Eugène Onéguine

In a few weeks, The Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov, currently playing at Opera Bastille, will be succeeded by Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: two major composers among the mostly widely performed today and two of the most prolific of their generation. Although they have a number of things in common, the two men began their careers in opposite camps, representing two different currents in 19^th century Russian music: academic for Tchaikovsky and nationalist for Rimsky-Korsakov.

Tchaikovsky was one of the first students to enrol at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire after its foundation in 1862 by Anton Rubenstein, a westernised representative of Russian music who had trained in the German tradition and accorded only a relative importance to the ethnic music of his country. Rimsky-Korsakov was a member of The Five, a group of Slavophiles initiated by Balakirev, a conductor as charismatic as he was sectarian and dictatorial. Opposed to the academic teaching of music he believed that Russian music should be developed from the national legacy of Glinka, drawing only selectively on western models, (primarily Berlioz). However, Tchaikovsky, who always acknowledged his ethnic roots, was no less attached to thematic subjects and national folklore than his colleagues in the opposite camp; he widely demonstrated this in both the choice of his sources of inspiration and his use of folk melodies, which he easily combined with his Germanic, French and Italian grounding. There was no ostracism between himself and The Five. Music critic for diverse publications, he gave a favourable reception to Rimsky-Korsakov’s first symphonic works (First Symphony, Sadko, Serbian Fantasy), whilst noting, not without justification, some of their technical shortcomings: “There can be no doubt that this exceptionally talented man is destined to become one of the most admirable exponents of our art”, he concluded. On his side, Rimsky-Korsakov gradually became aware of the limits of the teaching received under the aegis of Balakirev, particularly after his appointment in 1871 as professor of composition and orchestration at the Conservatoire of Saint Petersburg, where he himself had never studied. He explained this with perfect candour in his Chronical of my Musical Life in which he enumerated the gaps in his knowledge in detail. He then undertook various exercises in counterpoint: fugues, canons and chorales with figured bass, which he sent to Tchaikovsky to correct. The latter replied to him with a beautiful letter showing his esteem: “I sincerely admire and bow down before your noble modesty as an artist and your astonishing strength of character. These countless exercises in counterpoint that you have written, the sixty fugues and the numerous other musical subtleties, all this is such an exploit for a man who, eight years ago, composed Sadko, that I would like to proclaim it before the whole world!” For the moment, the relationship between the two men seemed to be developing with perfect amity. At around the same period, Tchaikovsky seems to have become closer to his colleagues when his Second Symphony, The Little Russian, which quoted Ukrainian folk melodies, elicited their admiration. The 1870s were the years of Tchaikovsky’s period of intensely Russian inspiration: the Second Symphony was followed by the opera L’Opritchnik (1872) in which the action takes place during the reign of Ivan the Terrible (16^th century) and the incidental music for Ostrovski’s play Snegurochka (1873) which Tchaikovsky laced with twenty symphonic and vocal numbers, featuring an abundance of folk melodies, a perfect masterpiece testifying to his genuine attachment to folklore and showing another facet of the work of a composer too unilaterally labelled as “pathetic”. However, a cloud was to darken the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov when, seven years later, in 1880, the latter threw himself into a composition on the same theme and wrote an opera which he was always to consider as his most accomplished work… Whilst conserving a semblance of perfect courtesy to his colleague, Tchaikovsky vented his resentment in a letter to Jurgenson, his editor: “Is it not disagreeable to you too to know that our subject has been stolen, that Lel is to sing other music on the same text, and that something intimate and precious has been snatched from me and used in another arrangement. I am so vexed that I could cry”!

It is pointless to deny it: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka clearly reflects the influence of its Tchaikovskian predecessor, and a comparison, number by number, is not always to the advantage of the opera over the incidental music.

