Anush Hovhannisyan as Tatyana and Samuel Dale Johnson as Eugene Onegin
(Picture: Ali Wright)Tchaikovsky based his opera Eugene Onegin, which opened last night at Opera Holland Park, on a Pushkin novel, written 50 years before the opera’s 1879 premiere. The composer kept Pushkin’s title, but the opera could have been called Tatyana Larina, after the teenage girl who is the real focal point of Tchaikovsky’s sympathies. A young innocent, raised on her family’s country estate, she only knows about love from the literature she reads avidly. Onegin, by contrast, is a sophisticated man of the city, world-weary and arrogant, whose rejection of Tatyana’s advances comes back to haunt him years later.
Tchaikovsky wanted to free the drama from the stifling conventions of the opera house so students at Moscow conservatory gave the opera’s first performance. Opera Holland Park is neither opera house nor music college but it has its own distinct identity. It’s a semi-open-air theatre: at one point, two pigeons flew nonchalantly across the stage, and birdsong is a constant presence. Since Covid arrived, the company has rejigged the space, including installing an attractive miscellany of what look like jumble-sale chairs instead of conventional theatrical seating.
