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The Grandest of Grand Operas
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20087 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
1,202 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
Elephantine would be an appropriate word to describe Sergei Prokofiev's opera War and Peace, except that the word suggests big and lumbering. Prokofiev's opera based on the mammoth Tolstoy novel and composed between 1941 and 1952 (which makes it a modern opera, although it sounds rather old-fashioned melodically)--is certainly big; however, it is anything but lumbering. Composed in thirteen scenes, with an obvious rest between the "Peace" and "War" sections, War and Peace is definitely not a short opera: It consists of two acts of approximately two hours each, the second longer than any in Wagner, and well over four hours of music in all. Epic seems an understatement.
Happily enough, in Prokofiev's centenary year the San Francisco Opera put on his big show to pretty much first-rate effect. It was easily the company's largest under taking. The statistics involved are themselves worthy of recounting: 38 soloists, 94 choristers, and 135 supernumeraries; 150 pairs of sideburns, 150 mustaches, and 100 wigs; one big cannon and a dozen small ones; 150 swords and 650 costumes; and 600 pounds of flameproof snow form each performance. David Belasco--or P.T. Barnum--would have approved.
But let it not be thought for a moment that the SFO production, designed by Michel Lebois and directed by Jerome Savary, was merely about getting crowds of people on and off the stage. Not a great or imaginative production, it was instead a solid one that did justice to the scope of its subject and Prokofiv's music. The opera was cast with a number of splendid Russian voices, and the man in the pit, Valery Gergiev, artistic director and chief conductor of St.Petersuburg's Kirov Theater, making his U.S. debut, brought out the beauties in Prokofiev's gorgeous score. The score, the story, and the people came reliably to life, which is perhaps as much as anyone should ask of an opera these days, since the majority lie on stage like beached whales.
Although there are plenty of pyrotechnics in War and Peace (a few of the cannon blasts took care of anyone nodding off in the audience), the opera is essentially a love story, albeit in a resonant setting. The opera itself, though it took Prokofiev over a decade to write it, is an amazingly smooth adaptation of Tolstoy's densely populated novel. Prokofiev's work on it was first interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Russia and Prokofiev's evacuation to the Caucasus; later, the authorities felt his depiction of the abandonment of Moscow was quite unsavory and "not for the people."
Originally, Prokofiev
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