From this point, as was "only too human", an embryonic rivalry developed between the two men, both of whom could pretend to the accolade of leading composer in the Russian pantheon. They did not contend on entirely the same territory and each had his own trump cards. Tchaikovsky, carried along by the patronage of Madame von Meck, quickly became a “media” personality, as we would say nowadays, initially at national level, then more and more on a European scale and beyond. The 1880s were to see him triumph first in Prague, where The Maid of Orleans was a resounding success; in France, where his works were published by the editor, Félix Mackar, and performed by Edouard Colonne’s orchestra and in Germany where he met Brahms and Grieg… In 1891, he crossed the Atlantic to inaugurate the Carnegie Hall; he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge… International renown was to come much later and more gradually for Rimsky-Korsakov. Although the twelve years Tchaikovsky spent teaching at the Conservatoire in Moscow (1866-1878) brought him the esteem of certain of the musical elite, in particular Serge Taneïev, they did not make him a leading composer of the Russian school: he did not have the stature, and teaching was burdensome to him. This did not prevent him from helping, with his habitual kindness, his juniors: Anton Arenski whose work he offered to programme in a concert instead of his own Romeo and Juliet – a really exceptional example of self-abnegation in favour of a colleague; and Rachmaninov whose opera Aleko he admired. Meanwhile, Rimsky-Korsakov, who, in addition to a teaching post in Saint Petersburg, was deputy director of the Imperial Chapel, with Balakirev at the helm once more, and who was soon to be appointed conductor of the Russian Symphony Concerts, only composed intermittently although he exercised considerable influence on dozens of students, an influence which was to extend well into the 20^th century. Another difference that is far from negligible: politically, Tchaikovsky was a conservative and a monarchist and was soon to be presented at the court of the Tsar Alexander III who granted him a pension for life, and he would set poems by the Arch-Duke Konstantine Romanov to music. As for Rimsky-Korsakov, he steered clear of politics as long as his profession was not involved, but his position, however discrete it may have been, was clearly of another persuasion. It was only later, in 1905, that, taking up the defence of his students at the Conservatoire for having taken part in demonstrations, he found himself temporarily suspended from his duties before being reinstated when one of his students, Alexander Glazunov, took over as director of the establishment.

Rimsky-Korsakov must have realised how much tension the Snegurochka affair had created between himself and Tchaikovsky and he waited until after his colleague’s death before taking up a subject that he had already used for an opera: Vakula the Smith, which in 1874 Tchaikovsky had adapted from Gogol’s Ukrainian tale, Christmas Eve, for a competition organised by the Russian Musical Society, which he won. Dissatisfied with the first version, Tchaikovsky reworked it in 1885 with the title Tcherevitchki (The Slippers or The Tsarina’s Slippers) though still not producing a masterpiece. “During Tchaikovsky’s lifetime, I could not have taken up the subject without causing him pain”, wrote Rimsky-Korsakov in his Chronicle, - a phrase as laconic as it was telling in ethical terms. Composed from 1894 to 1895, his opera Christmas Eve, a masterpiece still neglected in the West, is another testimony to Rimsky-Korsakov’s osmosis with supernatural themes linked to the cult of the season and the deities of Slavic paganism, an area in which he was much more at ease than Tchaikovsky. However, setting aside Snegurochka and Christmas Eve, to oppose the two composers through a comparison of their works, to favour one against the other, would be a completely sterile position, greatly in excess of the mutual umbrage their parallel lives may have caused.  

In declaring her love for Onegin, Tatiana makes a gesture that the writer Nicolas Cavaillès takes up here. He has made it the initial theme of his variations on the gravity of bodies. In this silent dialogue of postures, chairs and benches acquire new nobility.   

Tatiana spends her time sitting: silently, sadly, she dreams, sitting in the window at her parents’ home, looking out over the dreary countryside where she grew up, where she is waiting; sitting at her table, in her room, she observes herself pityingly in the mirror; sitting at the banqueting tables to which her condition of nubile young woman condemn her, and then as a high-ranking wife, judiciously married off, she smiles amid her boredom. Only love, her impatience, her fevers and her insomnia have ever dragged Tatiana to her feet: she has only ever stood up once in her life, for the short, tragic episode summed up in the name Eugene Onegin, and that one could also call a double humiliation. Was she not right, the ingénue, to stand up as she did then, in all the freshness and spontaneity of her sudden passion? Why should she have felt ashamed? But she hastened to sit down again, to write an unfortunate letter to Onegin that said everything, and ruined all. What a humiliation was to follow!

