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With his tragic novel, Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin produced a masterpiece that endowed the Russian language with new literary qualities. More than a century later, the choreographer John Cranko, champion of the narrative ballet, takes up Pushkin’s themes, giving shape to his vision of a “theatrical ballet” capable of conveying the passionate density of the narrative through movement alone. Returning to the origins of the verse novel, Tristan Béra traces the link that inextricably unites literature with dance.

Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is the founding masterpiece of modern Russian literature. Defined as an “Encyclopaedia of Russian life”, by the critic Vissarion Belinsky at its publication in single volume form in 1883, this novel of 5,541 verses, written in iambic tetrameters and a virtuoso exercise in style, set the seal on its author’s status as national poet. In the eyes of his commentators, Pushkin, before Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, is the first of the Moderns and embodies what posterity has deemed to be the “Russian soul”. Born in 1799 in Moscow, he was of aristocratic lineage on his father’s side and, on his mother’s, the great grandson of a black slave given as a tribute to the first emperor. This dual heritage is perhaps at the heart of the dynamics and tensions brought into play in his writing and in his life as a poet. From his youth, he was honed in the literary circles of Saint Petersburg, a city of pomp and ceremony that vied with the patriarchal capital, and began openly to resist autocratic power through “mutinous poems” and incendiary pamphlets. In 1823, his subversive behaviour earned him a period in exile, not in Siberia but in Bessarabia, where he began to write Eugene Onegin: “At the moment, I am writing, not a novel but a novel in verse – diabolical difference”.

Pushkin laboured on the work for seven years. The seemingly simple story is that of a “proud dandy”, one of the privileged “golden” youth who, having come into a fortune, decides to move to the country. Fascinated by Napoleon and Lord Byron, portraits of whom are among his possessions alongside their writings, Eugene is a cold-hearted creature no longer capable of exaltation. However, he makes the acquaintance of Lenski, his complete opposite, a romantic poet with a sincere soul who has just finished studying in Germany. Lenski takes him to visit two sisters, one of whom is his fiancée and the other Tatyana Larina. Tatyana is a dreamer immersed in Russian folk tales and sentimental French novels. She falls hopelessly in love with Eugene and writes him a letter. During a secret encounter, the dandy rejects her, giving as an excuse his flighty nature and, in return, flirts shamelessly with her sister. In the different ballet adaptions of the novel this gives rise to a memorable dance scene that naturally excites the ire of Lenski who challenges Onegin to a duel. The hero kills his comrade and then exiles himself. After a lapse of five years wandering the country, Eugene chances to encounter Tatyana, now dazzlingly beautiful, at a ball given by her husband at Saint Petersburg and, in his turn, asks to speak to her in private. In the final scene of the novel, Tatyana, repulsed by the vulgarity and immorality of adultery, resists Eugene’s belated declaration of love, without however concealing the depth of her feelings for him. Eugene “stands there, rooted to the spot”, and the author, in conclusion, addresses the reader who has thus become a character in the story, proclaiming “the horizon of the free novel”.

In 1850, Ivan Turgenev published The Diary of a Superfluous Man which established the literary figure of the “useless” or “superfluous man” as one of the keys to understanding the Russian novel under the autocratic regime in the 19^th century, of which the prototype is the eponymous hero of Eugene Onegin. Although Onegin has certain features comparable in French 19^th century literature, with René or Adolphe, the heroes of Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant, he is profoundly linked to the inegalitarian aspects of Czarist society and to the radical nihilism which developed from 1825 onwards in the wake of the Decembrist uprising. A variation of the romantic hero and derived from the Byronic hero, “the superfluous man” is a rich layabout, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who cynically despises social norms and confounds an existential ennui with gambling, drinking, amorous intrigues and duels. Detached from the distress and the destinies of others, indifferent to the structural iniquity of aristocratic power, in spite of his social position, he is the fatalistic product of the period of the reign of Nicolas I, which corresponded to a profound crisis of values.

