'War and Peace' With a
Cast of 346 and a Horse
February 11, 2002
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Deep under Lincoln Center the Russian army was learning how
to march.
Down there, on the Metropolitan Opera's C-level stage, three
floors below ground, time was short. In less than four weeks, 160
raw recruits from the ranks of New York's unemployed actors would
have to stop bumping into one another and take on Napoleon in the
Met's first production of Prokofiev's "War and Peace"
on Thursday.
"You're an army; you need discipline," exhorted Peter
McClintock, an assistant director, as confused troops right-faced
to the left and struggled to stay in step. His colleague Irkin
Gabitov, from the Kirov Opera and himself a former Russian
officer, put on a brave front. "Three more months and it'll
be great," he said.
There was much else to rehearse besides. In terms of the cast
this is probably the biggest thing ever put on by the Met, and it
has been a long time coming. The company first tried to stage the
freshly composed "War and Peace" as far back as 1943
during a grimly real war of survival. But the Met's eager general
manager, Edward Johnson, could not make a deal with skittish
Soviet commissars and censors, and then the cold war intervened.
The Bolshoi Opera of Moscow came over to stage it at the Met in
1975, and the English National Opera presented it there in
English in 1984. Now the Met is finally doing it and doing it big
with a mixed American-Russian cast worthy of, well, a Russian
novel.
Tolstoy's 1869 masterpiece with its 365 chapters and 500-plus
characters was boiled down considerably by Prokofiev as he
struggled to please Stalin under the guns of the invading Nazis.
But this "War and Peace," a co-production with Valery
Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg, which will
have 10 performances at the Met, is hardly a study in minimalism.
No fewer than 52 soloists - headed by Dmitri Hvorostovsky and
Anna Netrebko, making her Met debut - sing the parts of 68
characters. (There is some doubling up of roles.) And the
monumental final scene calls for 346 people onstage along with a
horse (Napoleon's). All told, in addition to the soloists there
are 227 extras, 120 choristers and 41 dancers, dwarfing even
"Gosford Park" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" put
together.
The spires of Moscow blaze in film effects contrived by the set
designer, George Tsypin; the projection designer, Elaine
McCarthy; and the film director Andrei Konchalovsky in his Met
debut as stage director. Oh, and the stage is
not flat. It is a steeply rounded revolving dome, evoking the
earth, "mir" in Russian, the same word as peace.
"There's nothing that comes close," said Joseph Volpe,
the company's general manager, shrugging off comparisons to other
spectacles. At an unusually expensive $3 million to $4 million,
it was substantially underwritten by the opera benefactor Alberto
W. Vilar.
With one of the largest stages in opera, the Met is no stranger
to elaborate productions from "Turandot" to
"Aida" and "Les Troyens" next season with its
Trojan horse and siege of Troy, but the epic-scale "War and
Peace," Met managers say, breaks new ground.
"It's sort of like doing `The Ten Commandments' of
opera," said Sarah Billinghurst, artistic assistant manager,
who has been through it before. In 1991 while at the San
Francisco Opera, she did a version of "War and Peace"
with Mr. Gergiev and costumes left over from the 1956 movie
starring Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn.
The opera might well have been called "Peace and War."
In 13 scenes, divided by one intermission, it begins as the
simple love story Prokofiev originally envisioned, turning darker
as the romance of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova is
undone by intrigues and faithlessness and is finally engulfed by
the horrors of war.
The message? "Peace should be unattainable and
dreamlike," Mr. Konchalovsky said. "But its problems
are minuscule compared to war."
This production is a reworking of one that the Kirov staged at
the Mariinsky and took to London and Milan in 2000, battling
problems with an Italian-built dome that took a day and half to
assemble and dismantle. The Met built larger scenery and its own
bigger dome, which could be put up and taken down in an hour and
a half, said Joseph Clark, the company's technical assistant
manager.
The top revolves over the Met's turntable, and a section rises
hydraulically to provide a ridge for Napoleon's overview and
tilts down to reveal the Russian redoubt.
Everything had to be larger for the Met, including the French
army, Mr. Volpe said. For one thing, he said: "I realized
Napoleon lost the war, but he had only four troops in his
regiment. Come on, he needed more troops."
The Met did do things bigger, Mr. Gergiev agreed. "I expect
the Met to kill us all," he said, laughing.
The Met expanded other aspects of the production, winding up with
nearly 1,000 costumes that necessitated clearing out a longtime
underground fire station for use as a costume shop. To get the
costumes on and off the singers, extra dressers were recruited
from closing Broadway shows, swelling the roster to 78.
Just keeping track of everything was a challenge in itself, said
Stephen A. Brown, the company manager. While preparing for
"War and Peace," the Met was also rehearsing or
performing seven other operas, including "Don Carlos,"
which also starred two leads of "War and Peace," Mr.
Hvorostovsky and Samuel Ramey, who sings the role of the heroic
Russian victor, Field Marshal Kutuzov.
