My initial professional training was in literary studies, my first job was teaching Renaissance poetry and drama to university undergraduate and graduate students and now I write primarily about music. It's no surprise, therefore, that I'm often asked which I prefer -- words or music?

That's an impossible question to answer -- unless the context is that of a solitary existence on a desert island. In that situation -- one without electricity, presumably -- I figure that I'd be better off with volumes of Milton and Shakespeare than with CDs of Chopin and Mozart.

But the question came to mind in a different context Thursday night when I attended the opening night performance of the Baltimore Opera Company's production of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" in the Lyric Opera House. This was a great performance of a great opera. Like almost all Russian operatic composers, it seems, Tchaikovsky used as his source one of Alexander Puskin's great works.

I don't read Russian, but Pushkin is one of my favorite authors. I first read his "Onegin" as an impressionable 17-year-old, re-read it in my 20s and 30s and read it for the fourth time last week, just before attending the BOC's "Onegin." As much as I loved the opera, I must admit that I missed much of what I love about the poem. Tchaikovsky's musical setting is heartbreaking. But Pushkin's long poem, while just as filled with sentiment, takes an ironic view of its characters that makes experiencing their human situation all the richer.

Although one might cite the obvious differences in Pushkin's and Tchaikovsky's artistic and private personalities, one could also propose that opera does not easily lend itself to a cynical or even ironic treatment of its central character.

Even operas that cultivate parody, such as "Don Giovanni," "Cosi fan tutte," and "Ariadne auf Naxos," cause us to take their characters seriously while the music the characters sing can make fun of characters who would sing such music. While the poet Pushkin can equally invoke both sympathy and ridicule for Onegin, Tatyana and Lensky, the composer Tchaikovsky is largely limited to the first possibility.

As Ivan Turgenev wrote Leo Tolstoy: "Undeniably notable music . . . but what a libretto!"

I am reasonably well situated to appreciate Tchaikovsky's music, I am woefully ill-equipped to appreciate Pushkin's language. Of all the great Russian writers, Pushkin is said to be the most impervious to translation. Russian friends, who speak and read English fluently, tell me that Pushkin's poetry is even more difficult for non-Russian readers than Milton's poetry is for non-English readers.

I know how hard the latter must be. The glory of reading Milton is the subtlety and precision of his rhythm, the economy and nuance of his word choice, in which a single word easily suggests multiple meanings, and the music with which his English falls upon the ear. Pushkin himself, who had a fairly good reading knowledge of English and who admired Milton's poetry extravagantly, called attention to how much more difficult for the non-English reader Milton was than, for example, Lord Byron. As Robert Frost once remarked, "Poetry is what gets lost in the translation."

Then why do I continue to prefer Pushkin's "Onegin," which I cannot presume to understand fully, to Tchaikovsky's, which I can. I suspect that I have a problem with Tchaikovsky's music -- it's a problem that one cannot have with words.

Literature conveys emotion through words, which must be filtered through the mind as they are interpreted. Music conveys emotion through tones, which impinge upon the human nervous system directly. You can choose not to accept the meaning of a word; it's far more difficult to reject the affect of a tone -- unless you insert ear plugs, walk out of the concert hall or turn off your music system.

Music has a tendency to by-pass human censorship. This is why Plato regarded it as even more dangerous than poetry. This is why Leo Tolstoy, who knew a great deal about music, grew ambivalent about it as he grew older, even suggesting in his novella, "The Kreutzer Sonata," that it can play upon human instinct and sexuality to incite irrational and terrible acts.

Vladimir Nabokov went even further. Nabokov, whose edition of (and accompanying commentary for) Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" is considered definitive, despised Tchaikovsky's "Onegin" so much that it moved him to describe "the ideal state" as one in which there was "no torture, no executions [and] no music."

Most of us are not that direct. One Pushkin scholar, Hugh Maclean, wrote that the composer reduced the poet's "wonderfully, intricate, balanced structure" to "a banal, trite and sentimental bore -- which may nevertheless be a vehicle for some delightful music."

I guess it's simply that -- almost more than any other music I know -- Tchaikovsky's is in-your-face stuff.

"It seems to me," Tchaikovsky once wrote to a friend, that I am gifted with the ability, truthfully, sincerely and simply to express the feelings, moods, and images suggested by a text."

I'd call that an accurate and honest self-appraisal.

Pub Date: 3/16/99