"Is it as good as the book?" The question asked whenever a work of fiction becomes a movie is also pertinent to opera — cinema's predecessor as the spectacular entertainment of the middle class. The answer throughout musical history is almost always a resounding "No." Out of the thousands of operas inspired by Shakespeare's plays, for example, only four (three by Verdi and one by Benjamin Britten) have captured at least some of the greatness of the originals.
The Russians, however, are the exceptions to the rule. If successfully transferring great literature to the operatic stage is next to impossible, someone forgot to tell them. In this respect, Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace, which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on 14 February, is just a typical Russian opera. If it is the most grandly scaled and densely populated work in the operatic repertory, it is because Leo Tolstoy's novel occupies the same place in the literary canon.
Needless to say, the task facing Prokofiev when he sat down in 1941 to write the opera was monumental. Even after compressing more than 1,200 pages into a 30-page libretto, the composer was left with 60 characters, 14 of them requiring well-rounded vocal portraits. In War and Peace, moreover, armies clash by day and Moscow burns by night. The demands of mise-en-scène for those events would drive any composer crazy.
And yet, while it assembles only 13 episodes from the novel, Prokofiev's War and Peace succeeds in giving a faithful impression of its scope and diversity. Anyone familiar with the book will recognize the enchanting duet by Natasha and her cousin Sonya on the subject of the spring night; the debauchery of Anatol attempting to rape Natasha; the unfeeling Marshall Davout ordering civilians to be dragged off and shot; the fever and delirium of Prince Andrei dying in Natasha's arms; and Pierre's awkwardness as he finally declares his love for Natasha. All of these portraits and scenes spring naturally from Tolstoy's text to Prokofiev's musical drama.
The composer particularly admired the episode of Andrei's death-bed reconciliation with Natasha, calling it "the perfect operatic scene." Tolstoy's words are virtually unchanged in the libretto, but Prokofiev's music moves even beyond the power of these words. The fleeting recollections of the waltz theme from the opera's second scene, for example, makes Andrei's memories — and, therefore, his realization that he is about to die — all the more achingly real. Only the scene in which the chorus sings a hymn of victory seems manufactured — and that comes neither from Tolstoy nor Prokofiev, but from the requirements of Stalin-era censors.
In writing this opera with such careful attention to the preservation of the novel's literary quality, Prokofiev was following a distinctly Russian tradition that had been established a century earlier. This tradition, in contrast to its Western counterparts, was based on particular attitudes toward literature and music. Over the years, the Russians cared little about "art for art's sake," focusing instead on subjects like the relationship between music and language; music's responsibility to the nation, its political institutions and its people; and opera's role in redeeming Russia from its own history.
Russians revere their great writers as no other nation does, regarding them as a public conscience. As Alexis Suvorin, the editor of Russia's influential Novoye Vremya (New Times), noted in his diary in 1901:
We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which is the stronger? Nicholas II is powerless against Tolstoy and cannot make him tremble on his throne, whereas Tolstoy is incontestably shaking the throne of Nicholas II and his whole dynasty. Let anyone lift a finger against Tolstoy and the whole world will be up in arms and our administration will turn tail and run!
While a true Russian literature began with Pushkin (1799–1837), its national music was born shortly thereafter with Glinka (1804–1857). But unlike literature, instrumental music had to contend with cultural attitudes hostile to its existence. (Even the word for "music" in Russian is derived from Polish.) The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, forbade any Western-style instruments or musical notation. Nothing was to compete with the austere majesty of the liturgy, which was sung in unaccompanied chant and framed by the ringing of bells.
When music finally made its way into the court culture of 18th-century St. Petersburg, it was largely produced by foreigners and confined to small theaters for aristocratic audiences. Even in the early 19th century, most Russian composers worked in Western Europe. As late as 1849, censors at the border confiscated the scores of the 20-year-old pianist/composer Anton Rubinstein, apparently fearing that musical notation was some kind of secret revolutionary code.
But by the 1860s, classical music had grown popular enough to support the establishment of two great conservatories in the imperial cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Before the end of the 19th century, they produced as many accomplished instrumentalists as the rest of Europe combined. Yet it was opera that triumphed over every other musical genre. The Orthodox Church's favoring of the sung word over the played phrase had paved the way for opera. The golden age of Russian opera began in 1868, when Mussorgsky finished the first draft of his opera based on Pushkin's Boris Godunov, and the era ended in 1907, when Rimsky-Korsakov turned again to Pushkin for The Golden Cockerel.
