Director Dustin Wills, a 2023 Obie winner, is leading his first local operatic production.

Dustin Wills

Tchaikovsky has long been Russian culture’s most iconic queer figure: the equivalent of Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf in British arts circles. All three contracted conventional marriages, least happily the composer. His conflicted and largely gay romantic path partly fueled his most accessible and tuneful opera, 1879’s “Eugene Onegin,” based on Pushkin’s novel-in-verse. Heartbeat Opera, since its inception a decade ago as New York’s most excitingly innovative and inclusive opera company, presents New York’s first explicitly queer reimagining of “Onegin” this month. Brilliant gay director Dustin Wills, a 2023 Obie winner, helms his first local operatic production, and the superb Jacob Ashworth conducts from the fiddle.

LGBTQ+ personnel and sensibility are hardly in short supply in the opera world but Heartbeat, though open to everybody, trends queerer than most. Queer Heartbeat co-founder Dan Schlosberg (pianist/composer/conductor) has been called the troupe’s “secret sauce” for his incredibly skillful — and also playful — arrangements of the scores, often incorporating jazz, bluegrass, and electric rock elements when you least expect them. “For the Russian-ness of  ‘Onegin,’ which deploys nine musicians, we have our guitarist doubling balalaika. Plus there’s the harp for some dreamy parts — kind of a Russian and certainly queer special effect!” Tchaikovsky’s work — a pretty good “date opera”, by the way — plays alongside Schlosberg’s world première opera, “The Extinctionist,” about a young woman weighing childbearing given today’s environmental collapse. By design, Heartbeat foregrounds intersectional political content in many of their revisionist and (in a positive sense) provocative shows — with alternative sexuality, most notably in 2018’s “Fidelio” in which the title character was posing not as a man romancing the jailer Rocco’s daughter but (with Rocco’s approval) as a hot lesbian prospect. Schlosberg relishes the company’s annual Drag Extravaganzas, saying they’re “basically a big party to dress up and perform all kinds of arias and numbers with subtexts made explicit. Many younger people come and say they had no idea opera could be so cool — and we love that. Kind of a ‘gateway drug to opera’ thing.”

Wills and Ashworth have assembled a typically committed and diverse cast of attractive singing actors, centered on Indian baritone Edwin Joseph (Onegin) and Lebanese tenor Roy Hage (Lensky) and the sisters whose lives their shifting, ambiguous friendship complicates, Tatyana and Olga (Chicago-born soprano Emily Margevich, who just triumphed as Tatiana in Baltimore, and Mexican mezzo Sishel Claverie, Heartbeat’s terrific 2017 Carmen). In the rehearsal I attended, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (in which scenes from “Eugene Onegin” actually figure) and “Top Gun” were bandied about in discussing the tragedy-bound bromance between the young aristocrats Onegin and Lenski.

Says Wills, “There’s a story here screaming to come out that I’ve never seen: the closest was Krzysztof Warlikowski’s “Brokeback Onegin” [in Munich], with lots of naked men in cowboy hats. I didn’t want to hit people over the head like that. Sexuality exists on a spectrum. Tchaikovsky’s recently-released letters show a very sophisticated individual dealing with his particular (for the time) issues with sexuality. That complexity brings a lot more to ‘Onegin’ than ‘boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, someone gets shot.’ In directing this, I think about my favorite writer, Lorca: sexually fluid, writing in a coded way with so much desire compacted together. All this desire eating these people alive, and they don’t know what to do with it! But it’s much more than just, ‘Oh — they’re gay!’ — which is pretty uninteresting. I like to think that Tchaikovsky has bisected himself into Onegin and Tatiana: each of them has what the other one needs, but can’t ever get it. So Olga and Lenski become the victims of this world that has placed this structure round them, keeping them from being the way they need to be.”

Wills’ complex reading of the two leading men’s overlapping desires and how the dynamics among “this strange little country romantic foursome” play out over time does not exclude moments of great humor alongside the teenage and 20-something angst, plus some explicitly hands-on experimentation between the guys during their big quarrel.

“The way the music and the text layer on the tension there, I’m like: I don’t know how else you would stage this! The mazurka there is the most sexual music in the whole score,” Wills said.

Wills stresses the interactivity of Heartbeat’s process; how he’s worked with Ashworth and Schlosberg to find moments that reinforce the concept but also challenge it. Then the singers come in with their insights and inspirations.

“Everybody’s in the mode of trying to get rid of their ideas of what they assume [“Eugene Onegin”] is, and come at it with fresh eyes,” Wills said.

Operalovers and those new to the form have seven chances to see what promises to be a fascinating and moving night in the theater.

“Eugene Onegin” | Heartbeat Opera | Baruch Performing Arts Center| 55 Lexington Ave., Manhattan | April 2-13 | Tickets from $10 | 100 minutes

The European Commission wants to increase EU clout in the strategically important Black Sea region, countering Russian influence through closer collaboration with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

"Against a backdrop of Russia breaching airspace, attacking ports and shipping routes ... front and center of this work is improving security in the region," EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday, unveiling a new strategy for the region.

The Black Sea is a body of water bordering seven countries with its coast spanning two EU member states — Bulgaria and Romania— as well as EU accession candidates Georgia, Turkey and Ukraine, plus Russia. Moldova, another aspiring EU state, also has access via the Danube River.

Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Black Sea has been both a theatre of combat and the site of Russian blockades of Ukrainian grain exports, which are key to world food security.

