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| | Second sight - music with Wilfrid Mellers |
 | | We aren't surprised when Tatyana agonizedly rejects Onegin's avowal that he had always 'really' loved her since, even if that were true, his patrician pride must have been stronger than his heart's truth. |
 | | Indeed, this may be the key to much of Tchaikovsky's most representative music, which is balanced between the fairy-tale illusion of ballet and the deceptive reality of sometimes shabby rather than grand 'tragedies', here induced by the all-too-human folly of a dim-witted Lensky, an empty-headed Olga, or whomever. |
 | | Compromise between reality and illusion is, of course, implicit in the two worlds of Russian folk lament and the giddy gaiety of Parisian valses and cotillons, and of Polish mazurkas and polonaises, congenial to genteel society, here brutally transplanted in industrial Leeds. |
| www.mvdaily.com /articles/2001/05/onegin3.htm (505 words) |
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