But if this novel is familiar to all Russians, who often know whole passages by heart, it was made famous in the West by Tchaikovsky’s adaptation at the end of the 19^th century and that of Prokofiev in the first half of the 20^th. The various translations from Russian have never really been able to convey the beauty of Pushkin’s poetic language. Translators, including Vladimir Nabokov, have burnt their fingers trying to transpose this verse narrative. Most translations seem irremediably flat and the French reader has difficulty imagining the eloquence and flow of a language that so inspired Pushkin’s contemporaries and his fellow Russians. For non-Russian speakers, particularly French speakers, a real mystery therefore enshrouds the novel Eugene Onegin, which the language barrier, the nuances and rhythms of the poetry - difficult to translate -, tend to maintain and even deepen. Ultimately, the transposition of the novel to the operatic stage has proved its best ambassador and provided the most faithful translation of the poetry of Pushkin who, by the way, lauded “the lively imagination and the prodigious charm of ballet”. It was in 1878 and, as legend would have it, after a sleepless night, that Tchaikovsky completed his adaptation of the novel as an opera-ballet, conserving only three acts of the original work and choosing three salient episodes from Onegin’s life. The opera, episodic and similar in structure to Puccini’s La Bohème which is also treated episode by episode, is considered apart in Tchaikovsky’s output as a ballet for adults (unlike Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker) and is one of the most beautiful examples of lyrical opera, free of pomp and finely nuanced. Thanks to the opera-ballet, the novel enjoys its most complete and most immediately accessible formal translation, at the intersection between music, visual arts, theatre, fashion and new corporeal representations. In 1965, the South African choreographer, John Cranko, undertook, in his turn, a three-act adaptation of Onegin in purely ballet form, adapting Tchaikovsky’s music with arrangements and orchestrations by Kurt-Heinz Stolze. His work, which entered the Paris Opera Ballet's repertoire in 2009, is a ballet of great purity whose plot, refocussed around the character of Tatyana, introduces, to paraphrase Théophile Gautier, the elegant and contained romanticism of Pushkin in the domain of Terpsichore. This reading makes one wonder if any other language than dance could replace the Russian language.

In 2013, a new production of I Puritani, directed by Laurent Pelly, entered the Paris Opera’s repertoire. To mark the revival of the production at the Opéra Bastille this season, discover the interview that Laurent Pelly gave to the Opera’s magazine. He reveals his fascination for Bellini’s last work, the scenographic challenges he was confronted with and the use of video as a dramatic tool. 

As a theatre and opera director you are a faithful habitué of the 19^th century. Where would you place I Puritani in your personal geography of that period?

Laurent Pelly: Between romantic opera and bel canto. I think what I find most fascinating in Bellini’s final opera is the singing. It’s true I’ve focused a lot on the 19^th century, but generally on works from the second half. I’ve never really tackled bel canto be it Rossini or Verdi—except for La Traviata which I directed in Santa Fe. But then, La Traviata is no longer bel canto: it’s theatre. I remember when I did L’elisir d’amore at the Opéra Bastille—my first Donizetti—I asked myself a lot of questions. Of course, it was a very theatrical comedy. It certainly wasn’t Handel’s aria da capo... Nevertheless, I found myself confronted with a style new to me, a style comprised of repetitions and variants far removed from sung dialogue. But as a director, I’m most interested in making use of the form to tell a story. With “L’elisir”, using the energy of the singers I was gradually able to get to grips with those stylistic codes to bring them alive, to give meaning to the merest note, to never let the music flow by gratuitously. Today, I’m at exactly the same point with I Puritani: how to build something theatrical from this new musical material? That’s the question I try to answer with the conductor and the performers. My greatest pleasure is working as closely as possible with the singers and chorus to draw on their performance to lend form to my production.

In a work such as I Puritani, do you find the singing—more than the libretto—the true challenge when it comes to the staging?

Yes. I assume that the music predominates because the plot narrative is constructed in a rather odd way. It is serious without really being so. At the start of the opera, how else do we explain the fact that the inhabitants of the jubilant fortress announce the marriage of Elvira to a man from the opposing camp without the young woman being aware of the union herself? How else do we explain that she tries out her nuptial veil on a prisoner whom she doesn’t even know and who turns out to be the Queen who in turn runs off with Arturo. To me, all of that seems to be more fantasy than reality. This was the reasoning behind our decision to tell the story through the subjective eyes of Elvira. Approaching it from that angle enabled us to construct a dramatic narrative that constantly referred to the music even if it meant moving away from historical reality. Furthermore, it seemed to me that the historical narrative was always more of a pretext than a major pillar of the drama. Unlike Victor Hugo who, when he wrote his Cromwell, sourced a significant corpus of literature and fervently questioned his relationship to the Napoleonic myth and his own era through the figure of the Lord Protector, I don’t think that Bellini and his librettist Pepoli were really passionate about 17^th century England or the conflict between the Royalists and Puritans...

The approach of recounting a story through the eyes of a character seems to be more in line with the writing style of a novel or a film screenplay than theatre...

Those are art forms that inspire me greatly. Especially cinema. I often perceive the stage—and the process of developing a scenography—through the movements of an imaginary camera. In shot, reverse-angle shot, travelling shot, wide-angle shots and closeups... In the theatre, I ask myself how can I transpose those cinematographic techniques? How can I obtain the rhythm of an edited film?

For I Puritani, how do you translate the idea of a “subjective camera” with things that are quintessentially theatrical such as scenography, costumes...?