Schedules setting out each singer's scenes, cover roles and
conflicts with other productions came to resemble computer wiring
diagrams, and the daily rehearsal schedules for "War and
Peace" were printed on yellow paper to distinguish them
from the usual white sheets of other productions under way.
The two languages, Russian and English, presented something of an
obstacle, although Mr. Konchalovsky is bilingual after years in
Hollywood making films like "Runaway Train" and
"Tango and Cash" and "The Odyssey" for
television. And the assistant director, Mr. McClintock, learned
Russian to work on a 1995 Kirov production of "La Forza del
Destino."
Besides, Mr. Clark said, "everybody is into being theatrical
animals: they improvise, they use their hands." When all
else fails, he said, "the look on someone's face is as good
as words anytime."
In a joint interview in Mr. Volpe's office, he and Mr. Gergiev
said plans for a co-production of "War and Peace" began
around 1997 when Mr. Gergiev was named the Met's first principal
guest conductor. They quickly agreed on the director and
designer, and Met managers traveled to St. Petersburg to watch
the production take shape.
Mr. Gergiev said that while "War and Peace" was heavy
with "extended triumphalism" to bolster the country at
another time of national emergency, "I got rid of the
typical Soviet-pleasing propaganda."
The Mariinsky learned some cautionary lessons, principally from
its ill-fated production in 1993 when part of the stage gave way
and Napoleon's horse took a fatal stumble, throwing the baritone
Vassily Gerello. It took some persuasion to get Mr. Gerello to
take on the role this time, Mr. Volpe said. As for the flooring,
he said, the Met already knew it had to provide a strong
foundation for a cast of hundreds.
The first rehearsals began in August. By Jan. 12, many of the 227
supernumeraries, known as supers or extras, along with members of
the ballet corps, were organized on the underground stage. A week
later, divided into regiments of grenadiers, chasseurs,
Ismailovskis and Cossaks, they literally got their marching
orders at what Mr. McClintock called "Metropolitan Opera
boot camp."
When it came to marching, the Russians had had an advantage,
tapping for their 2000 production naval cadets stationed near St.
Petersburg. Not to be outdone, Mr. Volpe looked into recruiting
West Pointers or other military cadets for the marching scenes,
but the logistics proved insurmountable. Out-of-work actors it
would be.
With great enthusiasm the Kirov's Mr. Gabitov demonstrated the
straight-leg parade march while bellowing some of his limited
English, "Right face!" The green troops tried it out
with mixed results. "They're doing great," said another
trainer, Sasha Syomin, a Russian gymnast, "for guys whose
fastest march was to the bathroom."
Then Mr. Gabitov upped the ante. With the men of one regiment
facing a different direction from the others, he told them that
at the command "Right face!" they were to snap their
heads left.
Upstairs Mr. Brown, the company manager, checked the clock.
"You've got to leave," he called down. " `Figaro'
is coming
in half an hour."
By the time the supers' rehearsals shifted to the main stage
upstairs on Jan. 22, the marching was coming along nicely. But
there were other concerns. The three madmen, representing a world
demented by brutality, had to weave a contorted path around the
edge of the dome without falling into the orchestra pit. Two
French soldiers nearly dropped a trussed prisoner into a sunken
bunker. The horse did what horses do.
Roaming the stage in a safari jacket, Mr. Konchalovsky showed
Vladimir Ognovenko, who plays the Russian peasant Matveyev, how
to make a prop tree stump look like a truly heavy club.
"Hold it with two hands when you drag it, like this,"
he said. He rearranged a campfire scene and worked on the bayonet
thrusts of the Russian resisters.
"The first problem is to make it fluid," he said,
relaxing in the cafeteria during a break. "Opera is
basically rigid. You have to make it fluid." For that
reason, he said, the set was kept simple. The set, he said, was
space.
Unintimidated by the multitude of roles, Mr. Konchalovsky said:
"Epic never comes from the amount of people. Lear can be
alone and be epic. `Cleopatra' can have 4,000 people and not be
epic. Epic is a dimension of character."
He said that the war on terrorism might imbue the work with what
he called "a special resonance today."
Sitting in the back of the house during a break, Mr.
Hvorostovsky, who was born in the central Siberian city of
Krasnoyarsk, said the role of Prince Andrei filled him with
special nativist pride. "It's a great patriotic opera,"
he said.
Downstairs in the makeshift costume shop, James Kabel, the chief
supers' dresser, kept things straight with an eye-boggling wall
chart of roles and costumes. Clearly, you couldn't tell the
lackeys (blue and cream) without a score card.
But "War and Peace" was not his biggest production, Mr.
Kabel said. What was? Well, he said, thinking, that would have to
have been "Siegfried and Roy in Japan.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/11/arts/music/11MET.html?ex=1014977021&ei=1&en=79ab518c76ec1707
(C) The New York Times, 2002