When Hitler's armies marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, the Russian people's fight for survival inspired Sergei Prokofiev to write an opera that would embody their struggle. His hugely ambitious choice for a story: Tolstoy's War and Peace. What he finally produced in 1943, however, was written in an almost schizoid style—part introspective love story, part heroic showpiece—that was difficult to grasp, easy to misunderstand. Stalin's commissars gave only grudging approval, demanded more pageantry and patriotic fervor. At his death in 1953, the composer was still rewriting the work. He never saw it fully staged.
Passion and Despair. War and Peace is finally catching on. In 1973 the work was chosen to open the new Sydney Opera House. A year ago in Boston, Sarah Caldwell presided over the first U.S. staging. Last week in New York, at long last, the Bolshoi Opera unveiled the production of War and Peace that it has been performing in Moscow since 1959. With chandeliers shining, cannons roaring, soldiers marching and Moscow burning, it was, as it should have been, spectacular. Coming along as the fifth of six productions offered by the Bolshoi during its current American debut at the Metropolitan Opera (TIME, July 7), War and Peace reaffirmed the Bolshoi's eminence as one of Europe's great opera houses.
Prokofiev's opera might as well have been called Peace and War. It starts well along in the Tolstoy novel, with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky on a visit to Count Rostov's country estate, musing on the seeming emptiness of his life, then discovering Rostov's beautiful daughter Natasha. That and the next six scenes depict, with a mixture of passion, intrigue and despair, the decadent social life of prewar Russia. The last six scenes are devoted to the French invasion of 1812. Napoleon struts nervously (to the accompaniment of diabolic fanfares in brass), while Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov praises the people and plots the invader's doom ("The beast will be wounded with all the strength of Russia"). There is little continuity in the libretto written by Prokofiev and his second wife. Prokofiev was dramatizing only a series of focal points in the story that all his audiences know. In a final chorus ("We went to battle for our fatherland"), the Russian people declare themselves the victors and heroes of the opera.
The strength of the Bolshoi's first-night performance—from the blasting power of both chorus and orchestra to the sensitive, rich-voiced singing of Soprano Makvala Kasrashvili as Natasha and Baritone Yuri Mazurok as Andrei —lay in the company's willingness to take War and Peace for what it is and never what it is not. It is an epic; but unlike the heroes of Verdi or Wagner, Napoleon and Kutuzov never meet face to face, nor do we ever see Andrei suffer his fatal wound, nor can Natasha save him. But although War and Peace is no lyric drama, Prokofiev is capable of remarkably delicate touches, like the soft rasping of strings that evoke the delirium of Andrei's death scene.
War and Peace will be one of the major attractions next week when the Bolshoi moves on to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. So will Boris Godunov, which opened the Bolshoi's New York stand, as well as the two major Tchaikovsky operas that followed: