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18 Playbill to Prokofiev's “War and Peace” at The 18 PLAYBILL TO PROKOFIEV’S “WAR AND PEACE” AT THE MET Th is program note appeared in the February 2002 Playbill for the Metropolitan Opera / Mariinskii Th eater production of Prokofi ev’s War and Peace. It was written, and read, under conditions unusual for North American cities — although reasonably familiar to the rest of the world, including Russia. Th e twin towers had fallen to terrorist attacks the September before. New York was still reeling from that unprecedented event; the nation was bellicose, confused, full of rumor and mourning. Th ere is a moment in Tolstoy’s novel (Book Th ree, Part II, ch. 17–19) where the inhabitants of Moscow are assured by their governor Rostopchin that the city was in no danger and would be defended, even though the French were advancing steadily. Th ey prepare to fl ee and at the same time stubbornly refuse to alter their round of balls and entertainments. Th is atmosphere of denial, necessity, and relief at a dose of real life, so subtly caught by Tolstoy in War and Peace, was also in evidence during this spectacular Russian-American production of Prokofi ev’s opera at the Met in 2002. THE ENDURANCE OF WAR, THE DECEPTIONS OF PEACE: PROKOFIEV’S OPERATIC MASTERPIECE 2002 Everything about this powerful, curious opera is too large. Its 1700-page source text, its sprawling massive choruses, the number of hours required to perform it (one night or two?), the looming presence of Leo Tolstoy together with that writer’s famous denunciation of opera as the most pernicious, corrupt art-form in the Western world: only a composer with the stubbornness and discipline of Tolstoy would ever take it on. Prokofi ev was such a composer. He was passionately committed to opera (although plagued with bad luck in the genre). He was also committed to serving the Soviet state. In this penultimate opera, his sixth, working under crisis conditions and in increasingly ill health, Prokofi ev at last succeeded in fusing his spectacular lyrical gift with patriotic spectacle. — 337 — ------------------------------------ PART III. MUSICALIZING THE LITERARY CLASSICS ----------------------------------- Th e pace of composition was extraordinary, military-like. Writing began in August 1941. As the Nazi war machine advanced, Prokofi ev, working steadily, was evacuated with his companion and librettist Mira Mendelson, fi rst to Nalchik, then to Tbilisi, and fi nally to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. By April 1942 the eleven-scene opera was complete in piano score: in less than eight months, Tolstoy’s epic novel of Russia’s “First Fatherland War” (1812) had become Soviet Russia’s operatic epic for her “Second Fatherland War” (1941–45). Th e bulk of the libretto’s lines are taken straight from Tolstoy. Th is decision to preserve whole meandering paragraphs of Tolstoyan prose intact, without recasting the verbal material into conventional arias and recitative “fi ller,” elicited from the offi cial music jury the same complaint made twenty-fi ve years earlier against Prokofi ev’s setting of Dostoevsky’s Th e Gambler: too wordy, not enough singing, more excitement for the orchestra than for the voice. But the Stalinist arts establishment, mobilized for a terrible war, raised more substantial political objections. Are the Russian people glorious enough? Are not Tolstoy’s beloved and familiar characters too trivially reduced to their erotic appetites? Where is the all- seeing Leader, predicting victory and justifying sacrifi ce? In three revisions submitted over the next decade — 1946, 1949, and 1952 — the loyal but harassed Prokofi ev packed in ever more triumphant heroism and tuneful ensemble pieces. He added a brilliant ball in Tchaikovsky’s style (thus adding dance rhythms to “Peace”) as well as Glinka-style patriotic arias (thus adding inspiration to “War”). He even composed a desperately non-operatic scene of military deliberations for Kutuzov’s war council (“Fili”). But during the post-war period, only “Peace” was performed, albeit to great popular acclaim. “War” never passed preliminary censorship. Prokofi ev was still adjusting the opera months before his death in 1953. Mira Mendelson and Prokofi ev crafted the libretto out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace with exeptional precision. All scenes for “Peace” are taken from Book II, Parts Th ree and Five. Th e unifying theme is Natasha Rostova’s fall from innocence and the repercussions of that fall on the three men who desire her: her fi ancé Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, her seducer Anatol Kuragin, and her admirer, confessor, and eventual husband, Pierre Bezukhov. At the epicenter of these events sits a famous scene that Prokofi ev did not set: “Natasha at the Opera.” In that novelistic episode, the 16-year-old Natasha — pampered, impulsive, betrothed to Prince Andrei (at a distance and with a built-in delay) but spurned by the rest of the Bolkonsky family, so