Arizona Opera has mounted Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” just once in its 43 seasons — back in the 1999-2000 season.
It’s not an easy piece to cast; there aren’t too many people who sing in Russian well enough to pull it off.
But the Arizona Opera Chorus has a number of Russian speakers who were itching to do the work. And when the company had the chance to cast soprano Corinne Winters in the lead role of Tatiana and tenor Zach Borichevsky as Onegin’s nemesis Lensky, that sealed the deal.
“It felt like a right fit,” said Arizona Opera General Director Ryan Taylor, who said the production also celebrates Arizona’s Russian populations. Phoenix is home to a vibrant and active Russian community and Tucson also is home to native Russian speakers.
Arizona Opera opens “Eugene Onegin” at Tucson Music Hall Saturday night as its debut in the Tucson Desert Song Festival. The third annual event closes this weekend.
“Eugene Onegin” is the story of the naive Tatiana, who falls for the well-to-do playboy Onegin. When she professes her love for him in a letter, he ignores her. When they meet again, he rebuffs her advances, condescendingly telling her that he is not meant to be married. Onegin and Lensky end up in a duel that ends badly for Lensky. Onegin travels abroad to escape.
Years pass before Onegin and Tatiana see one another again. She is married and is apparently a striking beauty; he’s immediately smitten. But when he tries to rekindle her love for him, proposing they elope, she tells him she still loves him but she’s staying put with her husband and her commitment. (Here’s where Arizona Opera’s pop-culture tagline “If he liked it, then he should have put a ring on it” — a reference to Beyoncé’s hit song “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” — comes into play.)
“This is utterly unlike anything else we’re doing this season,” Taylor said, explaining that “Onegin” plays out more like a series of lyrical scenes rather than a drawn-out, drama-drenched opera. “It’s real humans making extremely poor decisions and living with the consequences.”
Winters, in her third appearance with Arizona Opera, is making her Tatiana role debut. She was here last February in the role of the consumption-wracked Mimi in Puccini’s “La Boheme.”
The role of Tatiana — which she described as her dream role — is tragic, but in an entirely different way.
“It’s not the kind of tragedy I normally play where I die,” she explained. “She has to be strong and carry the burden. Onegin is her true love, but he missed the boat basically. … It’s so heartbreaking almost in a deeper way than death. When someone dies you can still have an idealized version of them. But when you know they are out in the world and you can’t be with them, it’s heartbreaking. … I’m obsessed with her.”
