Opera on the front lines with ‘War and Peace’
“Again sufferings, needed by none, wholly unnecessary; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.” These words were penned by Leo Tolstoy in his 1904 anti-war text “Bethink Yourselves!” in reference to the Russo-Japanese war taking place at the time. Tolstoy, once an artillery officer, became an ardent pacifist.
It was precisely this quote that the creative team behind “War and Peace”, an opera by composer Sergei Profokiev, chose as the guide text for their five-hour performance at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which recently celebrated its premiere.
Prokofiev’s 1946 opera is based on Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”, originally published in 1867.
The new Bavarian staging is a large-scale operatic production, not just because there are 40 solo roles, but because the music is demanding. What’s more, the current production was staged against the background of Russia’s brutal and ongoing war against Ukraine.
The original plot revolved around a defensive war that Russia waged against Napoleon’s troops in 1812. It’s a touchy subject and an ideological balancing act – which the Bavarian State Opera team masters with a production that is a bold appeal. to peace and freedom.
a significant date
Even the premiere date, March 5, was significant.
On that day 70 years ago, in 1953, both composer Sergei Prokofiev and dictator Joseph Stalin died.
The opera is performed by a high-level international ensemble led by maestro Vladimir Jurowski, current general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, and Russian enfant-terrible director Dmitri Chernyakov. Both are defining figures of Russia’s art and cultural scene and currently work at a healthy distance from their homeland.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 brought the creative team to the brink of despair; the already planned project seemed doomed to failure. However, the entire team decided to take a risk and still go ahead with the production of “Guerra e Paz”, out of a sense of responsibility and a commitment to art as a way of positioning itself, especially in times of war.
What war does to the world
Leo Tolstoy’s four-volume novel “War and Peace” is a key piece of Russian and world literature and is considered a masterpiece of 19th-century fiction. The title in Russian, “War and the World” (“Voyna i mir”) can also be translated as “War and the World”. “War” or “voyna” means war, but the Russian word “mir” has the double meaning of “peace” and “world”. According to sources, this was also Tolstoy’s original intention.
In the novel, Tolstoy analyzes the nature of violence. At the time, he was watching the invasion of Russia by the French army in 1812. According to Tolstoy, although violence destroys peace and makes people suffer, it cannot change the world.
Sergei Prokofiev, meanwhile, wrote his opera during Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Though the composer inevitably condensed Tolstoy’s mammoth work into an abbreviated, less demanding version, the opera’s main theme remains juxtaposition. of a peaceful society with one devastated by a cruel war.
Life had not been easy for Prokofiev either. When he returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s after a successful international career, he found himself at the mercy of the Russian regime, which condemned all modernist trends in music. Although he was the country’s top songwriter at the time, his performances were banned for being too contemporary. He worked on different versions of “War and Peace” until his death in 1953, and yet he was never able to see the final fully staged version of his opera.
Opera stars of Ukraine and Russia
For the new production in Munich, Jurowski and Chernyakov recruited a fleet of opera stars from Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Armenia, as well as other Western European countries.
The main roles of the lovers, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova, a favorite heroine of Russian literature, are brilliantly cast with Andrei Zhilikhovsky, a native of Moldova, and Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska.
Kulchynska faced criticism from some of her compatriots for participating in a supposedly “Russian” production, but decided to participate.
As if the war was in Moscow
Director Dmitry Chernyakov takes a radical approach to staging the plot: he puts the war in the heart of Moscow. Both the peaceful scenes in the first part of the work and the bloody battle and murders later in the play are set in the columned hall of the Moscow House of Trade Unions – a place familiar to every Russian. Whether it’s the reception for the Tsar’s coronation or in recent years the presentation of deceased heads of state from Lenin to Stalin to Gorbachev, it occupies a central place in Russian history.
War reveals itself as a ruthless RPG with no rules, dragging the heroes into a maelstrom of mindless brutality.
Source: DW
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