By Sara Bright
In 1965, at the Württemberg State Theatre in Stuttgart, John Cranko unveiled a ballet that had no right to exist. The intendant had forbidden him from using Tchaikovsky’s opera music. The Royal Opera House board in London had already turned down his proposal. What emerged instead was a work built on Tchaikovsky’s lesser-known piano pieces and fragments from two obscure operatic works – and it became one of the most performed narrative ballets of the twentieth century. Sixty years on, the Royal Ballet’s refreshed production confirms that Onegin remains what the choreographer always intended: not a concert piece, but a slow-motion catastrophe of human feeling.
The ballet returns to the Royal Opera House stage in 2025 as part of a global 60th-anniversary celebration that has included revivals by Houston Ballet (September 2025), the Opéra national de Paris (February–March 2025), and Stuttgart Ballet itself, which brought the work to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for the first time in decades. At the Royal Ballet, the production has accumulated over 100 performances since its company premiere – a figure that speaks to a work which has transcended its origins as a Stuttgart experiment to become something close to an institution. For broader context on the contemporary Dance landscape in which this revival sits, the achievement is all the more striking.
The Score That Wasn’t Meant to Be Tchaikovsky
The most improbable fact about Cranko’s Onegin is its music. When the Württemberg intendant refused permission to borrow from Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same name, Cranko turned to Kurt-Heinz Stolze, his musical advisor and a Hamburg-born composer who would die tragically young at 44 in 1970. Stolze assembled a suite from Tchaikovsky’s piano cycle The Seasons, selections from the opera Cherevichki, and passages from the symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini – pieces that Tchaikovsky himself had never intended to be stitched together.
The result is a score that has divided opinion for decades. A 2012 New York Times review accused Cranko of “riding roughshod over Tchaikovsky’s phrasing.” But the work’s defenders – including the Royal Opera House Orchestra under music director Henrik Nánási, who shaped the arrangements with what Opera Wire described as “lyrical insight” – argue that Stolze’s alchemy achieves something the opera cannot: it strips away the literary scaffolding and lets the emotion speak through the body alone.
Stolze’s contribution is too often treated as a footnote. Without his ability to find harmonic coherence in Tchaikovsky’s scattered fragments, Cranko would have had no ballet at all. The score moves from the pastoral warmth of Tatiana’s letter scene to the icy anguish of the final confrontation with a fluidity that makes its patchwork origin invisible – which is precisely the point.
Nuñez at 43: A Masterclass in What the Ballet World Calls “Maturity”
Marianela Nuñez has danced Tatiana at the Royal Ballet since 2005, when she first took on the role at the age of 23. She is now 43, and the passage of years has not diminished her – it has deepened her. Awarded an OBE for services to dance in the 2025 New Year’s Honours, and receiving the decoration from King Charles III at Windsor Castle in April, Nuñez has been a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet since her promotion at 20, having joined the company in 1998 from the Teatro Colón Ballet School in Buenos Aires.
The role of Tatiana demands that a ballerina inhabit a seventeen-year-old dreamer in Act One and a sophisticated, emotionally guarded married woman in Act Three. In a discipline that has historically worshipped youth, Nuñez’s ability to move between these two extremes with equal conviction constitutes a quiet revolution. Sarah Crompton, writing in The Observer, called her “a marvel of desperation and desire,” noting how “she uses the lightness of her turns to show her eddying emotions, pulled towards him and pushed back.” The Financial Times awarded the production five stars, and Graham Watts, writing for Bachtrack, declared he was “running out of superlatives for Marianela Nuñez.”
What distinguishes Nuñez from other interpreters is psychological rather than purely technical. She holds the distinction of winning Best Female Dancer at the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards four times – 2005, 2012, 2018, and 2022 – a record that reflects not just consistency but an evolving artistry. As Jenny Gilbert observed in The Arts Desk, “this is essentially Tatiana’s story, not Onegin’s. And it’s about an especially painful transition from girl to woman, a process that Nuñez’s performance brings into particular focus.”
Clarke’s Onegin: The Anatomy of Emotional Cowardice
Reece Clarke’s Eugene Onegin is not a villain. That is what makes him devastating. Clarke, whose 2020 debut in the role revealed a performer of unusual restraint, returned to it in 2025 with what Jenny Gilbert described as “impressive height and imperious features” deployed not for melodrama but for something more insidious – a man so imprisoned by his own self-regard that he cannot recognise love when it presents itself.