Throughout this era (and thereafter), Russian literature was the common ground on which the nation's composers communicated with their audience. When a Russian composer set Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy to music, he knew his listeners were already familiar with his subject. Composers had a passionate desire for their music to actively engage Russia's political and civic life — and literature was the entry point. As Mussorgsky put it, "Art is a medium of conversing with people and not a goal."
Beginning with the texts of Gogol and Pushkin, Mussorgsky sought to derive his music from the sounds and cadences of human speech. It was only natural that he and the other composers of the "Mighty Handful" — Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Cui — placed such a high premium on the Russian language. They rejected Western European models in order to create music with authentic Russian roots. In so doing, they clung to the traditions of the sung liturgy — based on the belief that music should be united with words in ways that address the masses.
Cui, for example, derided the texts of Western operas — written by librettists "without gifts, devoid of any poetic feeling and not even always equipped with decent verbal skills." For Cui, as for Mussorgsky, "[a good] text can contain no end of nuances of feeling and emotion, no end of subtle strokes, without which no picture can come alive, but will remain just that — a picture."
This was a remarkable statement, for it challenged the hard-won prerogative of the Western operatic tradition: namely, that music take center stage in a collaboration with words, or as Ferrucio Busoni once put it, that an operatic text "allows room for [music] to expand."
The challenges that Western composers have faced in transforming Shakespeare into opera should be understood in the context of this tradition. With their explosive events, larger-than-life characters, aria-like soliloquies and fantastical plots, Shakespeare's plays already contain many of the qualities we call operatic. There just isn't much room for music to expand without seeming superfluous to the musical nature of the text. Then there is the complexity and abundance of themes and multiple plots, such as those in King Lear — Verdi's favorite play, which frustrated the composer's efforts to turn it into an opera for 50 years.
This may explain why Verdi was attracted early in his career to Macbeth, Shakespeare's shortest, simplest and most compact tragedy, and to Othello, whose entire first act can be jettisoned and which has only one straightforward plotline. Among the writers of his own time, it was Alessandro Manzoni who meant the most to Verdi. He thought so highly of Manzoni's work that he composed his great Requiem for the first anniversary of the writer's death. Yet the composer would never have dreamed of turning Manzoni's greatest novel, the War and Peace-sized I promessi sposi (The Betrothal ) into an opera; he would have considered it madness. Obviously, every great Russian composer of the 19th century would have disagreed.
Unfortunately, the achievements of the golden age of Russian opera were not sustained in the Soviet era — a phenomenon that is usually blamed on Communist censorship of the arts. The example often cited is Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which won great international success after its 1934 premiere but was quashed two years later when Stalin saw it and hated it. The infamous Pravda editorial, denouncing the work and threatening Shostakovich, destroyed what might have become the greatest operatic career of the 20th century.
Beginning with the Lady Macbeth debacle, Russian composers had to be careful to write operas in an accessible style close to that of popular music, as well as to portray Soviet society in the best possible light, glorifying revolutionary events and reflecting proletarian ideology. In the Stalin era, all Russian artists were reminded repeatedly, by means ranging from censorship to assassination, that their lives were forfeit to the state. Prokofiev's own frustrations in bringing War and Peace to the stage — it was not performed until six years after his death — were the result of such ideological intimidation.
Yet, before placing all the blame on the Soviets, it is worth noting that Russian composers have always had to deal with autocratic censorship, whether from tsars or commissars. The truth is that the decline of Russian opera began about 10 years before the Revolution, and opera was in decline everywhere — not just in Russia. Nevertheless, the quality of operas written in the Soviet era matches, perhaps even surpasses, those of any country in the West. That a masterpiece such as War and Peace was written during the Stalin era speaks for itself.
Like his predecessors, Prokofiev certainly felt compelled to address the
nation through opera — never more than in 1941, when Hitler broke the
non-aggression pact he had signed with Stalin two years earlier. The composer
had been re-reading War and Peace and was struck by the parallels between Napoleon's
invasion of Russia and the one just launched by Hitler. More than 20 million
of his countrymen would die in the next four years, and Prokofiev
recognized, as any Russian composer would, that only the words of Leo Tolstoy
would suffice for an opera that celebrates the heroic fortitude of the Russian
people.
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