On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Prokofiev's 'War and Peace' By John Simon A highly musical couple of my acquaintance used to debate assiduously about who was the greatest modern Russian composer, Sergei...
...Until, that is, Hitler came...
...Epigraph...
...He manages with only three discs by speeding up and making a small cut...
...On Music Prokofiev's 'War and Peace' By John Simon A highly musical couple of my acquaintance used to debate assiduously about who was the greatest modern Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev or Dimitri Shostakovich...
...All of these are well represented in War and Peace, largely written in three different, ever more remote locations to which the Soviets transported their artists and scientists as the German offensive advanced...
...His wife Galina Vishnevskaya, who sang Natasha at the 1959 premiere, repeats the role...
...Should one try to defend Moscow with inadequate forces or make a strategic retreat and abandon the holy city to Napoleon...
...The music, as Harewood writes, is "a sinister scherzo in Prokofiev's most sardonic vein...
...Scene 8. The music of the second part is so different that some have talked of two separate operas...
...Even though a definition of Prokofiev's music is hard to come by, it strikes me as the ability to season the most lyrical passages with a whiff of cool understatement...
...Although hardness has affected her 60-year-old voice, and some details are off, this is still an impressive, very dramatic performance...
...This was to change later, when Prokofiev, as it were, fell in love with Natasha and actually considered her name for his title...
...for a long time his death went unrecorded...
...The Russian Council of War in the village of Fili...
...The second half, "War," was forbidden after the dress rehearsal, despite the cast's ardent defense...
...There he meets Platon Karataev (Tolstoy's stand-in), a simple peasant and veteran, whose faith inspires Pierre...
...only some 40 friends managed to dodge the contrary traffic to his obsequies...
...His work became more accessible, more obviously tuneful, as required by Stalin and his stooges in both the political and musical realms, but also owing to a genuinely Russian, almost populist, strain in the composer...
...If The Fiery Angel represents his operatic summit in the earlier phase, War and Peace is the pinnacle of the later one...
...thus Prokofiev has written his own very idiosyncratic versions of four dances of the period...
...Soon the coachman Balaga, an accomplice in previous escapades, shows up and, given some wine, proves ready to help...
...Prokofiev abandoned Europe, mostly Paris, and America, where he lived from 1917to 1936, to return to Russia...
...Wieslaw Ochman's Pierre, Nicolai Gedda's Kuragin, Nicola Ghiuselev's Kutuzov, Katherine Ciesinski's Sonya, Stefania Toczynska's Hélène, and Eduard Tumagian's Napoleon are all excellent, even if Rostropovich's baton drags a bit...
...in their different ways, both composers were equally splendid...
...Uneasy about each other, the two nevertheless embrace with premonitions of not meeting again...
...From a window above, he overhears a conversation between Natasha, the Rostov daughter, and her cousin Sonya...
...He dispenses compliments to the Russian people—his army—and invites Andrei to join his staff...
...Many of his major works, particularly for the stage, were postponed, sometimes indefinitely, if not banned outright...
...He likewise dropped his very European first wife, Lina, for his very Russian second Mira Mendelson...
...Herewith a précis of the 13 scenes...
...Night in a peasant hut in the village of Mitishi...
...Scene 12...
...Scene 4. A party at the Bezukhovs...
...I did not sympathize so much with Natasha as with Sonya, whose fate made me very sad...
...his friend, the roly-poly, homely, goodhearted Count Pierre Bezukhov...
...Even so, Sergei and Mira refused to make Napoleon either ridiculous or a contemptible Hitler figure...
...Porter, by contrast, compares the opera's patriotic elements to similar ones in Verdi operas that are now fully accepted...
...Meeting him (he had been Natasha's first suitor) induces bittersweet reflections in Andrei...
...In the wake of Erwin Piscator's pioneer effort, recent decades have witnessed stage and screen adaptations of War and Peace galore...
...Natasha worries about remaining a wallflower...
...They dream of future happiness as the orchestra intones the waltz of their first meeting...
...from Sergei Eisenstein, who made numerous suggestions and was to have directed the work on the Bolshoi Theater stage...
...a glimmer of hope awakens in Pierre, who has finally found himself through shared suffering with the people...
...Five versions—some shorter, some longer—were done before 13 scenes were settled on...
...Natasha finds Andrei and begs his forgiveness, but he, more in love than ever, bears no grudge...
...In a grand patriotic aria, he glorifies Moscow...
...Not coincidentally, Tolstoy's Whatis Art...
...Kutuzov has the last word and orders retreat...
...Enter the rake Kuragin, who makes shameless advances to Natasha and hands her a note proclaiming he must have her or die...