The role demands a paradox: Onegin must be physically commanding and emotionally hollow. Clarke achieves this through what Matthew Paluch, reviewing for BroadwayWorld, called a “movement dialogue between resist and release” that is “high drama but equally very believable.” His Onegin does not spurn Tatiana’s letter with theatrical cruelty; he simply fails to understand it. That distinction – between malice and obliviousness – is what transforms a period piece into a work of genuine psychological acuity.
The final pas de deux, which Gilbert calls “one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary pas de deux,” is not a reconciliation but a war. Cranko choreographed it as what she describes as “a bout of wrestling as much as dance,” full of “strange, rugged imagery that speaks of a woman at war with her sexual instincts.” Clarke’s physical intelligence – his capacity to make resistance look like tenderness and surrender look like violence – is essential to the scene’s devastating effect.
Jürgen Rose’s Silver Birches and the Aesthetics of Emotional Landscape
Jürgen Rose’s designs for Onegin, refreshed for the 60th-anniversary run, remain inseparable from the ballet’s emotional architecture. The sumptuous yet muted costumes evoke nineteenth-century Russia without tipping into period illustration. Rose, who designed both sets and costumes, understood that a ballet’s visual world must function as emotional shorthand – a country garden that signals innocence, a ballroom that signals danger, a leafless landscape that signals irreversible loss.
The duel scene, staged among Rose’s mournful silver birches, is, as Gilbert writes, “still the most memorable” moment in the production. The garden in Act One has been simplified to allow maximum space for the ensemble’s “flashing diagonals of leaping local youth,” while both ballroom scenes sparkle with the restrained opulence of a society that prizes decorum over feeling.
Rose’s contribution extends beyond decoration. His colour palette – the cold blues and silvers of the final acts set against the warm ochres of the opening – creates a visual grammar that mirrors the ballet’s emotional trajectory. It is a reminder that Cranko’s genius was not solely choreographic: he understood that design, music, and movement must function as a single organism.
The Choreographic Lexicon: Folk, Ballroom, and the Language of Regret
Cranko’s choreography in Onegin draws on an eclectic range of forms – folk dance, modern movement, ballroom technique, and acrobatic partnering – that sets it apart from the purely classical vocabulary of works like Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty. The letter-writing scene, in which Tatiana dances a dream pas de deux with her imagined lover, blends classical lyricism with a modern, almost improvisatory quality that reflects her untrained emotional state. By the third act, the formality of the ballroom vocabulary signals Tatiana’s transformation into a woman who has learned to contain her feelings within socially prescribed structures.
This eclecticism was deliberate. Cranko, who had joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1946 and served as its resident choreographer by 23, understood that narrative ballet required a wider movement vocabulary than the classical tradition typically allowed. His move to Stuttgart in 1961, as ballet director of the Württemberg State Theatre, freed him from the institutional conservatism of the London company. Under his leadership, Stuttgart became what the ballet world still calls “an artistic Eden,” producing future luminaries such as Jiří Kylián, John Neumeier, and William Forsythe.
Cranko died of a heart attack in 1973, at the age of 45, on a transatlantic flight from Philadelphia to Stuttgart. He did not live to see Onegin become a fixture of the repertories of the National Ballet of Canada, American Ballet Theatre, the Boston Ballet, the National Ballet of China, and dozens of other companies worldwide. The John Cranko School, named in his honour in 1974, has trained generations of dancers – and in January 2026 welcomed Elisa Carrillo Cabrera as its new director.
Why a Ballet of Regret Still Speaks in 2025
The Royal Opera House’s own programme notes observe that “Onegin‘s exploration of unrequited affection, impulsive choices and bitter regret still breaks hearts today.” The observation is accurate but understates the case. In a culture increasingly driven by instant gratification and algorithmic curation, Cranko’s ballet insists on the weight of time – on the possibility that a decision made in a moment of casual indifference can calcify into permanent loss.
The work’s final image – Tatiana and Onegin separated by the realisation that what was available cannot be recovered – has lost none of its force. If anything, it has gained resonance in an era when the mythology of the second chance dominates popular culture. Onegin offers no such comfort. It is a ballet about the precise moment when regret becomes irreversible, rendered in a movement vocabulary that makes that irreversibility not merely visible but physically palpable.
Kevin O’Hare CBE, Director of The Royal Ballet, has spoken of the production’s capacity to “connect with audiences” across generations. That connection is not sentimental. It is the recognition that Cranko achieved something rare: he turned a very wordy tale into pure, devastating movement – and sixty years later, that movement has lost none of its power to wound. Those seeking further analysis of how Theatre continues to grapple with narrative and emotion will find the Royal Ballet’s commitment to this work a compelling case study.
Onegin is at the Royal Opera House, London, in the 2025 season.
