Doing Our Best to Make Things Jolly

I went to see the live matinee HD broadcast of Renee Fleming and Dmitry Hvorostovsky in the Met’s Eugene Onegin at my local movie theater.

It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.  If I hadn’t already decided earlier this year that I was pretty interested in opera, this definitely would have made it happen.  Hvorostovsky has been, only through recordings, my favorite singer and vocal idol, and I was excited for a chance to see him actually perform a role.  Various reviews I’ve read say things like, “this is the role he was born to play,” which sounds pretty plausible to me.  He was vocally as incredible as I would have hoped (and wow, he really just does have some ridiculously amazing breath support), but I didn’t know he would be as dramatically phenomenal as he was.  There’s a stereotype of opera singers as unable to act, and sometimes I can see why — the Met Puritani (Netrebko excepted) comes to mind — but this production exhibited truly phenomenal acting as well as singing.  As in, literally among the best acting I’ve ever seen in any medium.  I don’t know how you’d make it better.

I know (barely) enough about the opera world at this point to know that Renee Fleming is something of a controversial performer, and that at least a significant minority (maybe more?) of fans and critics don’t care for her.  This was my first time seeing her (assuming television Mormon Christmas specials don’t count), but I thought she was superb.  I took a little while to warm up to her, and there was a minute about halfway through her letter-wring aria when I was bored.  I’m surprised at myself for that minute now, in retrospect — I suspect my mind just wandered.  By the end of the aria I realized that it was amazing.  Her final scene with Onegin seemed to me to be perfection.
The other thing that really struck me about this Onegin was just how powerful a story it is.  I didn’t feel at all like what seems to be the prototype in non-comic opera.  People aren’t killing lovers in fits of rage, or slowly and inevitably dying while savoring last moments of love.  This was just a realistic and sad and excellent love story, where we relate to all the characters, and all the decisions, and see how they lead to the very sad, but not tragic, ending.  Tchaikovsky (I spelled it right on my first try!  Rule!) adapted the opera from a verse novel, which I’m sure was superb.

At this moment, Eugene Onegin is my favorite opera. But I know that I was lucky enough to see a phenomenal production of it, and also that there is so very, very much left for me to explore and discover.

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