Today we're talking with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev about the text to Lensky's Aria from Yevgény Onégin. We concentrate on the vowels e [jɛ] and ё [jo], the hard consonant ж [ʒ] and the soft sign ь.

For the text to Lensky's aria, you can download the libretto for the opera through the Wikipedia page here. Just scroll down to "External links" at the bottom and click on "Russian libretto in zip file for Word". I mention on the podcast that the Tenor Anthology has a lot of extra soft signs--I've discovered an older piano/vocal score online here (scroll down to page 58) that uses the old spellings including the hard sign (ъ) which we don't see much anymore. This letter is very similar to the soft sign (ь), and it seems that in the Anthology they use the same symbol for both, which is a little confusing; be sure to check the text with the libretto or the full score here (scroll down to page 115) if you are using this score to learn the aria.

While there's never any singing on the actual podcast, I found a YouTube of Andrej singing Lensky's aria in Paris here. I really don't like the staging, but it's fine if you can ignore the woman on stage distracting the audience from the aria!

Feel free to contact me here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com with any questions or comments.