@article{01HPKMD22Q8REFWFNDM4ATT179,
  abstract     = {{Tchaikovsky enjoyed composing Yevgeni Onegin. He expressed his fulfillment in a famous
letter to Sergey Taneyev. What could his enthusiasm convey about the content of the project?
Music criticism has taken Tchaikovsky’s words as proof for the thesis that the opera is connected
to autobiographical circumstances. In this mode of thinking, the quality of Tchaikovsky’s music is
the result of the composer’s identification with the subject matter. Despite the objection of several
Tchaikovsky scholars, the autobiographical paradigm remains very much alive in the reception
of Tchaikovsky’s music. As an alternative, Tchaikovsky scholarship has explored a hermeneutical
approach that would link his music to its context in Russian society and culture. In this paper,
I present another possible reaction to Tchaikovsky’s statement: an exploration of the composer’s
approach to musical characterization. Analysis of some key scenes reveals that the definition of
characters and situations by musical means is more precise than standard interpretations of the opera
would concede. This discovery may lead to a new assessment of characterization as a critical tool
to refine the definition of Tchaikovsky’s position in European music history. The method may be
applied to examples outside his operatic output, such as Serenade for Strings and the Fifth Symphony.}},
  articleno    = {{82}},
  author       = {{Maes, Francis}},
  editor       = {{Ioffe, Dennis}},
  issn         = {{2076-0752}},
  journal      = {{ARTS}},
  keywords     = {{Tchaikovsky,Russian opera,Russian music,musical characterization}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{3}},
  pages        = {{12}},
  title        = {{Tchaikovsky, Onegin, and the art of characterization}},
  url          = {{http://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030082}},
  volume       = {{13}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

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