ONEGIN at Teatr Wielki - Opera Narodowa, Moniuszko Auditorium

Onegin’s contemporaries felt offended by the irony, which the poem’s narrator, the title hero, used to chip away at the world with. Half a century later Tchaikovsky translated that irony into the melancholy of feelings that had failed to meet. It is as if in 1878 the composer sensed the decline of Russian gentry culture. Nowadays the climate of the fragility of the repesented world seems to be a musical and a spiritual discovery of Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, his message to the people of the coming age of destruction. The story of Tatiana‘s joyless adventure, of the unknowing Onegin and the pure in spirit Lensky, became a parable about the escape of time, which steals the sentiments of youth, the freshness of feelings and the joy of life, leaving one’s soul so empty, as the scene of Mariusz Treli?ski’s performance that for 10 years has been making the Warsaw opera afficionados sad.