I love a good Polonaise! And for some reason, I can’t imagine why, Chaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin has popped into my mind and it happens to have a good one.

The plot is very simple. As a young girl Tatyana falls head over heels in love with a stranger, Eugene Onegin (It’s Russian, so it’s usually pronounced something like Ohn-YAY-guhn, with a hard “g”), and writes him a letter professing her love. But he turns her down, gently but firmly, and she is devastated. Many years later, Tatyana has grown into a beautiful woman and has an aristocratic husband, and Onegin realizes he made a mistake and asks her to recall her earlier feelings for him, but of course, it is too late.

Some think that it was at least partly because he did not want to end up embittered like Onegin that Chaikovsky entered into what turned out to be a disastrous marriage with a former student, Antonina Miliukova.

Here is the Polonaise that opens the third act as performed by the Bolshoi Theatre.