...Scene 9. The French command post on the Shevardino redoubt...
...From his childhood, he derived a classical line, thanks to the Beethoven sonatas his mother would play...
...The wonderfully elastic music eloquently conveys the fast-shifting emotions...
...Scene 11...
...Napoleon paces through the burning city and is greatly impressed by the heroism of the populace...
...Very reluctantly, he sends in the reserves...
...Scene 7. Pierre Bezukhov's study, the same night...
...Richard Taruskin rightly sees in the love story's betrayal and redemption an allegory of Russia's excessive Francophilia and betrayal of Russian roots...
...A blizzard on the Smolensk road...
...Scene 5. Dolokhov's apartment...
...The Rostovs dump their furniture to evacuate the wounded instead—Andrei, unbeknown to them, included...
...Several I dutifully but unenthusiastically sat through...
...Scene 10...
...Two elderly ladies, Akhrosimova and Peronskaya, comment sardonically to Natasha about various guests...
...Scene 1. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, disillusioned by Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz in the campaign of 1805, has retired to the country...
...But the work is known to most Russians the way Huckleberry Finn is to most Americans...
...There followed a modern trend, involving harmonic language but also innovations in melody, orchestration and dramatic emphasis...
...The most successful adaptations are of insignificant fictions, usually thrillers...
...Last summer, there were separate, much-lauded productions of War and Peace in both Paris and London...
...It was plain to me that if Tolstoy had managed to cut the novel in half, from four volumes to two, it would only have gained by it...
...Anatol and Dolokhov escape...
...A waltz, less grand than in Scene 2, is heard...
...guests are announced, including Prince Andrei...
...The recording is good and includes some effective sound effects...
...While the bedraggled Grande Armée retreats, two officers bemoan their wretched condition (a hint of the scherzo trumpets from Scene 9...
...The young international cast, with many Russians, is generally fine...
...Old Bolkonsky shows up in cap and nightgown, and snubs Natasha...
...The young woman is back in Moscow...
...August 1812, the Russian Army is digging in for the battle of Borodino...
...Earlier CD versions exist, but I will focus on the three that are readily available...
...Tolstoy's presumed masterwork, the gargantuan novel War and Peace, has remained a closed book for me...
...Flowers for him were pre-empted by Stalin...
...To a waltz, the two fall in love...
...anyway, the weirdness is effective...
...This struck Prokofiev as highly operatic, and work began in earnest...
...After the 1972 revival by the English National Opera, Andrew Porter reported disapprovingly that the London Times critic wrote of "cheap pageantry, hollow rhetoric, claptrap, agitprop set to music," and dubbed Kutuzov "a cartoon figure...
...Akhrosimova berates Natasha, who is defiant until Pierre arrives and informs her that Anatol has a wife...
...and to keep grotesqueries good-humored...
...Scene 2. A ball in the home of an old nobleman in St...
...André Lischké calls this an "obsessive onomatopoeia," but for what...
...In occupied Moscow the citizenry is setting fire to whatever might be of use to the enemy, as the aristocracy flees...
...Had he lived to see a stage production—one of his dearest wishes—he might well have made some further revisions, as was his wont...
...Opera may be more propitious to importantnovels,having music to compensate for what is lost...
...It may be argued that the Prokofievs' libretto reduces the vast Tolstoyan canvas to a comic strip, something like Tom Stoppard's speeded-up Hamlet...
...But trouble is brewing: Kuragin, too, is taken with Natasha, and asks his sister to arrange a meeting...
...Tightening or dropping scenes created no problem for Russian audiences...
...The music has returned to the lyricism of "Peace...
...her brother, the profligate Prince Anatol Kuragin...
...Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1810...
...It is a moonlit May night...
...One may doubt," writes the Earl of Harewood in The New Kobbé's Opera Book, "if Prokofiev ever elsewhere penned music of such tenderness...
...Tolstoy has upward of 500 characters, reduced by Prokofiev to 72...
...Third was the toccata or motoric line, the legacy of Robert Schumann's Toccata that had captivated him...
...As Pierre —who in the novel eventually marries Natasha—is a savior on the personal plane, Kutuzov is on the national...
...At this point it was to have been a much shorter opera about spiritual resurrection through the miracle of love, focusing on the Andrei-Natasha-Pierre relationship...
...If ever there was a musical dead heat, this is it...
...Finally, the "scherzoish" or grotesque line, based on various degrees of "whimsicality, laughter, mockery...
...In the novel, Natasha's seduction begins at the Opera, which in Tolstoy epitomized phoniness...
...Colonel Denisov arrives with the news that Napoleon is about to attack...
...No cogent reason for the interdict can be deduced...
