Prokofiev's Eugene Onegin music was written for an abortive production in 1937, and has since languished. It is not an opera, nor is the enterprise really covered by the term incidental music, since, especially in the later stages, Prokofiev uses music and the accumulated resonances of motives to develop the drama as well as to heighten the effect of the spoken poetry. This is, indeed, chosen so as to make occasion for musical expression. So what we have here is really a kind of melodrama, with music intervening, accompanying, going along with speech in literal melodrama, sometimes contributing a song or a chorus.
The text is chosen so as to include much of the poem, and uses a narrator as well as giving characters the lines they speak in Pushkin. This is skilfully done, so that Pushkin's device of distancing himself from his human figures one minute and embracing them the next can take dramatic form. There is a good deal that does not occur in Tchaikovsky's opera, chiefly Tatyana's strange, sexually charged dream (with some forbidding music for the sinister bear) and her affecting visit to Onegin's library when—as is always the case—a man's books reveal much about him, and Prokofiev surrounds the wondering girl and the absent man with some haunting music. The chief omissions are Pushkin's magical descriptions of the winter landscape, which might have inspired Prokofiev had the adaptation been not for the stage but for radio. Some of the balance between words and music seems oddly judged, and Tatyana is characterized as steadily melancholy, without the girlish quality and the charm which so beguiled her creator; but much of it is movingly effective. The music for Tatyana's name-day party is lively, with a slightly apprehensive waltz, a twisted mazurka and some more dance music with an undercurrent of menace. The St Petersburg ball music is sharper, more sardonic, and there is another rather foreboding slow waltz for the scene when Onegin meets Tatyana and her husband. Prokofiev turns to tenderness for Onegin himself at the last.
Timothy West has encouraged the actors to speak Sir Charles Johnston's translation—a justly admired tour de force—with a quick sense of the delicately sprung rhymes and rhythms, and himself sets a fine example as Narrator for Niamh Cusack's touching, intelligent Tatyana and the well-contrasted Onegin of Samuel West and Lensky of Dominic Mafham. Sir Edward Downes, who completed the score with some lost pages that unexpectedly turned up in a London sale, conducts a beautifully judged performance of a fascinating work. Good recorded sound.'