Tchaikovsky’s setting of Pushkin’s timeless verse novel is presented on the Met stage in Deborah Warner’s moving production, starring Anna Netrebko as Tatiana and Mariusz Kwiecien and Peter Mattei sharing the title role. Alexey Dolgov sings the role of Lenski, and Robin Ticciati conducts.

World premiere: Maly Theater, Moscow, 1879 (student performance). Professional premiere: Bolshoi Theater, 1881. Tchaikovsky’s many moods—tender, grand, melancholy—are all given free rein in Eugene Onegin. The opera is based on Pushkin’s iconic verse novel, which re-imagines the Byronic romantic anti-hero as the definitive bored Russian aristocrat caught between convention and ennui; Tchaikovsky, similarly, took Western European operatic forms and transformed them into an authentic and undeniably Russian work. At the core of the opera is the young girl Tatiana, who grows from a sentimental adolescent into a complete woman in one of the operatic stage’s most convincing character developments.