What: Eugene Onegin.
Where: Aotea Centre.
When: Opens Thursday at 7.30pm with further performances on Saturday 19, Thursday 24 and Saturday 26 at 7.30pm and Tuesday 22 at 6.30pm.
Patrick Nolan arrives late after a rehearsal for NBR New Zealand Opera's Eugene Onegin.
Directing La Boheme for the company last year was "one of the best experiences I've had as far as working on operas goes", the Australian tells me.
"It's such a great company when it comes to creating a production. Aidan Lang is so committed as a general director to exploring the form and breathing new life into it."
I ask whether he might like to name some companies which are not so accommodating but, understandably, he takes a rain check on any such revelations.
Back over the Tasman, Nolan is as celebrated for his work in the theatre as he is in the opera house, but opera has that special extra dimension of the music.
"You're always wanting to precipitate an emotional response when you work as director," he explains.
"When you can explore the emotional world of the characters and the narrative with the forces of an orchestra, it's a fantastic counterpoint to work off. Having all those musicians there providing the soundtrack to the story is just so powerful."
With all his theatrical experience, Nolan insists on making opera "work" dramatically. And these days, he tells me, audiences reared on cinema and television simply demand more in the way of characterisation.
"Over the 10 years that I've been working in opera there's been a generational shift," he muses. "I find the younger singers are more interested in creating a believable performance. They're very willing to engage in issues and ideas around character and motivation.
"Boundaries can be helpful," he exclaims, when I ask him whether the predetermined musical structure is ever irksome. "It's all about working out what the limits are and, when you've set them, you know where to move, physically, emotionally and psychologically.
"We were working on the first act quartet with the young lovers," he says. "At first it was static, but then we were able to discover those little moments of connection that I find exciting."
When Nolan first took on Eugene Onegin for Australian Opera he was reworking a Michael Edwards production from the mid-90s; now, tackling it solo, he finds he has a new respect for Tchaikovsky the composer.
"This time I've really enjoyed discovering the detail in the characterisation. I'd never appreciated just how much Tchaikovsky puts into his score in terms of telling us what's going on."
"He even sets up his characters through the music that he brings them on stage with. When Lensky and Onegin enter for the first time, the 16 bars of introduction give us an insight into who they are."
Inevitably, for many the pivotal character of the opera is the young Tatyana, played by soprano Anna Leese who has returned from England to take the role. Nolan has no time at all for other productions which present Tchaikovsky's heroine as "very much the little girl".
"For me, Tatyana's innocence is based on a great strength of character. Here is a young woman who lives in this romantic world of great Russian literature and she's incredibly vulnerable. What she does in writing her letter is extraordinarily brave. There are moments of great na vety, exquisitely painful for us to watch, but then there's such integrity in the way she puts her feelings down.
"It is not a grand operatic story, but an intimate domestic drama," Nolan insists. "Here is this girl who feels such an outsider and who is incredibly alone with her emotions and her desires. We can all remember the first time that we fell in love, both the delight and the pain. I'm sure Tchaikovsky himself identified deeply with this Pushkin story and it's going to speak to us for a long time."
RISING FROM THE WRECKAGE
Eugene Onegin is Tchaikovsky's most popular opera, written in 1879, in the wake of the composer's disastrous marriage.
The Alexander Pushkin novel which inspired the opera examines the fragile divide between life portrayed in literature and existence in the real world. The young and sheltered Tatyana lives through the books she reads, leading to a thwarted passion for the dandified Eugene Onegin, whom she finally realises is nothing more than a cipher of the various heroes that populate the books on his shelves.
While Pushkin's novel, set in 389 verses, is celebrated as much for its literary style as its plot, Tchaikovsky focuses on the characters' emotional lives. Little wonder that he subtitled his score, "Lyrical scenes".
This opera was a work close to the composer's heart and perhaps he felt uneasy parallels between Tatyana's romantic dilemmas and the problems he was having with his own sexuality.
"I couldn't care less about how it works on the stage," he wrote to composer Taneyev. "I couldn't care less about special effects and don't need tsars and tsarinas, revolutions, battles and marches. I was looking for an intimate and yet shocking drama based on conflicts which I myself have experienced or witnessed, which are able to move me profoundly."
Curiously enough, one of the opera's greatest admirers was the composer Dvorak who, after its Prague premiere in 1889, wrote to Tchaikovsky "I confess with joy that your opera made a profound impression on me - the kind of impression I expect to receive from a genuine work of art. It is a wonderful creation, full of glowing emotion and poetry, and finely elaborated in all its details; in short, this music is captivating and penetrates our hearts so deeply that we cannot forget it."
And, 130 years later, on the other side of the world, Eugene Onegin will doubtlessly prove that it still has the power to do just that.
