by the dancer Esmeralda, a member of a visiting circus, who persuades him to dress up as a performing bear.
Mařenka hears of Jeník’s bargain with Kecal and, in a rage, agrees to marry Vašek after all.
The village gathers to celebrate the marriage of Mařenka to ‘the son of Tobias Micha’.
Then Vašek’s parents recognize Jeník as their long-lost son, and Mařenka is delighted at Jeník’s clever ploy.
Kecal storms off in a rage and, despite some confusion caused by the appearance of Vašek in his performing-bear costume, Jeník and Mařenka are happily united.

What to listen for

The sparkling overture and energetic opening chorus get the opera off to a cracking start.
Much of what follows is grounded in Czech folk-rhythms, especially the fast polka.
Some of the tunes may sound like traditional melodies, but they are in fact almost all Smetana’s original compositions.
Each act contains one danced section (polka,
furiant
and
skočná
): these were not part of the opera’s original scheme, but part of the process by which Smetana bulked up the score after its initial frosty reception.
The arias are not complex or elaborate, and it is for its feisty duets that the opera is most admired.
The role of Mařenka is the most substantial, requiring a soprano who can ride over the heavy scoring of her Act III aria.

In performance

Productions in Frankfurt and at Opera North and Glyndebourne have tried livening up the rather genteel nature of the comedy by updating the opera to the Communist era – influenced, perhaps, by satires of modern Czechoslovakia like Forman’s movie
The
Firemen’s
Ball
– but the idea of arranged marriages doesn’t make much sense in a modern social context.
Left in a folksy Czech setting, however, it can seem awfully twee and toytown: one solution, first attempted by Walter Felsenstein in East Berlin in 1951 and subsequently successfully adopted by both Rudolf Noelte for WNO and Thomas Langhoff in Munich, is to underplay the sunny farce and contextualize the farcical plot with a realistic portrait of a hard-working, mean-spirited rural community against which Mařenka and Jeník are busily rebelling.

Recording

CD: Gabriela Beňačková (Mařenka); Zdeněk Kosler (cond.).
Supraphon 103511 2

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

(1840–93)

Eugene
Onegin

Three acts. First performed Moscow, 1879.

Libretto by the composer and Konstantin Shilovsky

Based on Pushkin’s verse novel, though the opera’s romantic tone is very different from the wryly satirical literary source.
Tchaikovsky began composing the opera shortly after receiving an unsolicited letter from the woman who briefly and disastrously became his wife.
This has obvious parallels with the situation of Tatyana, a figure with whom the homosexual Tchaikovsky must also have identified from his own perspective of amorous frustration and unspoken yearning.

Plot

On a modest country estate in early nineteenth-century Russia, the widowed Madame Larina lives with her daughters, the outgoing Olga and the introspective Tatyana.
Visitors are announced – the poet Lensky, who is courting Olga, appears with the jaded and urbane aristocrat, Eugene Onegin.
Tatyana is smitten with his glamour, and in the course of a sleepless night, writes and sends him an impassioned love letter.
The next morning, Onegin kindly but firmly rebuffs her and urges her to more self-restraint.

Madame Larina holds a modest party to celebrate Tatyana’s name-day.
Irritated at being forced by Lensky to attend such a dull event at which he is the focus of much gossip, Onegin perversely decides to flirt with Olga.
Lensky is furious and rashly challenges Onegin to a duel, causing a furore at the party.
At dawn the next morning, Lensky reflects on his love for Olga.
After all the proprieties are observed, Onegin shoots Lensky dead and leaves Russia.

Several years later, Onegin returns from years of foreign travel to discover that Tatyana has become the wife of Prince Gremin and a great lady of St Petersburg society.
Full of
remorse and regret, he realizes that he loves her.
He begs her for a private meeting, which she reluctantly grants.
Alone together, Tatyana confesses that she still loves Onegin, but as a happily and respectably married woman, she cannot yield to his ardent entreaties.
Onegin is left alone in despair.

What to listen for

The first performance was given by students, and the opera presents no great vocal challenges: all the roles are attractively singable, and opera houses find it relatively easy to cast, though it is important to find a Tatyana (soprano) who can grow convincingly from the fragile, vulnerable girl of Act I to the passionate woman of the final scene.
In the course of its seven scenes, the score moves from gentle rustic simplicity to melodramatic intensity, but its emotional centre comes early on, in the second scene, when Tatyana spends the night writing her fateful letter to Onegin (baritone).
Here, the music vividly embodies over a twelve-minute span all the girl’s anxieties, hesitations and ardour, crowned by a wonderful orchestral crescendo and a piping oboe which heralds the dawn.
As Richard Taruskin put it, ‘we can “see” and “feel” Tatyana – her movements, her breathing, her heartbeats – in her music’.

Other highlights of the score include the rapturous parlour duet sung off-stage by Tatyana and Olga (mezzo-soprano) at the beginning of the opera in counterpoint to the more down-to-earth recollections of Madame Larina and the old babushka Filipyevna; Lensky’s aria, the quintessence of Russian melancholy, sung just before his fatal duel (preferably by a tenor who can bring some rich-toned plangency to it); the telling contrast of the jolly waltz at Tatyana’s name-day party with the stately polonaise at the St Petersburg ball; and the no-holds-barred confrontation between Onegin and Tatyana in the final scene.

In performance

Lovers of Pushkin’s poem may find the opera falls short of the original’s wit and subtlety – ‘undeniably notable music,’
wrote Turgenev to Tolstoy when he heard the opera, ‘but what a libretto!’ Yet Tchaikovsky makes something emotionally true and sincere from what on paper might look rather novelettish, and productions which take the drama and characters at face value rarely fail to make an effect with it.
Notable among recent stagings is Graham Vick’s spare yet evocative version at Glyndebourne, which gently charted Tatyana’s sexual awakening and growth from adolescence to maturity.
Thomas Allen, Thomas Hampson and Simon Keenlyside are among the handsome baritones who have recently enjoyed tremendous success in the title role; among many wonderful Tatyanas, Ileana Cotrubas, Mirella Freni and Elena Prokina have been particularly memorable.

Recordings

CD: Mirella Freni (Tatyana); James Levine (cond.).
DG 423 959 2

Video: Elena Prokina (Tatyana); Andrew Davis (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Warner 0630 1401 4 3

The Queen of Spades
(
Pique Dame, Pikovaya Dama
)

Three acts. First performed St Petersburg, 1890.