...On a business trip, he stays over at the estate of Count Rostov...
...one had to be pieced together from sketches by Prokofiev and notes by Samosud...
...Natasha tries to commit suicide with arsenic...
...He is tired but happy to share the people's victory celebration with a choral reprise of his Scene 10 aria...
...Pierre reflects on his wife's and his hollow existence, to which Natasha would be the antidote...
...The solid cast is attractively much younger here, but has no stars...
...The feckless Hélène congratulates Natasha on her engagement but at the same time presses Anatol's suit on her...
...The chorus—i.e., the Russian people—proclaims might and defiance in a statement derived from Tolstoy, but made to apply to Hitler's invasion...
...ODDLY ENOUGH, no fair copy of the final version exists...
...The text, incidentally, borrows from a poem by Vastly Zhukovsky, already used by Tchaikovsky in Pique Dame...
...Foolish chitchat with a silly Frenchman is interrupted when a furious Pierre bursts in, shakes Anatol by the lapels, makes him hand over Natasha's letters (why would he have them with him...
...This frustration, no less than frail health, may have contributed to his death at not quite 64...
...How subtly the music distinguishes between waltzing with joyous abandon and waltzing with sophisticated languor...
...Offstage choruses are praising Kutuzov...
...I have never been able to get through it...
...Initially shocked, Natasha is confused and charmed, despite Sonya's warning...
...Again, no stars, except perhaps Alan Opie, as a good Napoleon...
...Surveying the battle with his staff, Napoleon is perplexed by the Russian resistance...
...Scene 13...
...Amid fine comic music, Andrei's lyrical motif breaks in as ironic contrast...
...Scene 6. In the house of Akhrosimova, Natasha's godmother, the girl awaits Anatol...
...Reports of French brutality arrive as Denisov proposes to harass the enemy from the rear with 500 partisans...
...Anatol says good-bye to his gypsy lover, Matriosha, and the three men board the sledge in a blizzard, as Anatol also bids a nostalgic farewell to Moscow...
...Scene 3. An old-fashioned gloomy salon in Moscow, at the elder Prince Bolkonsky's...
...The highly self-analytical Prokofiev has himself recorded the five lines of his development...
...On Erato (75480, four discs), recorded in 1986, Mstislav Rostropovich conducts the Orchestre National de France...
...She is unhappy and yearns for Andrei's return...
...Hélène is entertaining guests...
...The music interweaves Andrei, Natasha and Kuragin themes...
...he is amazed to find himself along with a few others reprieved and merely marched into captivity...
...Pierre, who was an incendiary, had hoped to kill Napoleon...
...The answer is simple: both...
...He awaits a Russian delegation bringing him the keys to Moscow, where he intends to show clemency...
...This epigraph can head "Peace," or come here to head "War," a matter that has never been resolved...
...Some were left unfinished, others received only posthumous performance...
...Harewood's "bloodpounding in the ears" is likelier...
...Pierre appears in quaint civilian garb and tells Andrei he has come as a spectator...
...his wife, the frivolous Hélène...
...Elsewhere, there are borrowings from his score for the film Lermontov and his score for Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible...
...The latest version was recorded in 1999, with Richard Hickox deftly conducting the Spoleto Festival Orchestra and a Russian choir (Chandos 9855, 4 discs...
...The latter took over fully when Mira read aloud to Sergei from the novel and reached the scene of the deathbed reconciliation between Andrei and Natasha...
...There was help from Prokofiev's fellow composer and best friend, Nikolai Miaskovsky...
...But the Prince, as gunfire begins, chooses to stay with his men, courting near-certain death...
...As early as 193 5, Prokofiev toyed with the idea of an opera based on Tolstoy's Reswrection, while simultaneously considering War and Peace...
...but the recorded sound is mediocre...
...But with such performances and the greatest sonorous immediacy, the choice, if money is no object, should be Chandos...
...Deeply moved, Pierre declares that were he free, he himself would woo her, even though she is his friend's fiancée...
...The girls' rapturous talk about the beauties of the night awakens in the Prince the desire for happiness...
...Tsar Alexander I drops in and dances a mazurka...
...Restless, he muses pessimistically at the open window about a gnarled oak (himself) he saw among leafy birches...
...And this opinion was strengthened at the various times later on when I came back to the book...
...Here I want to focus on War and Peace, the penultimate of Prokofiev's eight operas, discounting juvenilia...
...In his lucid moments, he longs for Natasha...
...The one production I have witnessed (the Bolshoi at the Met) left me neither puzzled nor unsatisfied...
...A shell lands at his feet and he gallantly kicks it away...
...The sound, as usual on Chandos, is resplendent, and the stage performance, recorded live, adds drama...
