a
TCHAIKOVSKY
HUGEN ONEGIN excerpts
VISHNEVSKAYA
BELOV
LEMESHEV
PETROV
MK 1557 TCHAIKOVSKY: EUGEN ONEGIN excerpts
| GALINA VISHNEVSKAYA EUGEN BELOV
SERGEI LEMESHEV IVAN PETROV
BOLSHO!I THEATRE ORCHESTRA
BORIS KHAIKIN, conductor
The felicitious combination of Pushkin’s bittersweet poetic
romance, HUGEN ONEGIN, with Tchaikovsky’s lyrical music might be
regarded as a well-nigh inevitable event. Pushkin’s sentimental
work was so fondly read by all cultivated Russians that it was
certain to win Tchaikovsky’s favor. Yet the out- pouring of
Tchaikovsky’s inspiration is more directly a revela- tion of what
the limpid story meant to him, traveling as he was within the
heart’s troubled domain. |
In the same year that he began HUGEN ONEGIN, 1877, Tchaikovsky
had drifted into matrimony with a young woman who loved him
desperately but with whom, he confessed later, “T am not the least
in love’. Whether he married out of pity or hope, the separation
nine weeks after the wedding was no less poignant for Tchaikovsky
that the touching scenes of EUGEN ONEGIN. The pathetically sincere
love of Tatiana, whose declaration of love in the “Letter Scene’,
(Side One, band 3),
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BOLSHOI THEATRE ORCHESTRA
BORIS KHAIKIN Conductor
he made so affecting, must have seemed very close to his own
experience. Also, the kindly but firm answer of Onegin, (Side One,
band 4), shunning that “bed of roses’, may have seemed, in the
light of Tchaikovsky’s own disaster, a discretion better than
valor. The musical result, itself, shows how completely Tchaikovsky
was attuned to Pushkin’s nostalgic poetic realism. EUGEN ONEGIN,
occupied Tchaikovsky’s travels and “rest” abroad, being completed
in 1878. It was first performed at the Maly Theatre in Moscow on
March 28, 1879, and becamé his first really popular work for the
stage. The practical difficulties of adapting a verse novel were in
part solved with the libretto, which Tchaikovsky and Konstantin
Shilovsky adapted from Pushkin. For the rest, Tchaikovsky’s
unfailing melodic instinct and emotional vitality enabled him to
triumph over all artistic problems. The result is one of the most
delightful “collabora- tions” of poet and composer in the realm of
lyric theatre.
Other operas on MK
EUGEN ONEGIN (Complete) MK 204D
TSAR SALTAN (Complete) MK 206C
PIQUE DAME (Complete) MK 207C
A LIFE FOR THE TSAR (excerpts)..MK 1554
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