Ruzan Mantashyan

“Eugene Onegin tells a love story that doesn’t work”. This is how Ralph Fiennes sums up the plot of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera, inspired by Pushkin’s work. A jaded young dandy, Onegin sets shy Tatiana on fire at first sight. Overcoming her reticence, she writes him a passionate love letter. Alas, he brutally refuses, giving her a lecture on morality. However, years later, after a duel, he falls in love with the young woman who is now Prince Gremin’s wife. Will she yield to his advances? Fascinated by Russian culture and attuned to the dramatic intensity of Tchaikovsky’s music, Ralph Fiennes is directing his first opera. If he chooses to use pictorial simplicity to evoke the Russian countryside or a ballroom, it is all the better to emphasise the emotions of the characters, as complex as they are modern.

There are elements of Macbeth in this political fable, in which the ghost of the child that Boris has had killed in order to seize the throne appears as an impostor. Adapting Pushkin's epic poem, Mussorgsky composed a meditation on the solitude of power, a populist drama in which the real protagonist is the Russian people with its burden of eternal suffering. Ivo Van Hove is no stranger to grand political frescos. This is his first production for the Paris Opera.

Taking a classic opera and turning it on its head, Karin Henkel, a leading director in contemporary German theatre, offers a new interpretation of Verdi's masterpiece. In a world dominated by men, where women are exploited and history repeats itself, she explores the fate and sacrifice of a 19th-century heroine through a contemporary female perspective.