...Andrei, mortally wounded, lies in a badly-lit bed...
...Anatol has seduced Natasha with the note Dolokhov wrote for him...
...In his memoir, Prokofiev by Prokofiev, the composer wrote about his first youthful encounter with the book: "I was enthralled by War and Peace, although of course I was bored by the endless discussions...
...noticing this, the kindly Pierre makes Andrei dance with her...
...His final bad luck was dying on the same day as Joseph Stalin, March 5,1953...
...But audiences that need help can get it from program notes...
...If, as I have often written, a novel can be adapted to the stage, it must not have been good enough to be worth doing...
...At the same time, he inveighs against the madness of it: Anatol is already married...
...The Kirov Opera version, under Valéry Ghergiev, is due at the Met next season...
...to tone down the most grandiose ones with harmonic subtleties and rhythmic variety...
...In 1991, at a quarter hour less than Erato's four hours plus, Valéry Ghergiev conducted his Kirov Opera forces in an energetic, albeit somewhat less expressive, performance (Philips 434097...
...Natasha is overjoyed when her father asks Andrei to visit them...
...Fourth was the lyrical line, at first overlooked by his critics, but he considered it progressively more important and characteristic...
...He did make minor and major changes either under political pressure or out of perfectionism, but he never experienced even a complete concert performance...
...War and Peace is the longest Russian novel, making it the hardest to adapt...
...It does, however, display a true sense of a well-drilled ensemble...
...seems to me characteristically a middlebrow screed against high art...
...Those who cannot keep up are shot, as, over Pierre's protests, is Karataev...
...and from Pokrovsky himself, who produced the first half, "Peace," conducted by Samosud...
...Natasha and her father come to pay their respects to her fiance's father...
...This, like other music in the opera, is lifted from a Prokofiev composition for a stage version of Eugene Onegin...
...But Sonya has tipped off the hostess, and when the seducer appears at the French doors a butler bars his way...
...A brief libretto outline by Mira and Sergei was sketched in April 1941...
...Despite his successes, though, Prokofiev was the unluckiest of composers...
...The scene ends with an écossaise...
...Now he also secures a passport and a defrocked priest to marry the couple...
...The waltz becomes the theme of Andrei and Natasha's love, one of the opera's many recurring motifs...
...Oddly, no two commentators agree on that number—I have seen 67,73,76, and 80, among others—partly because some writers don't count the silent characters, and some just don't know how to count...
...Kadja Grönke writes that the nonsense syllables may represent "the whirring of battlefield grenades," which I doubt...
...On June 22 Hitler invaded Russia, and the idea of a greater national opera began to take shape...
...The combination of misty metaphysics, historical philosophizing, goody-goody moralism, and unchecked prolixity strikes me as epic windbaggery...
...the Prince dreams of making her his wife...
...Natasha's father leaves and Andrei's sister Marya entertains her awkwardly, envying her beauty and happiness...
...and his friend, Lieutenant Dolokhov...
...Hoping to break Andrei's engagement to the impoverished young woman, he has sent his son abroad for a year...
...it was all part of the general artistic pogrom launched by the infamous Andrei Zhdanov against the leading writers, composers and filmmakers...
...It is Natasha's first...
...Liberating guerrillas under Denisov attack the convoy, and he recognizes Pierre, who now learns about Hélène's demise, Anatol's loss of a leg in battle, and Andrei's death in Natasha's arms...
...The Russian advance guard appears, followed by Kutuzov on horseback...
...He consoles the hapless girl who tearfully asks him to implore Andrei's forgiveness for her...
...Russian incendiaries are rounded up and executed...
...Andrei sinks into his final sleep...
...The orchestra plays a polonaise...
...and extracts a grudging promise that the cad will keep mum and leave Moscow promptly...
...Marshal Kutuzov, a stand-in for Stalin, enters to a subtle flute tone in the orchestra that gradually builds...
...and worst, he was denied the pleasure of outliving his tormentor...
...In a sense War and Peace, which occupied Prokofiev for nearly 12 years, was also unfinished...
...A final irony: Stalin and his henchmen, with all their harassment, ended up making War and Peace, through the inflicted rewrites, into a bigger and better opera than it might have been otherwise...
...Instead, he gets grim news about his generals wounded or dead...
...in his delirium, he hears an offstage chorus singing "Piti-piti-piti...
...Grotesque interludes are provided by French actresses in costume fleeing their burning theater, and three madmen escaped from the asylum disporting themselves...
...from the conductor Samuil Samosud, a steady fan, fired from the Bolshoi for being Jewish, but welcomed by Boris Pokrovsky, director of Leningrad's Maly Theater...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
