The Met: Live in HD
Eugene Onegin
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Saturday, May 9 | 1 p.m.
Museum of Art | Sinnott Family – Bank of Utica Auditorium
$26 Members | $32 General Public | $16 Students
Tchaikovsky’s many moods—tender, grand, melancholy—are all given free rein in Eugene Onegin. The opera is based on Pushkin’s iconic verse novel, which reimagines the Byronic romantic anti-hero as the definitive bored Russian aristocrat caught between convention and ennui; Tchaikovsky, similarly, took Western European operatic forms and transformed them into an authentic and undeniably Russian work. At the core of the opera is the young girl Tatiana, who grows from a sentimental adolescent into a complete woman in one of the operatic stage’s most convincing character developments.
Tchaikovsky’s original score neatly divides into each of its three acts: from the timeless rituals of country life to the rural gentry with its troubles and pleasures and, finally, the glittering imperial aristocracy of St. Petersburg. His universally beloved lyric gifts are at their most powerful and multilayered in this opera. Rich ensembles and buoyant dance numbers punctuate the work, and the vocal solos are among the most striking in the repertory: Anyone who can remember the first stirrings of love will be moved by Tatiana’s Letter Scene, in which she rhapsodically composes a letter to Onegin in an outpouring of gorgeous melody. This is rivaled in popularity by the tenor’s moving farewell to his young life in Act II, while Onegin’s Act III narrative on the pointlessness of life borders on Wagnerian.
Following her acclaimed 2024 company debut in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, soprano Asmik Grigorian returns to the Met as Tatiana, the lovestruck young heroine in this ardent operatic adaptation of Pushkin. Baritone Igor Golovatenko is the urbane Onegin, who realizes his affection for her all too late. The Met’s evocative production, directed by Tony Award–winner Deborah Warner, “offers a beautifully detailed reading of … Tchaikovsky’s lyrical romance” (The Telegraph).
Language: Russian
Run Time: 4 hrs., 5 min., with two intermissions
To purchase tickets at the student price, call 315-797-0055.
Cinema Series Sponsor: Elizabeth R. Lemieux, PhD.
