A mirror of the times
Sergey Prokofiev's War and Peace
The great chorus of the Russian people, the “Epitaph”, rises up like a majestic monolith of sound at the opening of Sergey Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace. Into this monolith the words “The armies of 12 European nations have invaded Russia” – a declaration of doom taken almost word for word from the novel by Leo Tolstoy on which the opera is based – seem to have been chiselled in monumental letters. Just like in Greek tragedy, the chorus, though itself affected by the course of events, is a clear interpreter of these same events. It is as if the composer, through the instrumentality of the overwhelming treble forte, was trying to break down the barriers of historical time and hammer home to the audience that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia at the end of June, 1812, was a real, living event of the here and now.
Thus Prokofiev short circuits history and fuses the events of 1812 with those of his own time, when another catastrophe of the same dimension befell his country – the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler in June 1941. Among other things, this mirroring of contemporary events in his opera drew upon it the attention of the Communist bureaucracy that supervised cultural developments in the USSR. Bringing their ideological interpretation of history to bear on the work, they made its completion an extremely complicated matter. The first outline came into being a few months before the outbreak of the war, and a number of revisions took place before the final version appeared in 1953, the year of Prokofiev’s death. The conflict that existed between the composer’s own ideas and those of the culture cadres, with their stressing of idealised characterisation as required by the doctrine of Socialist Realism, naturally left its traces on the work itself. Thus the portraiture of Natasha as a woman surrounded by three men was probably tolerated only because Tolstoy had already depicted to great effect both the bright side of her character and the darker contours of her being.
The aesthetic ambiguity of the opera finds its fullest expression in the character of Kutusov, Napoleon’s adversary. The question that here arises is, did Prokofiev create a prefiguration of Stalin in the character of the Russian army commander – an accusation levelled against him up till today – or is such an interpretation in terms of political personality cult too limited? After all, Kutusov was popular as a national hero in Russia ever since the defeat of Napoleon. It was probably just this ambivalence that the author strove to achieve. While pampering the propagandist interests of the Politburo officials, the work is nevertheless dominated by a central patriotic idea, namely that of erecting a resounding monument to the brotherhood of war-ridden Soviet citizens. The method used is to project the 1941–45 “War for the Fatherland” back in time to the heroic year of Napoleon’s defeat in 1812.
Robert Maschka
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| Hans Werner Henze, L'Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love |
Sergej Prokofjew
WAR AND PEACE
Concert performance
Conductor Valery Gergiev
Soloists
Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Anna Netrebko
Ekaterina Semenchuk
Larissa Shevchenko
Evgeny Nikitin
Mikhail Kit
Sergei Alexashkin
Gennady Bezubenkov
Mikhail Petrenko
u.a.
Choir and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Kirov Theatre
Premiere 9 August, 6.30 p.m.
Second performance
11 August, 6.30 p.m.
Felsenreitschule
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Production photos © Karl Forster