In 1936, the Soviet
Union was preparing for a major celebration
the following year to mark the centenary
of the death of one of Russia’s most
revered cultural figures, Alexander
Pushkin. Among the planned events was
a dramatisation of the great verse novel
Eugene Onegin with integrated
music by Prokofiev. By December 1936
preparations by the Moscow State Chamber
Theatre were advanced, much of the music
was written, sets had been made and
costumes sewn. Then Prokofiev got a
letter from the Theatre. Capriccio publishes
it for the first time in the CD booklet:-
"The All-Union
Committee for Art Affairs has given
us categorical instructions not to perform
the play Eugene Onegin .... you
are not to conduct any more work ...
on the music. The play…is herewith cancelled."
The production had
fallen foul of the Main Committee for
Repertoires that had sent in an inspection
team of Pushkin Scholars to vet things.
1936 was a perilous year for the arts
in the USSR. Pravda had been attacking
artists for bourgeois formalism. In
January Stalin had personally ordered
the shut-down of Shostakovich’s Lady
Macbeth in the middle of a successful
run the day after seeing the opera.
It could not be a work of the people
because Stalin could not detect any
decent melody. Shostakovich was lucky.
Stalin had certainly shot people for
less than writing tunes he couldn’t
whistle.
As far as I am aware,
the first attempt to stage this project
took place only nine years ago in the
remote Russian town of Yekaterinsburg.
There have been recordings of selected
orchestral numbers from the work, but
apart from this CD, there is only one
other recording currently available
that uses all the music that survives.
It was from Chandos, using English forces
under Sir Edward Downes.
Those who have never
heard the music in context are likely
to be astounded by its quality. Superb
melody abounds starting with a haunting
oboe solo that is then developed with
irresistible, expanding orchestration.
An obvious irony is that even Stalin
might have liked it. There is dance
music that shows off Prokofiev’s gifts
as a great composer for the ballet with
some delightful numbers that include
the inevitable ball scene crops up in
so many of Prokofiev’s dramatic works.
Above all, the music has dramatic impact
appropriate to the text, enhanced by
the composer treating some tunes as
repeating leitmotivs in a way that would,
I am sure, have given a full performance
of the play great cumulative power.
The quality is such that Prokofiev incorporated
some of the music into other works including
the opera War and Peace, and
the ballet Cinderella.
The problem for the
producers of the discs was how to realise
the music in dramatic context. This
is not just incidental music. There
is song, chorus and orchestral music
that backs spoken word, melodrama fashion.
An additional problem is that some of
the music survives in fragments and
some only in piano score.
The Chandos version
took a more speculative, reconstructionist
course than the current recording. There
was considerably more spoken word either
side of music sections as well as completion
of the fragments. The result is that
the recording runs to two full discs
as opposed to Capriccio’s one. There
was also orchestration of some of the
dance numbers that survived in piano
score only, whereas here they are simply
played on the keyboard, although some
of Edward Downes’s orchestrations are
re-used.
Perhaps the most impactful
difference between the two recordings
is that Chandos has the words, which
are given to narrator as well as to
main characters, delivered in English.
Spoken by well-known British actors,
this has the advantage meaning that
Anglophone audiences know what is being
said without recourse to a booklet translation.
Some, including myself, consider the
loss of idiomatic Russian too great
a cost.
This Capriccio recording
has the Russian voices intoning with
far greater dramatic effect. On Chandos,
Timothy West as the narrator has a bland,
polite style that sounds as if he is
delivering a lunch-time poetry reading
at a Women’s Institute in Surrey. The
Russian Tatiana, Chulpan Chamatova,
is particularly striking although it
was a shock when she first speaks because
she is recorded quite loud as if in
an echo chamber. But her delivery of
Tatiana’s Dream has an impassioned,
sibilant sexiness - backed by Prokofiev’s
intense music - that seems to me entirely
appropriate, especially if you agree
with Canadian Pushkin scholar, J. Douglas
Clayton’s assertion a few years ago
that Tatiana’s dream is "masturbatory".
It is in stark contrast to Niamh Cusack
on Chandos who sounds as if she’s
in one of those old Jane Austen costume
drama movies.
The playing of the
Berlin RSO is immaculate and sumptuous,
perhaps a little languid for some but
there is beautiful sound in which to
revel, well recorded.
The same applies to
the "bonus" disc which contains
music from another aborted project designed
for the Pushkin centenary. This was
a film based on the novella, Pique
Dame. It was thought that Stalin
would not tolerate films being shot
on subjects that were not contemporary
in content, by which time Prokofiev
had written and orchestrated most of
the music. I get the impression he was
putting less effort into this than in
Eugene Onegin but there is much
to delight, including an inevitable
ball scene with a delicious trumpet
solo.
The booklet essay does
not even mention Pique Dame but
is detailed on the misfortunes of Eugene
Onegin. I felt that the best way
to listen to the latter was to follow
the Russian with English translation
and read up a synopsis of the action
between numbers. But the booklet has
no synopsis and although the text appears
in French, German and English, it does
not, perversely, have the Russian so
it is impossible to know where you are
within numbers. Also, all the track
titles at the beginning of the book
are only in German which may pose cross-referencing
problems.
This double disc set
represents an important addition to
the Prokofiev recorded canon. Eugene
Onegin was a revelation to me and
made me think what a wonderful opera
Prokofiev might have produced on Pushkin’s
masterpiece. But it would, of course,
have been unthinkable – a heresy - to
try and follow Tchaikovsky’s Onegin,
that popular pillar of Russian culture.
John Leeman
see also review
by Rob Barnett - October Recording
of the Month
Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester/Michail Jurowski 
for
details 
