Eugene Onegin is an opera with music by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that's based on the famed Russian novel of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. The opera's libretto, also worked on heavily by the composer and his brother Modest, stays fairly true to Pushkin's own words, given that the novel was written in verse, making it easier to successfully transfer to a lyric format. The story follows a self-centered hero, Eugene Onegin, who must live a lifetime of regret after rejecting the only woman who ever truly loved him on top of inciting a fatal duel with his best friend resulting from an act of selfish carelessness. Pushkin's novel is considered to be one of the greatest examples of Russian literature, and the story has been adapted countless times to varying degrees of success. Tchaikovsky's operatic adaptation, however, became a major success under the direction of Gustav Mahler at the opera's Hamburg premier in 1892, and is now considered to be one of Tchaikovsky's greatest operas.
