Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin (Eugène Onéguine) at the Opéra Garnier in Paris
Opéra Garnier, Paris, Wednesday February 18 2026
Conductor: Case Scaglione. Production: Ralph Fiennes. Sets: Michael Levine. Costumes: Annemarie Woods. Lighting: Alessandro Carletti. Choreography: Sophie Laplane. Onegin: Boris Pinkhasovich. Tatiana: Ruzan Mantashyan. Lensky: Bogdan Volkov. Olga: Marvic Monreal. Prince Gremin: Alexander Tsymbalyuk. Larina: Susan Graham. Filipievna: Elena Zaremba. Monsieur Triquet: Peter Bronder. Zaretski: Amin Ahangaran. Commander: Mikhail Silantev. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris.
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| Photos: © Guergana Damianova - OnP |
A handful of quotes to start the ball rolling:
‘Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.’
(Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance.)
‘Le grand ennemi de l’art, c’est le bon goût’ (art’s greatest enemy is good taste).
(Marcel Duchamp.)
‘C’est plat’ (as in ‘platitude’).
My neighbour at the first interval.
‘J’adore cette partition. Qu’est-ce qu’on s’est ennuyé !’ (I love this score. Were we ever bored !).
Anonymous woman on the grand staircase as we left for dinner.
‘When I write it up (...) I may have to explain what “Un robinet d'eau tiède” means.’
Me, just back from the show.
Because Ralph Fiennes is a famous actor, his first ever opera production, at the Palais Garnier no less, created quite a buzz. It sold out in no time, and even towards the end of the run, when I arrived on Wednesday night, there were people begging for tickets outside in the rain. It occurred to me, then, that inviting famous actors to direct operas might be one way struggling houses could get more - and younger - bums on seats: Il pirata directed by Johnny Depp, for example. But while it may fill the coffers, it’s no guarantee of artistic success.
For a change, this article is going to be made up of a mix of quotations and comments of my own. As I just said, I went to this Onegin towards the end of the series, so it’s been written about over and over by now, since January. As I’m feeling lazy, I’m just going to dip, practically at random, into some of the accounts that chimed with me, in a kind of press-review way, and run these excerpts, originally in French, through a translation app.
I’ll start with Le Figaro’s (and France Musique’s) Christian Merlin on the subject of Fiennes’ production.
‘Not much to say about Fiennes' staging, which falls into the usual trap of film-makers tackling opera: in Michael Levine's vast sets, he sticks to conventions as dismaying as the choreography. Between the illegible futurism of Calixto Bieito's Ring and the banal clichés of this Onegin of yesteryear, there must be a middle ground! (...) Ralph Fiennes offers us a spectacle reminiscent of the BBC's highly respectful literary adaptations, at least in terms of the care taken with the historical costumes.’
(French daily Le Figaro.)
Yes, the eccentric, near-comical, contemporary choreography, incongruously reminiscent of some of the whackier dances in Laurent Pelly’s production of Platée, in the same house, indeed stood out (like a sore thumb?) in this otherwise literal production. The costumes (did I read the Opéra’s workshops hand-tailored and fitted 300 in all?) were as beautifully designed and made as (the 700) for Francesca Zambello’s War and Peace, long ago, but I wondered why, at the St Petersburg ball, they were all jet black. Still in mourning for Lensky, perhaps: Onegin was crouched over his body, in a scattering of snow, as the curtain rose on the last act. That snow became, instead, chalk on the ballroom floor.
Let’s move on, with a snippet from Laurent Bury on Concertclassic:
‘With its haughty hero, who scorns a young girl inspired by her reading, Pushkin's novel here seems to bring together Mr. Darcy and Marianne Dashwood, or in other words, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. And when Tchaikovsky's opera adds to this basic premise its ball scenes, where soldiers of the neighboring regiment rule the roost, it becomes even easier to see St. Petersburg as Pemberley.’
(Concertclassic.)
According to François Lesueur on Wanderersite, the production aims to respect...
'... the author's spirit down to the idealised images his subject evokes (nature, the woods, the customs of Russian rural high society, and the ostentatious luxury of the great aristocrats), sparing us nothing. The sad forest of birch trees that extends to the huge stage curtain, seen many times over; the carpet of leaves that the peasants must clear away to dance after the harvest; the young girl's bedroom; the sinister St. Petersburg palace (...) nothing is missing. Michael Levine (...) has created large, drab sets that have been seen a thousand times on all the biggest stages, punctuating each moment of the drama.'
Among those ‘idealised images’, the good-natured intermingling of peasantry and landowners looked unlikely to me.
