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I was listening the Opera it last night and then returned back to the Prince Gremin aria – there was a true fascination HOW the Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto he did the celebrated Gremin’s story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF9MZ3nacrk

Prince Gremin aria by A. Pushkin

Love is no respecter of age,
its transports bless alike
those in the bloom of youth
yet unacquainted with the world
and the grey-headed warrior
tempered by experience!
Onegin, I shan't disguise the fact
that I love Tatyana to distraction!
My life was slipping drearily away;
she appeared and brightened it
like a ray of sunlight in a stormy sky,
and brought me life and youth, yes, youth and happiness!
Among these sly, poor-spirited,
foolish, pampered children,
these scoundrels both absurd and boring,
dull, fractious arbiters,
among the pious coquettes
and sycophantic slaves,
amid affable, modish hypocrisy
courteous, affectionate  infidelities,
amid the icy censure
of cruel-hearted vanity,
amid the vexing vacuity
of calculation, thought and conversation,
she shines like a star
in the night's darkest hour, in a pure, clear sky,
and to me she always appears
in the radiant,
radiant nimbus of an angel!

Of course, the translation is horrible, as usually is happens with Pushkin but it give an idea for a non-Russian speaking person. The way how the Salzburg cretins who set the production made the adult Tatiana to appear like a call-girl shell be disregarded.  There is also no correct in my view behavior of Gremin in this production. Reciting different “types” Pushkin in my view did not refer to society (as Ferruccio Furlanetto trying to portray) but rather Pushkin enumerates the different behavioral patterns of women, women that Price Gremin was exposed not people. I think, as many other thighs, the people who made the production were short minded about it. Still, I very much like what Ferruccio Furlanetto did, particularly the late section of the aria where he truly took his time – a seldom gift that the contemporary singers who love the fast instantaneous thrill do not do often.

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