Opera - Peter Conrad is supplied with moral courage at a flawless production of War and Peace
Tolstoy despised opera, and in War and Peace he sent the Rostovs to a performance of Gounod's Faust in order to ridicule the tawdry unreality of the form. Bravely defying this built-in taboo, Prokofiev condensed Tolstoy's outsize novel into the grandest of 20th-century music dramas. His War and Peace, premiered in 1945 under orders from Stalin's cultural commissars, is stocked with balls and battles, balmy rural nocturnes and storms of ice; it contains roles for 70 soloists and walk-ons for assorted livestock, as well as an anthology of folk songs and epic chants rousingly delivered by the entire Russian people.
Stalin demanded demotic anthems praising Kutuzov, the general who routed Napoleon: he was one of Uncle Joe's pet forebears. But despite the ideological constraints that the Kremlin imposed, the aural impression left by Prokofiev's opera is one of lyrical regret, mourning for lost innocence and betrayed hopes. Prince Andrei begins, in a passage of unbearably tender musical beauty, by describing the earth's renewal in May; at the end, five hours (or rather several years) later, with the war won, Pierre Bezukhov absently remembers a multitude of incidental deaths and listens to the remote echo of a peacetime life that is, he knows, defunct for ever. You can hear Prokofiev - lured back to Russia by official flattery, only to be harried, obstructed and driven to a premature death before he could hear his opera complete - interring the idea of the revolution.
I have always loved War and Peace, and longed to see a worthy performance of it (especially after English National Opera's starveling vernacular effort last autumn). Now, in New York, the Metropolitan Opera has obliged. Valery Gergiev conducts the Met's new production with fluttering, dervish-like fingers. He conjures up light-footed waltzes and jolting cannonades, and even finds some eerily unexpected chamber music in the score: the scene in which Napoleon supervises the Battle of Borodino is accompanied only by military ordnance and a few hysterical galloping trumpet volleys. The director is Andrei Konchalovsky - best known for films such as Runaway Train - who keeps the action cinematically fluid, whisking contingents of dancers and battalions of soldiers on and off a curved stage so perilously raked that, on opening night, it decanted a Napoleonic extra into the orchestra pit, where he knocked a violinist off her chair, snapped her expensive bow, and delayed the Russian victory for ten agonising minutes.
Thanks to George Tsypin's sets, transitions happen instantly as we watch the globe turning. The green and yellow stars above the Rostov country estate fade, eclipsed by a new galaxy of chandeliers; transparent malachite columns descend to redefine the space, and a ball is at once in progress. When war is declared, a parquet floor is peeled away to reveal the earth, layered like the granitic foundation of Manhattan. Napoleon stands on a cliff of crushed corpses. A bronze Moscow burns and is rebuilt before our eyes.
Konchalovsky holds the two parts of the opera together with a single, symmetrical reminiscence. After their first dance, Andrei and Natasha tumble on the floor, overcome by innocent, enraptured, juvenile delight. As he dies, they do the same: he spectrally climbs out of his bloodied bed, sleepwalks into her arms, staggers for a few steps in her embrace, then drops to the ground.
The cast is perfect. Andrei's yearning melodies have never been sung as exquisitely as they are by Dmitri Hvorostovsky (and this endearingly vain baritone has even made a painful sacrifice to dramatic truth by chopping off his cascade of snowy hair). Gegam Grigorian is the very image of Tolstoy's Pierre: a frog prince to look at, the noblest and most valiant of souls when his tenor voice makes audible his inner nature. I had always thought the role of Natasha uncastable. She is everyone's ideal woman, as well as being the spirit of Russia itself; she behaves skittishly and reprehensibly, yet has to charm you into forgiving her. The soprano Anna Netrebko fits these impossible specifications. She sounds like the spring she describes in the first moonlit scene, and - moving with the weightless grace of a ballerina - resembles Audrey Hepburn in King Vidor's 1956 film of Tolstoy's novel. The single American in the principal quartet is Samuel Ramey, as the grizzled warrior Kutuzov. He hobbles across the stage with stoical determination, then brandishes sustained, mettlesome high notes that gleam as triumphally as the bayonets everyone else is waving.
Naturally, the patriotic militancy of Prokofiev's Stalinised War and Peace suits the current mood in embattled New York. The Russian banners on stage are matched by the compulsory American flags draped all over the Lincoln Center. But the production is more than a fortuitous morale-booster. When, at the end of the first section, a messenger interrupts a private social encounter to announce that Napoleon's army has reached the border, the mighty chorus suddenly masses in the drawing room to declaim its tumultuous epigraph about Russian resistance. The world has changed in a moment. For once, opera, despite Tolstoy's mockery of it, tells the truth about the heedless, hedonistic peace we used to enjoy, and supplies some of the moral courage we need to cope with whatever wars lie ahead.
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