‘In his eagerness to remain faithful to the text and demonstrate his reverential loyalty, the actor and director brings nothing new to this lethargic and laboriously classical Eugene Onegin. (...) Fiennes's version, easy to stage but above all consensual to a fault, risks soon wearying audiences.’
(Wanderersite.)
On to the musical side. All of these review quotations are about performances conducted by Semyon Bychkov. The one I saw was, however, led by someone new to me, Case Scaglione, music director and chief conductor of the Orchestre national d'Île-de-France, the Île-de-France being, basically, the region of 5,000 square miles surrounding Paris. All of the singing was good, but Scaglione’s conducting, meltingly tender in some soft passages, was otherwise scrupulously, meticulously unexciting. No colour, no relief, no passion… all, so it felt, a featureless, well-behaved mezzo-forte.
Someone whose opinions I take seriously, on a world-famous opera forum, often reminds us the conductor is the person responsible for the story-telling in opera. While all the singing was intrinsically of a high order, with this young Texan studiously avoiding drama as he beat time, it was rarely stimulating or dramatically convincing, with one major exception (as we shall soon see). Also, once again on an empty stage with no reflecting sets, the singers, when not lined up at above the pit, sounded distant.
I’ll start with Onegin himself. I’d seen him before in Boris Godunov, at the Bastille in 2018, and wrote: ‘Boris Pinkhasovich was an extremely impressive Clerk of the Duma: a solid, straightforward sound.’ According to Merlin in Le Figaro again:
‘In a concert version, we would have applauded Boris Pinkhasovich's Onegin, such is the fullness, consistency, and richness of his voice. But his characterization is so bland that we are unable to take any interest in him.’
It was hard to see him as the title character, the star, last out at curtain calls.
I'd actually seen Ruzan Mantashyan in that very same Boris, but, ‘In the 1869 version there isn't a great deal for the women to do, and there isn’t much to say about them.’ In Onegin, understandably François Lesueur, on Wanderersite, found more:
‘With her supple, powerfully arched voice and girlish face and figure, Ruzan Mantashyan's Tatiana has everything going for her. Her vocal line is sustained, her projection assertive, and her delivery masterful, but her interpretation lacks depth, leaving us unable to connect with her character's experiences, unable to be moved or touched by them.’
Her top notes were especially impressive. But to me, her personification of Tatiana looked, from beginning to end, like the Little Match Girl having a particularly freezing night. Mousy, miserable and uncharismatic.
Marvic Monreal, as her sister Olga, radiated commitment, as in Mahler’s 8th in Brussels last season, but had, vocally, less distinctive personality at Garnier.
Susan Graham naturally needs no introduction. She made a noble, even glamorous Larina, but was overshadowed, vocally, by Elena Zaremba’s lively, variegated Filipievna.
Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang Le Grand Inquisiteur in Don Carlos at the Bastille last year, when I found he lacked some of the evil blackness needed. He was better-cast as the paternal Gremin. Peter Bronder brought more vocal strength, suppleness and colour to Monsieur Triquet than the last-gasp, wheezy Emperor Altoums we sometimes hear in the role. And Tehran-born Amin Ahangaran was a noticeably promising Zaretski.
I left my ‘one major exception’ till last. Bogdan Volkov is the Ukrainian tenor whose incredible portrayal of an autistic youth many must surely recall from videos of Tcherniakov’s Brussels production of Rimsky’s Czar Saltan. I saw him as Lensky, also in Brussels, in 2023 (with Sally Matthews at her very best, and Stéphane Degout’s near-peerless Onegin), and wrote: ‘Bogdan Volkov has a clear, sweet, lyrical voice that felt a bit short on body at the start, but by the time of 'Kuda, kuda' he'd found his footing and gave a beautiful performance of what I recently saw described as one of the top ten tenor arias in the repertoire.’
That corresponds exactly to Wednesday’s performance, some of it daringly quiet and delicate. Christian Merlin’s take is as follows:
‘... Bogdan Volkov turns it into a theatrical monologue rich in nuance, with a voice that is less charming than others, but which more than compensates for this with its ability to imbue each word and each note with a different emotional weight.’
So now, what does ‘Un robinet d’eau tiède’ mean? Well, ‘robinet’ is a tap or faucet, ‘eau’ is water, and ‘tiède’ means tepid. So ‘Un robinet d’eau tiède’, when applied to someone’s talk, is an uninterrupted flow of tepid platitudes. More widely, it is a continuous stream of something inoffensive, not necessarily even unpleasant, but ultimately bland. Like this Onegin, fundamentally faultless singing notwithstanding.
And of course...
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