badly in need of both illusion and love — attends an opera performance. Tolstoy mercilessly parodies the genre and its baleful eff ect on the heroine. — 338 — ------------------------- 18. PLAYBILL TO PROKOFIEV’S “WAR AND PEACE” AT THE MET ------------------------ At fi rst appalled by opera’s crude artifi ce, Natasha is gradually bewitched by its brazenness, its unembarrassed grounding in deception (what Tolstoy called all social and artistic convention). Soon thereafter she falls to the corrupt, manipulative Hélène Bezukhova and her lascivious brother Anatol. Prokofi ev, of course, had nothing to gain by reproducing Tolstoy’s disgust at operatic convention. But he had everything to gain by showcasing the seductiveness of music. And thus, in Act I, scene iv of his second revision, he replaces the “absent center,” Natasha at the Opera, with an equally intoxicating device of his own: an E-fl at major waltz in compelling 3/4 time, which none of the supremely musical, resonant Rostovs are able to resist. Modulating in and out of more sinister minor keys, Hélène and Anatol keep this waltz going throughout the scene. Natasha and her father, Count Rostov, try feebly to counter with a 4/4 beat of their own but cannot sustain it; their words might resist, but they sing the waltz. For Prokofi ev (unlike Tolstoy), opera is not a spectator sport; we are in it. Even the impeccably moral Sonya, who castigates Natasha for her profl igacy and will eventually tattletale on the elopement scheme, cannot assert a successful 4/4 beat against the maddening swirl. Natasha, the spirit of music and dance, defi es them all. Only the ridiculous, nearsighted, lumbering and titanic Pierre Bezukhov will preserve her, believe in her, and drive the aggressor (his cowardly brother- in-law) from Russia’s ancient capital. Th is same theme of seduction followed by betrayal, a fall, and a cleansing maturation is repeated in the “War” portions. But now Natasha has become all of Russia. Th e Frenchifi ed salon of the Kuragins has become the French Grande Armée, carrying its “theater of war” ever closer to the Russian core. Russia is seduced, betrayed, falls. Field Marshal Kutuzov (blind in one eye, ridiculous, lumbering, titanic) will preserve her, but not without terrible losses. In the process, the wounded Andrei will die in Natasha’s arms on the outskirts of burning Moscow, thus bringing together the two levels, the battlefi eld and the hearth. If the seductive rhythms of the waltz dominate “Peace,” then the mass choral hymn, the military march (with percussion and brass fanfare), and the well-paced patriotic aria will stitch together “War.” Whenever this fabric temporarily relaxes and civilian life is remembered, the waltzes briefl y return. In this opera, peace means the possibility of carnal love, and thus of love’s unstoppable folly. War, in contrast, is absolutely ennobling and transcendent. We sense this truth in the maturation of Natasha (a “peace” mentality) and Prince Andrei (split between “peace” and “war”). In the fi rst scene, both hero and heroine are equally self-absorbed. Andrei at the — 339 — ------------------------------------ PART III. MUSICALIZING THE LITERARY CLASSICS ----------------------------------- Oak (his opening aria) can only think of himself, his rights to personal happiness — and even listening in later to the singing of the endearingly self-absorbed adolescent Natasha, he laments only her “indiff erence to his existence.” By the end, Andrei on his deathbed reaches out both to her and to Russia, whose resurrection he fantasizes but will not live to see. Natasha too has been chastened by war; in the novel it sobers her caprice, transforming her impatient ecstasies into lifesaving gestures for others (persuading her family to empty their laden carts, for example, and abandon their wealth to the invading French in order to evacuate wounded soldiers). Such lyrical progressions from selfi sh to selfl ess love are still, however, conventionally operatic. Th e problem that audiences have today with Prokofi ev’s War and Peace is its Stalin-era pageantry and chauvinist rhetoric. Such scenes seem to defy both Tolstoy (who condemned militarism, state worship, political bombast) and musical decency. Th e deeply lyrical Prokofi ev felt this crudeness keenly. When advised in 1947 by his close friend and patron, the Bolshoi conductor Samuel Samosud, to add more patriotic hymns (of the sort sung in classic Russian military-historical opera, by Glinka’s Ivan Susanin or Borodin’s Prince Igor), Prokofi ev responded glumly, “I can’t do that.” His music for Kutuzov’s major aria went through eight revisions. But one paradox of this opera is that its patriotic pageantry is in fact immensely stirring and satisfying — an indication, perhaps, of the strong link between the lyrical and the propagandistic that produced so much tremendously good fi lm music during the Stalinist era. Th is aesthetic link is also in keeping with Tolstoy’s musical aesthetic.
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