Tchaikovsky was considered a »Westerner« among his Russian contemporaries, so the advocates of artistic nationalism honoured him with a special form of »hateful love«. On the other hand, Europeans and Americans perceived him as a composer who succeed-ed in almost perfectly expressing the mysterious Russian soul through his music. Along with Frédéric Chopin and Antonín Dvořák, Tchaikovsky was the first Slavic master who firmly established himself in the Western musical canon. Although Tchaikovsky devoted a number of his works to the opera stage, only the operas Eugene Onegin – the height of the Russian romantic opera - and The Queen of Spades, both created based on the literary material by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, were famous worldwide. Despite the demanding and dramatic upheavals in his personal life, he composed the opera Eugene Onegin relatively quickly; only a year passed from his first enthusiasm for the material to the work's completion. Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Mrs. von Meck, that Eugene Onegin would satisfy only those who could be "moved by ordinary, simple human emotions". The grandly conceived tragedy took a form of a series of scenes, where the dramaturgical tension arises from the characters of stage personali-ties rather than the situations in which they find themselves. Such an approach in the second half of the 19th century was considered an unprecedented innovation in the formal sense. Eugene Onegin was first presented to the world in 1879 in the Moscow Maly Theatre. It was performed by the conservatory students without considerable success. Only its restagings at the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre in 1883 and Sankt Peters-burg in 1885 and 1892 proved that it is an exceptional work of art that breaks the es-tablished stereotypes about the pomposity and artificiality of operatic art. Pushkin's poem touched the great composer as its verses capture a myriad of diverse emotions, especially the transformation of friendship into great love and love into deep hatred and even death. The reflection of the souls of the two romantic giants, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, as experienced in this opera, awakens the imagination of every opera lov-er even today.

We will be able to enjoy the operatic masterpiece and one of the best pieces of Russian musical literature under the baton of the excellent Kazakh conductor Alan Buribayev. Its masterful staging, will be in the hands of our long-time collaborator and director, Vinko Möderndorfer, who is passionate about fateful and extreme human relations, overshadowed and illuminated with highs and lows in all their colours and shades, which is always a great challenge.
We will be able to enjoy the operatic masterpiece and one of the best pieces of the Russian musical literature under the baton of the excellent Kazakh conductor Alan Buribayev. It will be as always masterfully staged by our long-time collaborator, director, Vinko Möderndorfer, who is passionate about fateful and most extreme human relations, overshadowed and illuminated with highs and lows in all their colours and shades – which is always a great challenge.