Operatic fantasy or reality?

Few operas are as determinedly realistic as Eugene Onegin. Mundane actions, such as the jam-making that opens Act One, offer a version of life in which fantasies of passion and high drama -the stuff of opera- have been safely put to one side, in favour of the calmer pleasures of domesticity. But is this reality or itself only operatic fantasy? By the end of the opera, with the once-dreamy Tatyana married off to the much older Prince Gremin, it is no longer clear whether the picture of contentment provided by Tatyana’s mother, nurse-maid and sister Olga at the opening is any more than a carefully constructed but thin-walled fabrication, shutting out both the pain and also the potential ecstasy of strong human feeling.As such, what any production of the opera has to figure out above all is how to handle the presentation of real life into…