Phases

Film essay due 2pm Monday and I HAVEN'T STARTED!!

So restless right now. I was talking to a friend yesterday and she was like "ugh there's this French song from my class that was stuck in my head at the traffic light, it's called Bonnie and Clyde" and I was all "ooh is it the Serge Gainsbourg one." She: "Ooooh how you know." Me: "Ha I go through phases."

Thinking about it now, and yeah I think you could totally measure my life in obsessive musical phases. There was that obsessive Stars phase, alt-country/ folk/ Americana, broadway musicals after obsessively reading PG Wodehouse, French songs after watching An Education, indie electronic, and since the Onegin ballet, the music played in Onegin.

The problem with Onegin is that even though it uses music by Tchaikovsky, and Tchaikovsky wrote an opera called Eugene Onegin after the verse novel by Alexander Puskin, the ballet wasn't allowed to use the music from the opera. So instead, Kurt-Heinz Stolze who did the musical arrangement for the ballet, took pieces by Tchaikovsky from everywhere. So you get music from different operas, and it's so darn hard to identify which pieces of music he used.

The two albums (one by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and the other by the Staatorchester Stuttgart) that compiled music from John Cranko's Onegin (Cranko choreographed the ballet) don't give the names as Tchaikovsky would have written, but name the pieces as they are used in the ballet. So they call them something like "Lensky's Variation Pas de Deux (Onegin Ballet Suite 4 -5)" when it's really Tchaikovsky's "The Seasons: January (By the Fireside), op. 37b" except arranged for an orchestra instead of a piano.

The internet doesn't provide much help either. The best website I found was by this Korean girl who managed to find out the names of some of the pieces used Onegin. But otherwise I've been kinda caught up with trying to match the Tchaikovsky names to the music as played in the ballet, and rewatching the ballet over and over again. Which is pretty much why I'm so behind in writing my essay, ugh it's really painful to write ): I'm definitely having more fun solving Onegin's music puzzle.