Eugen Onegin

Coproduction with the Wiener Staatsoper, Premiere in Vienna 2009

“Repressed longings and fears, the coldness of social norms and the inability to live the happiness he dreams for form the impulses for a composer, who like his female protagonist Tatiana, could not live the love he wanted to in 19th century Russia.
In preparing my production I was interested above all in the timeless story of the young protagonists, who stand on the threshold of youth and adulthood and attempt to feel at home in their lives. They all search very passionately for love or adventure, enter conflicts with each other, fail to come together, fight duels with each other, because the emotions they feel for each other cannot be put into any conventional form. That the story takes place in Russia is of secondary interest to me, it could take place in Tokyo, Vienna or Berlin – it’s about people who are hungry for life who don’t reach each other and a modern big city person like Onegin, who is only concerned with hedonism, doesn’t want to be pinned down anywhere, dashing from event to event, doesn’t want to grow up, cannot accept any relationship, and instead wants to keep all his options open and in doing so lets the love of his life slip away to end up lonely and empty, meaningless and friendless, lacking any substantial life. When is youth over? When to I decide to commit to someone? What do I do if I love my best friend more than social norms permit? What do I do if I no longer feel anything at all and constantly need to distract myself, rushing from one party to the next and only realise that my entire life has passed me by when it’s too late? These are all questions Tchaikovsky’s Onegin asks.”

Falk Richter
Berlin, February 2008

Falk Richter staged Tchaikovsky’s opera at the Opera Tokyo Nomori and at the Wiener Staatsoper (conductor: Seiji Ozawa), where it was performed until 2019 with Anna Netrebko in the role of Tatyana, among others.