The idea was to use the era—by performing in costumes and historical sets—while at the same time re-examining it: to create a mental world as perceived in the mind of a dreamer. With my stage designer Chantal Thomas, we developed a rather unconventional scenographic object that is both minimalistic and highly complex. The set represents a 17^th century-inspired English castle, albeit one reduced to its angles and lines: it’s an immense cage on a revolving stage that encloses the character in a harsh, austere world, at once historical yet unreal. The same goes for the costumes. I worked from the lines of the era, but I pared them down to make them purer and I used fabrics that were anything but realistic. We present the chorus for example in a highly graphic way. They appear like a set of pawns on a giant chessboard with extremely rigid silhouettes. It is the world as seen through the eyes of an Elvira plagued by madness.

Is the use of video projection—something rather rare in your productions—also part of this process?

Yes, and it’s interesting because the use of such a medium is new for me. It’s an additional experiment that I’m attempting with this I Puritani. At certain times during the performance we project black and white images of close-ups of the characters, which make us lose our spatial bearings and contribute to the nightmarish atmosphere of being confined in the mental space that is Elvira’s mind. By extension, that dramatic concept also allowed me to grapple with the theme of the sacrificial female character which is so pervasive in all—or almost all—of the works from the 19^th century.

Is the question of the condition of women in the 19^th century something that particularly moves you?

Not the condition of women per se, but rather, the jubilation with which the 19^th century theatregoer watched the great heroines suffer and often die as they were served up as sacrifices to bourgeois morality. I did a production of La Traviata this summer... Manon is in the same bracket, Carmen too... Because these women are seeking freedom and fall outside the realms of accepted norms, it causes a scandal, but also a reactionary gratification in seeing them pay with their life for their yearning for emancipation. To be sure, in I Puritani, Elvira survives, however, she still has to experience madness. And since she lives in a male-dominated world at war with itself in which she strives to experience her own desires, I think it makes sense to imagine the work through her eyes.

In addition to your prolific career at the opera, you also work regularly in the theatre. What do you gain from the constant back-and-forth between drama and opera?

Although the two are related, and although I get the impression that I’m doing the same job, working at the opera has greatly enriched the man of the theatre that I was. What I find most interesting in opera is the “absolute convention”: as soon as a character sings, you have to invent solutions to be able to maintain the dream. And since I like to create oneiric dramas this particular “constraint” suits me perfectly. Opera has also taught me to appreciate large spaces: it’s extremely rare for us to work on stages that big in a theatre. And then, the vagaries of programming have meant that I’ve dealt a great deal with works from the 19^th century repertoire at the opera. Meanwhile, at the theatre, I recently staged two plays by Victor Hugo. So inevitably, the two worlds begin to interact—the eras, the styles, the ways of envisaging a production...

You make many references to Victor Hugo, whose plays, in fact, you have often directed. You said jokingly that you could live extremely well in the theatre by just staging the works of Shakespeare and Hugo. In what particular way do those two playwrights nurture and sustain your vision of theatre?

Hugo and Shakespeare—who was a great source of inspiration to the former—are for me two great masters because their theatre closely intertwines human tragedy and comedy. Recently, I directed Macbeth: it’s a fearsome, violent, blood-soaked play, yet it is also one in which I couldn’t help but see a farcical dimension—a dimension that Jarry also appreciated in “Ubu Roi”: murdering everybody to seize and retain power, only to become isolated in one’s own madness... The way that Shakespeare and Hugo have the ability to constantly oscillate between profoundness and the light-hearted or ribald helps me to understand the works that I am directing, including this production of I Puritani: This gigantic, transparent castle-prison, this pathetic murderous war...

Compared to other directors whose aesthetics are immediately identifiable, your productions follow on one after another, yet none are alike—even when you work regularly with the same stage designer. Is it a constant concern for you to renew and invent without reproducing what has come before?

I don’t look at the problem quite in that way. Let’s just say that I believe that the work must assert its aesthetic. That’s why the staging for I Puritani doesn’t resemble Giulio Cesare or L’elisir d’amore, or Platée. With Chantal Thomas my scenographer, we have no formula. We always like to start with a blank slate. Of course, I have my obsessions and my way of telling a story can be influenced as a result: I’m fascinated by theatrical illusion and that fascination can manifest itself in any given production. But what interests me most is to be completely absorbed in a work. Sometimes, I feel the need to transpose the work; to change the era or deconstruct it, because we no longer have the cultural references to understand it. Yet for others, I completely avoid doing so. I just restaged L’Enfant et les sortilèges in Japan for example. When I direct a masterpiece that is so complex in terms of dramaturgy and scenography, my role is, above all, to do everything I can to ensure that it “functions”. If I start to deconstruct it, I risk killing it...