At the Met, 'War & Peace': The
Unabridged Opera
By Tim Page
The Washington Post
16 February 2002
NEW YORK -- Stephen Crane's withering description of Leo
Tolstoy's "War and Peace" -- "It goes on and on
like Texas" -- applies as well to the opera Sergey Prokofiev
attempted to distill from this vast novel.
The Metropolitan Opera's current production of Prokofiev's last
and most ambitious stage work, which opened here Thursday night,
employs 52 soloists (in 68 different roles), 120 choristers, 41
ballet dancers, 227 extras, a horse, a dog, a goat, four chickens
and the splendid Met Orchestra, under the direction of Valery
Gergiev. By any standards, it is a remarkable achievement -- like
climbing one of the lesser Himalayas, perhaps, or setting the
Manhattan phone book to music. Whether such endeavors are finally
worth the effort is, of course, another matter.
There can be few complaints about the production. It is handsome,
versatile and evocative, and the Met has cast from strength. If
you sift closely through the teeming masses, you will find
baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova,
bass Samuel Ramey, tenor Gegam Grigorian and two splendid house
debutantes, sopranos Ekaterina Semenchuk and Anna Netrebko, the
last of whom is far and away the best thing about the show.
Pardon the heresy, but "War and Peace" reminds me of
nothing so much as the extravagantly hyped early 1960s film epic
"It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." "MMMMW,"
as it was customarily abbreviated, promised the heavens -- it was
the comedy to end all comedies, 192 "riotous"
minutes, with appearances by Jonathan Winters, Buster Keaton,
Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Jack Benny and the Three Stooges,
among others. And indeed, it had its moments (so does "War
and Peace"), yet the final impression was that of an
overblown, uninvolving and curiously inert spectacle that was,
paradoxically, both cramped and diminished by its own gigantism.
The score is a typically Prokofievan hodgepodge -- a lot of
"wrong-note" neoclassicism, effusive melodies that make
careful plans to soar but rarely leave the ground, tub-thumping
grotesqueries for the lower brass and string instruments,
heart-on-sleeve choruses so vulgar that they could have been
lifted from "Les Miserables," and the occasional moment
of genuine eloquence. I have never attended Eugene O'Neill's
expansive "Mourning Becomes Electra" (dubbed
"Evening Becomes Interminable" by some long-ago wag) or
any of the half-day theater works of Peter Brook, but I've sat
through several renditions of Wagner's "Ring" Cycle, as
well as the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson
five-hours-without-intermission "Einstein on the
Beach," and still have no hesitation in naming "War and
Peace" the longest night of my operagoing experience. And
all in less than four hours!
There is no shortage of action. People fall in and out of love,
go mad, die. War is declared, Napoleon marches across the stage,
there are battles and firing squads, the torch is put to Moscow,
enemies of the Motherland are warned to take heed -- and so on.
If this description sounds clinical and dispassionate, it should,
for one makes no more personal connection with these people and
events than one would with the statistics in a census report.
All this, despite some wonderful performances. