UNM Associate Professor Natasha Kolchevska recently won a $122,772 grant to develop an interdisciplinary program to explore Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin.
The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will fund a four-week institute to study the opera and Alexander Pushkin's poem by the same name.
The program, titled "Opera, Giving Voice to Culture: Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin," will bring high school teachers from across the country to study the opera and its relationship to Russian culture, Kolchevska said. Participants will attend two performances of Onegin at the beginning and end of the four-week program so they can gauge changes in their understanding of the text and opera, Kolchevska said.
The program is unique because it will work with the Santa Fe Opera performance of Onegin, she said. The institute will utilize live performance - not just written texts - as primary source material for analysis of 19th century Russian society, Kolchevska said.
"Performance is different than the written text - different but equally valid," she said. "Music and lyrics and acting and staging all reinforce each other."
Teachers don't need to have exposure to Russian culture she said, but they do need to have backgrounds in the arts.
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Alexander Pushkin, who penned Eugene Onegin during the 1830s, is considered the father of Russian literature and his poem is held to be the classic of Russian literature of the period, she said. Tchaikovsky wrote the opera toward the end of the 19th century, by which time immense social and economic changes had taken place in Russia, she said.
"Culture was not in the hands of the aristocrats anymore and that shows in the opera," Kolchevska said.
The poem is a comedy of manners, featuring the relationship between the title character, a St. Petersburg sophisticate, and young, naãve Tatyana. The story features themes of falling in love too early, perhaps with the wrong person, and not being able to recognize love at the right times in your life. It deals with compatibility and incompatibility. According to Kolchevska, the story is full of love and regret, selfless sacrifice and tensions between the city and country that are still evident in Russia today.
Music and art historians will be brought in to supplement the program, which takes an interdisciplinary approach.
"We have art, music, theater and historical dimensions," Kolchevska said.
Studying and viewing opera is important, Kolchevska maintained, because it has the ability not only to make us think, but to move us.
"We are such a visual culture and opera is part of that," she said.
Kolchevska said that after the institute, teachers will be able to bring the unique experience of being part of something live into their classrooms. Moreover, the institute will provide insight into the troubled legacies of Russian history, which endure to this day.
"It's a window into Russian culture," she said.
