Bolshoi bust-up
Thursday, September 14, 2006
The first new interpretation of Russia's most beloved opera in more than 60 years has provoked a furious row at the Bolshoi, with insults traded, venomous letters exchanged and the country's foremost diva at war with the theater whose stage she once graced.
The new production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin has so enraged the arts establishment that the grande dame of Russian opera, Galina Vishnevskaya, has announced she is boycotting her own 80th birthday gala concert in disgust.

The new Onegin, the diva declared, caused her to "weep with humiliation" at its "shamelessness." She vowed never to set foot in the Bolshoi again, announcing in a letter to its general director Anatoly Iksanov that she would not attend a concert planned in honor of her 80th birthday next month. Vishnevskaya told of her revulsion at the depiction in one scene of Russians as drunken "morons." She wrote: "To the end of my days, I will feel ashamed of my presence at the public desecration of our national heritage."