As for Onegin, he never sits down; standing, he rejects the young woman whose audacious letter he read and whom he sought out at her home, in the wood adjoining the domain, in the garden of her laughter-filled childhood, of her romantic adolescence. She is seated: having seen him approach from afar, she sinks, overcome with emotion, onto a conveniently placed bench. Having come to reject her, Onegin does not sit down next to her, in no way seeks to console her, on the contrary: in the ambivalence of his feelings towards her, in his chilly empathy, he wants above all to teach her a lesson. Cynical and powerful, upright and straight, the blasé young baritone inflicts a masochistic “confession” on the pretty young girl sitting before him: I could never love anyone but you, Tatiana, but happiness is denied me, and routine would kill our marriage… A peremptory but lucid discourse, the aggressive ricochets of which pierce Tatiana’s naive heart like nails: she can find nothing to say in response, she remains seated, paralysed by what she has heard; it is Onegin who, having finished speaking, raises her from her bench to bring the torture to an end. The scene is worse than a duel, in which the adversaries in their vanity are still facing each other, on an apparently equal footing; here, Onegin operates with an almost immoral facility; he crushes the woman who explicitly confided in him, he responds to her kittenish desire for affection with the well-judged sermon of a so-called accursed creature. The affair is resolved in five minutes. Everything is very proper, each plays his or her part, and buries deep down inside the absurdity of this fiasco, but in their lack of experience, in the rigidity of their youthful souls, Onegin and Tatiana will persist to the bitter end: she lets herself be trampled on and he tramples her down; each is resigned to a life of disappointed hopes.

It is he who will regret it most… Onegin will never forget how Tatiana, stunned by her own boldness and by her emotions, collapsed on the bench, the day he came to reject her: in spite of all her confused emotions, it was the fall of a queen… She fell for him, but from the way she fell, the manner in which she collapsed, he instinctively felt, at the time, and understood later very clearly, that the poor naïve girl sitting on her rustic bench was worth infinitely more than him, who would always remain upright, frozen by shame and self-loathing, always feeding the nameless fear within him that prevented him from sitting down: the thought of the absence of a chair behind him.

It must be stated that, at the back of Onegin’s mind there persists a curious Russian joke, the legacy of his years of training, an anecdotal riddle which nevertheless has permanently conditioned his understanding of the world. Here it is, this light-hearted enigma: When a group of women enter the Royal Box at the theatre, how can you tell for certain which one of them is the Queen, the Empress, the Tzarina? Before they sit down, every woman checks her chair, places a hand on it; the Queen, however, sits down without a backward glance. A humorous saying suitable enough for the education of dim-witted girls, perhaps, and yet! The proud misanthropist, the quasi-nihilist Onegin owes much to that long-forgotten lesson. Love, hope, God even and meaning so sought after for so long, the meaning of life: are these not just so many chairs on which we hope to seat ourselves and enjoy a little rest, support or protection? But if we mistrust these chairs, we cannot sit down on them, and we remain standing, lost and ridiculous, like some one who remains on his feet during the liturgy, at a concert or even at a dinner party, when every one else is seated. The difficulty stems precisely from the fact that, in order to sit on these chairs, like kings, like queens, we must believe in them: we must be intimately persuaded that the chair is there, behind us, because we want it to be there. Even when there is no chair, it is enough to let oneself sink back with the desire of finding a chair there for the chair to exist: thus do queens, thus do kings.

Onegin lacked either flexibility or faith. Whatever the case, all was clarified, light was shed on the irony of his fateful destiny when, years later the Petersburg loner came by chance to wander through the palace of a Muscovite prince where he saw Tatiana again: sitting at the centre of the noble drawing room, sitting there with as much simplicity as majesty, with as much calm as indifference. Humiliated in his turn, mortified, conquered for ever by the girl who was once in love with him, whose spontaneous outpourings he scorned, Onegin exclaimed:
  
«Царицей кажется она !» «Tsaritsei kajetsia ona!» «She looks like a queen!»     

She believed she was a victim,
He was pleased to act as executioner;
She was seated like a queen,
Whilst he remained standing
Like an idiot.    

Nicolas Cavaillès