Opera-the most problematic of entertainments-is also the art form
most capable of breathing fresh life into a historical episode, a buried myth
or a work of literature through the transforming powers of musical imagination,
theatrical compression and live, flesh-and-blood performance. An unexpected
demonstration of just how potent this alchemy can be took place at the Met on
the opening night of Prokofiev’s War and
Peace , which the company is presenting for the first time.
Near the end of the opera, we found ourselves on the road to
Smolensk in November 1812. Napoleon’s invading forces, having taken Moscow,
were now in retreat across a steeply raked mound of mud-like terrain. A
cinematic snowstorm was raging, and the stage was filled with defeated French
troops. As the music skittered and swirled, one of the Frenchmen, apparently
disoriented, lost his footing and tumbled into the orchestra pit. There was no
scream from a surprised woodwind or horn player, no groan from an injured
supernumerary, and it took the conductor, Valery Gergiev, a couple of seconds
to lower his baton and stop the music. A dozen operagoers who were seated in
the first rows got up and peered curiously into the pit. The performers onstage
stood immobilized. The rest of us sat quietly for some minutes. And then, as
though nothing odd had happened, Mr. Gergiev raised his arms, the music started
up again, and we were back on the road to Smolensk without further thought of
that unfortunate French soldier. (He reappeared at the curtain calls-apparently
unhurt thanks to a safety net-led triumphantly onstage by the Met’s general
manager, Joseph Volpe.)
Prokofiev’s distillation of Tolstoy’s literary masterpiece may be
the most hard-won of operatic masterpieces. For the composer and his
co-librettist (and subsequent wife) Mira Mendelson to compress the 1,500-page
novel, with its minutely detailed crosscurrents between the turbulent love
lives of a handful of St. Petersburg aristocrats and Napoleon’s threat to the
survival of Russia, into a fluid, two-act evening was daunting enough. To do so
at a time when Russia was again under foreign attack-from the Nazi Germans in
1941-and when the composer was under intense pressure to create a work that
would satisfy Stalin’s patriotic paranoia, was asking for trouble. Prokofiev,
who had returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 after years of rootlessness in
America and Europe, was eager to put his prickly modernist tendencies to
simpler, more politically palatable uses. When the Soviet authorities
criticized a first draft for being insufficiently heroic-it had too much
“Peace” in it-he dutifully added yards of vivid poster music to the “War”
section. Getting both halves of the work performed together proved virtually
impossible, and the opera went into Siberian storage after 1948, when the
Kremlin’s cultural ideologues cracked down on anything but the crudest sort of
socialist realism. It wasn’t until two years after Prokofiev’s death in 1953
that the whole work finally reached the stage, albeit in somewhat abbreviated
form.
The Met’s production, which is a co-venture with the Mariinsky
Theatre in St. Petersburg, is also a marginally abbreviated version (it lacks
the banal overture). But with a running time of nearly four and a half hours,
including one intermission, it’s not abbreviated enough. Sympathetic as one is
to the climate of suffering in which the opera was written, the repeated
choruses invoking scared Mother Russia, on top of the scenes of tactical
head-scratching involving the strutting Bonaparte and the indomitable Field
Marshall Kutuzov, begin to feel like a military siege in themselves. And
although Prokofiev’s music is never less than theatrically vibrant (it borrows
thumpingly from his great film score for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and features, in the
“Peace” section, some of his most beautifully sustained lyrical writing), it
doesn’t shy away from agitprop and goes on for long stretches without providing
anything much in the way of a memorable tune.
The Met, however, has made the most of one of the last century’s
few genuinely stirring operas. The cinematic prowess of the director, Andrei
Konchalovsky, whose Siberiade was one
of the notable epic films of the 70’s, is ideal for an opera structured in 13
self-contained scenes. His stage compositions, whether of stolen exchanges
between Prince Andrei and Natasha, the gaiety and gossip of a St. Petersburg
ball, or a tortured procession of lunatics, have the detailed grandeur of one
of his great film collaborators, Andrei Tarkovsky. Never have I seen the
members of the Met chorus look less like a herd of nobodies and more like a
horde of individuals. The expressive lighting by James F. Ingalls, the splendid
costumes by Tatiana Noginova and a wonderfully versatile set by George
Tsypin-which employs minimal props and a cyclorama on which all kinds of
weather can be projected-are impeccable.
But the real splendor of this War
and Peace is in the performances, led by the preternaturally alert Mr.
Gergiev. In a cast of 69 named characters, everyone had his or her moment.
(“Even the messengers are terrific,” I overheard one woman remark during the
intermission.) As Prince Andrei, Dimitri Hvorostovsky confirmed what I had
suspected while listening to his recent, magnificent Posa in Don Carlo : This glamorous Siberian
baritone has gone beyond being one of opera’s pinup boys to becoming a singing
actor of world-class magnetism. The Russian tenor Gegam Grigorian brought sensitivity
and urgency to the opera’s closest thing to a hero-bumbling, bespectacled Count
Pierre. Especially vivid in the lesser parts were Elena Obraztsova, still
blazing in her early 60’s as Madame Akhrosimova; Vladimir Ognovenko as a
scarily dotty Old Prince Bolkonsky; and Mzia Nioradze, who demonstrated an
astonishingly powerful contralto in the fleeting role of Matryosha. (One of the
biggest ovations of the night went to Samuel Ramey for his preening,
wobbly-voiced Kutuzov.)
Opening night was the occasion of another major Met debut-that of
Anna Netrebko as Natasha. Although she has been a member of the Mariinsky since
1994, this delicately beautiful, slim soprano looked to be little older than a
schoolgirl. With a dancer’s grace of movement (she could give master classes in
fainting) and a voice of surprising power and steely-edged purity, she didn’t
so much play the impetuous, love-struck heroine as inhabit her. She was the
incandescent spark who held the whole outlandish thing together-Audrey Hepburn with
a voice.
