"An ear to my confession lend; to thy decree my will I bend"
Cranko first discovered the story of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin's novel in London in the 1950s, through Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's opera of the same name, and longed to bring it into the world of dance. After his first rejection, he successfully attempted to take up the same title a few years later in his new home in Stuttgart. However, Tchaikovsky's opera score was not recommended as a fitting bed for the new production, so Cranko teamed up with musical director Kurt-Heinz Stolze, who arranged a selection of Tchaikovsky's compositions (from the piano pieces from The Seasons and the Impromptu in A flat major, to the symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini, the concert duet Romeo and Juliet, excerpts from the opera Cherevichki, and Overture in F major) into a coherent piece that is particularly well thought out in its use of recurring musical themes and motifs.
The same principles are also used by Cranko as choreographer and director. His Onegin could be called a ballet of mirrors, as they are present throughout the three-act piece. In the opening scene, Olga and Tatiana, according to an old Russian folk tradition, are looking into a mirror in the hope of seeing their future husband. In the very last scene, Tatiana sees her incoming husband, Gremin (the same name as he has in Tchaikovsky's opera), in the mirror's reflection. The mirror also plays a role in the second scene of the first act, when the title character himself emerges from it into Tatiana's dream to sweep her up into his arms in a whirlwind of a romantic duet. Pushkin himself also makes use of mirroring through the love letters of his two central characters. Cranko translates the rejection of these letters onto the stage as a violent, forceful tearing at the hands of the recipients.
The ballet's libretto draws clearly from the opera, to the point that one sometimes cynically wonders whether the choreographer really wanted to adapt Pushkin's book or whether he just translated its dramatisation by P.I. Tchaikovsky and K. S. Shilovsky. In all fairness, as strong and powerful the storyline of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is, it is still a novel in verse, laced with highly lyrical scenes. Written in the third person, but by an unreliable narrator, who inserts himself into the action and, by breaking down the fourth wall, regularly addresses his audience, which does not make an ideal starting point for a work of theatre that, by definition, needs dramatic situations. Even more so then, for a dance piece that has to manage without words. From this perspective, I can logically understand some of Cranko's directing choices. Furthermore, it is impossible not to acknowledge that the ballet that he has created is brilliantly put together and has a coherent, skillfully composed structure. However, the more I watch Onegin, the more problematic I find the deliberate deviations and wilful detours from Eugene Onegin.
“Though he ne’er designed to slay himself with blade or ball, indifferent he became to all”
With Cranko, the story is condensed. Although the ballet is three acts long, the full length, including two intermissions, fits comfortably under 135 minutes. Stage shortcuts are a great invention, but if condensing the key events leads to their flattening, or the flattening of the characters involved, I consider that quite the problem, especially when the complex, ambiguous, and layered characters become mere templates, faded copies of their literary predecessors. To avoid any misunderstanding, Cranko's Onegin still provides the dancers with one of the best stories to tell and experience in dance and, one can hardly contest the genius of Tatiana and Onegin's last, emotionally exuberant pas de deux, the desperation and agony of the scene before the duel between Eugene and Lensky, the rising tension of the Larina family party with its foreboding bubbling conflict, and even the romanticism of Tatiana's literal dream duet with her chosen one.
All of these aforementioned scenes are examples of varying degrees of deviation from Pushkin's text that might be successfully viewed as necessary for the theatre situations to be effective. Lensky's slapping of Onegin with the subsequently thrown glove is considerably more dramatic than sending a formal written message. Similarly, the sisters' presence at a deserted forest clearing at dawn, where two former friends are about to put a bullet in each other's heads, is more comprehensible and impactful in its effect on the audience as it multiplies the emotional tension. I may perhaps also try to understand the dismissal of the two main male characters' friendship at the expense of Lensky's romance with Olga. Yet, why Cranko choses to transform Tatiana's dark dream of Pushkin, full of terrifying woodland creatures, and Onegin's morally ambiguous, albeit affectionate demeanour, into an uncomplicated love scene which feels like the fulfillment of the ballet cliché of at least one reciprocated, saccharine-sweet romantic duet between the main characters in every piece, remains a mystery to me. The potential answer, that this is yet another example of the mirroring and that this duet is a counterpart to the final scene, is not as grounded for me as it probably was for the choreographer and his team.
But by far the strongest discrepancy I regularly find myself fighting with is the portrayal of the characters themselves. Onegin, regardless of its name, is much more Tatiana's ballet — not only does her presence on stage open and close the piece, but Cranko also presents her as an Ancient Greek heroine, standing with clenched fists on a vacant stage in the finale, as a manifestation of the triumph of morals and fidelity in marriage, even at the cost of great personal sacrifice. What he ignores, however, is that Tatiana, by the end of Pushkin's novel, carries bitterness and hurt, as well as frustrated resignation over the loss of her village life, and a suppressed yet profound dissatisfaction with her new social status and the role she has had to learn to play and carry with seeming poise as the wife of a general, notwithstanding her inner torment, as nothing could possibly be farther from who she was and who she always wanted to be. While I find the omission of these facets of her character development problematic, it is not as fundamental as Cranko's oversimplified depiction of the eponymous (anti-)hero (and I'm not talking about his moustache in the last act, which, as an aristocrat without a relevant military position in nineteenth-century Czarist Russia, he simply would not have had, a battle that has only ever been won by The Bolshoi back in 2013).
