Music: Prokofiev & Tolstoy

Prokofiev & Tolstoy The U.S. witnessed a major musical event this week: the American premiere of the late Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace. Although the composer finished his first version while the Germans were still rumbling toward Stalingrad, the sprawling work, which in one version took eight hours, had been performed only once before outside Russia (in Florence, in 1953). The present 2½hour edition—brilliantly produced in an English translation by NBC-TV’s enterprising Opera Theater, and conducted by Peter Herman Adler—was. the version Prokofiev himself approved before his death four years ago. It turned out to be less an opera than a pageant, but it offered some of the best music Prokofiev ever wrote.

The libretto, by Prokofiev and his wife, Poetess Mira Mendelsohn, arbitrarily hacked great chunks out of the Tolstoy epic without ever linking them in true dramatic tension. Tolstoy’s own brilliant literary counterpoint—in which he switched from peace to war scenes and back—was abandoned. All the peace was concentrated in the first part, all the war in the second, so that many of the figures in Part I suddenly dropped out of sight. Moreover, the libretto was narrative rather than dramatic, required whole passages of flat prose to be set to music, with the result that long stretches of the score were labored and discursive. In the war scenes, the opera stiffened with self-conscious patriotism, which Prokofiev illustrated with military airs that occasionally verged on the banal. But overall, War and Peace was a notable achievement. Whatever it lacked in sustained dramatic effect it made up in color, movement, and the driving force of lyric melody and great choral frescoes.

The music of the first part and the situations that it animated glowed with an almost Latin fervor. Andrey and Natasha (well sung by Morley Meredith and Helena Scott) faced each other across a garden ashiver with moonlight and poured out their yearnings in great warm gusts of melody; Natasha pirouetted giddily at a ball and lacily sang her infatuation with Anatol across the shimmer and sheen of violins. In one magnificent ball scene, a percussive, insistent invitation to the dance (“Dance, dance, dance the waltz”) eerily foreshadowed the dance of death that was to come on the battlefields. In other passages the music sparkled with a dry wit, or lilted through the great candlelit palaces.

As Prokofiev moved from personal emotion to glorification of the Russian masses, he was less successful, but nevertheless produced some fine choruses—e.g., the troops in praise of General Kutuzov, the citizens in a hymn of thanks for victory. The second part also produced the most authoritative acting—and one of the finest voices—in Baritone Kenneth Smith, who played General Kutuzov with sinewy dignity. High point of the opera came in one of the closing scenes, in which Andrey and Natasha were reunited as Andrey lay on his deathbed. Through his delirium he hears a pulsing beat, played in the orchestra by the strings sul ponticello (bow strokes near the bridge), and echoes it over and over again in a faint, falling cry. In one of Prokofiev’s most dramatic musical inventions, the orchestra announces Andrey’s approaching death—a scene that ranks among the greatest ever written for opera.