The words that comes up the most often when talking about John Cranko's sweeping ballet "Onegin" is "life changing." Ask anyone who's seen the ballet what they thought of it, and you're likely to get a rapturous account of a performance that changed the way they saw classical ballet. And when San Francisco Ballet at last brings Cranko's iconic masterwork to the War Memorial Opera House stage Friday, it will be the fulfillment of a long-held dream for Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson.

"The time was right, and it all came together," Tomasson says. "I have thought about it a long time. It's so dramatic and different and will be a great challenge to the dancers, particularly those who do the leading roles."

Based on "Eugene Onegin," the epic by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, the ballet is a tsarist-era portrait of the handsome, yet self-centered and indifferent Onegin and his complex relationship with the quiet Tatiana, who loves him unreservedly as a girl, and then is forced to redefine her world when his carelessness precipitates tragedy. It is a tale that inspires the same kind of reverence in Russia that Shakespeare does in the English-speaking world.

"I still know most of the piece by memory," says the Russian-born Maria Kochetkova, one of four ballerinas assigned the role of Tatiana, adding that Cranko's "Onegin" was one of two performances that changed her perspective on her art form.

"I was so taken over by the story, I had tears in my eyes at the end," she says. "I thought, this is what ballet should be, and I decided then that that was how I wanted to dance."

Half a world away, it was the same for the young Yuan Yuan Tan, who first saw the ballet in a film as a student in China.

"Since I was 11 years old, I have had such a strong image of it," says Tan, who dances Tatiana opposite Ruben Martin Cintas' Onegin. "It's a transformation: Tatiana goes from a very young girl who likes to dream and read - she's quiet, but very passionate - and she becomes a mature woman. That's a fantastic journey to take."

"These are the kind of roles that dancers will kill for," says Reid Anderson, the director of the Stuttgart Ballet, who is in town to coach the dancers.

Anderson joined the Stuttgart Ballet at 19 in 1969 and remembers that "Onegin" was the first ballet of Cranko's that he encountered.

"I had been in Stuttgart one week, so I didn't speak any German - I couldn't read the program, so I had no idea what I was going to see," he says. "Well, I saw one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life. I never knew that ballet could be that gut-wrenching - it was a mind-blowing theatrical experience."

When Cranko created "Onegin" for his nascent Stuttgart Ballet in 1961, with Marcia Haydée and Ray Barra - who studied at the San Francisco Ballet School in the 1940s - in the lead roles, the evening-length ballet drama genre was mainly limited to the great 19th century classics of Petipa and Ivanov, with only a handful of 20th century entries. It was a performance of "Onegin" in New York in 1969 that overnight solidified both the choreographer's reputation as a master and the Stuttgart Ballet's standing as an international phenomenon.

Now revered around the world, Cranko's work hasn't been presented by San Francisco Ballet since 1974, when Haydée and Richard Cragun performed his "Legende" and "Taming of the Shrew" duets here as guest artists. "Onegin" will be the first full-length ballet by the South African choreographer - who died in 1973 at the age of 45 - to enter the company's repertoire.

Perhaps more than any other of his ballets, "Onegin" shows Cranko's remarkable ability to distill a complex and nuanced story to its human essence, yet still offer technical challenges for the dancers and thrilling theatricality for the audience.

"It's not just the steps," says Vitor Luiz, who will dance Onegin with Kochetkova. "It's steps with intention. Just a turn can mean something, the angle of the head."

"Or when you sweep me off my feet," interjects Kochetkova. "It's not just a lift. Reid says it should be like every woman in the audience should feel it."

"John was able to use the air above you, the floor that you're standing on, the floor that you're lying on," Anderson says. "He takes those three different levels and moves up and down to create something that's emotional.

"That is what one really sees for instance, in the last pas de deux. It's not only that you're lying down, it's about where you're lying down or how you're lying down. It's not only that you're in the air, it's about why you are in the air, how did you get there and, God, how are you going to get out of the air?

"We try not to just teach steps and just applique emotions onto them - the steps are the emotions. So when they rehearse these ballets, it should be rehearsed full out, from the mind, from the heart."

Then, too, Anderson says, each couple is not a cookie cutter of the other.

"You should be able to go see Onegin four times," he says, "with four different couples and take a completely different thing away from it each time."

"In a way, I feel that it's still very realistic," says Kochetkova. "These characters never grow old - you see Onegins and Tatianas in real life even though it was written such a long time ago."

San Francisco Ballet: John Cranko's "Onegin." 8 p.m. Fri., 2 and 8 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Through Tues. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. $40-$300. (415) 865-2000.

E-mail Mary Ellen Hunt at