Eugene Onegin

The singer Yelizaveta Lavrovskaya suggested Pushkin's verse novel to Tchaikovsky in 1877; he hesitated, calling Onegin a sacred book, then adapted much of the text himself with help from Konstantin Shilovsky. He wrote the opera alongside his Fourth Symphony, finishing both within a month of each other early in 1878. Students of the Moscow Conservatory gave the premiere on 29 March 1879 under Nikolai Rubinstein. While he worked, life imitated the plot: a conservatory student, Antonina Milyukova, sent him letters of her own, and the disastrous marriage followed.