More recently, the EU has grown concerned about potential Russian attacks on critical undersea infrastructure like cables needed for internet and communications as well as so-called "shadow fleet" shipping that helps Russia skirt EU sanctions on its oil exports, Kallas said.

What is the EU proposing?

In general, the plan is to further build on trade, energy and transport cooperation.

The most concrete aspect of the new proposal is to set up a "maritime security hub" to enhance "situational awareness and information sharing on the Black Sea, real-time monitoring from space to seabed, and early warning of potential threats and malicious activities," according to the strategy document.

Kallas said it could also help monitor a potential future ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Another goal is to support the buildup of regional transport infrastructure, in part "to improve military mobility so troops and equipment can be where they are needed, when they are needed," Kallas said.

However, where the hub would be based and which countries would be involved is not clear, nor is there any clarity on which financial resources would be allocated to it.

How might Black Sea countries respond?

While most Black Sea countries apart from Russia are on cooperative terms with the EU, some are more closely aligned with the 27-country bloc's agenda than others.

The governments of Ukraine and Moldova are striving to join the EU. Georgia and Turkey are also EU candidate countries although their bids to join are currently frozen. Armenia has drawn closer to the EU in recent years while Azerbaijan has a complex relationship with Russia and the EU.

Turkey is a close partner of the EU and member of the military alliance NATO but as a strong regional player, it also has its own interests to consider.

Like Russia, Turkey also has an interest in keeping the US and other NATO countries out of the Black Sea region, Stefan Meister, head of the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations, or DGAP, said. Ankara is hedging its bets, fulfilling its obligations to NATO while trying not to provoke Moscow, he notes.

Ankara "understands Russia as a security threat, supports Ukraine in the war and does not agree with the Russian annexation of Crimea," Meister told DW. "But it benefits from the Western sanctions, still buys Russian resources and benefits from the trade with Ukraine." 

EU relationship with Black Sea region has changed

The EU first started taking a keener interest in the Black Sea region, which was traditionally dominated by Russia and Turkey, after Bulgaria and Romania joined the bloc in 2007. It is not alone: China has also increased its footprint there. Last year the Georgian government awarded the tender to construct a deep sea port at Anaklia to a Chinese conglomerate that includes entities under US sanctions.

Meister says it is a good thing that the EU is looking to take a more active role in security in the Black Sea with a monitoring hub. But much was still unclear, he stressed, referring to the lack of further details on participation, financing and resources for the new security hub.

On Wednesday, the European Commission said the next step would be to gather ministers from EU member states and Black Sea countries to discuss how to take the proposal forward. 

The European Union aims to strengthen its presence in the Black Sea, a region of renewed geostrategic value, by setting up a security hub that would protect critical infrastructure, remove naval mines, combat hybrid threats, mitigate environmental risks and ensure freedom of navigation for commerce.

The hub is primarily designed to counter Russia's expansionism in Eastern Europe and could eventually be employed to monitor and sustain a peace settlement in Ukraine.

"The Black Sea region is of great strategic importance to the European Union because of the connection (between) Central Asia and Europe. It is important because of security, trade and energy," High Representative Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday as she unveiled a new strategy to bolster ties with the Black Sea.

"But the region's potential is marred by Russia's war. Recurring airspace violations and attacks on ports and shipping lanes highlight this reality."

Notably, the strategy, which also touches upon transport, energy, digital networks, trade, climate change and the blue economy, lacks a specific financial envelope to realise its ambitions and instead builds upon other programmes under the EU budget, such as SAFE, the new €150-billion initiative of low-interest loans to boost defence spending.

The funding, location and operational model of the security hub will depend on the negotiations of the bloc's next seven-year budget, Kallas said.

The European Commission is expected to present the much-anticipated proposal for the 2028-2032 budget before the end of the year. The draft will then kick-start a prolonged, complex and possibly explosive debate among governments.

Brussels hopes the magnified importance of the Black Sea, which encompasses 174 million people, two member states (Romania and Bulgaria) and four candidates to join the bloc (Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia), will convince capitals to bet on the strategy and provide the necessary funds. The plan may also benefit from the fiscal effort that most member states will have to make to meet NATO's likely future 5% of GDP target.

Chasing the 'shadow fleet'

One of the main threats that inspired the strategy is the "shadow fleet", the old-age tankers that Russia has deployed to circumvent the G7 price cap on seaborne oil.

The fleet, present in both the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, uses obscure insurance and ownership to escape the surveillance of Western allies and engages in illicit practices at sea, such as transmitting false data and becoming invisible to satellite systems. Its condition is so poor that it has stoked fears of an environmental disaster.

In recent months, "shadow fleet" vessels have been accused of engaging in sabotage and vandalism against the EU's critical infrastructure, fuelling calls for hard-hitting sanctions. Estonia has warned that Moscow is ready to provide military assistance to protect the decrepit tankers from inspections and seizures.

On Wednesday, Kallas admitted the "shadow fleet" was becoming a "bigger problem" for the EU. "We see our adversaries finding new ways to use it," she said.

Asked if Brussels should set up an EU-wide military mission to keep a closer eye on the "shadow fleet", Kallas appeared open to the idea but acknowledged the limitations imposed by international law, which provides for the right of innocent passage that compels all states to guarantee unimpeded, non-discriminatory transit.

The right entails a heavy burden of proof to justify the intervention of a foreign vessel.

"The discussions are ongoing," Kallas said. "We need to work also with our intentional partners to address these concerns (such as) when you can stop the ships. They need much broader attention than only the European Union."