Sergei Prokofiev’s score for the melodrama “Eugene Onegin” was written as incidental music for a centenary Pushkin celebration staging that Stalin abruptly halted and banned...

Sergei Prokofiev’s score for the melodrama “Eugene Onegin” was written as incidental music for a centenary Pushkin celebration staging that Stalin abruptly halted and banned in 1936; as a result the work and the music went unheard until its recent discovery in a Russian archive and subsequent reconstruction. This almost unknown composition and its accompanying melodrama focuses on parts that Tchaikovsky, in his world-famous opera, didn’t set to music. Comparable with the best of Prokofiev’s music for film, it is both a deeply emotional and highly dramatic work.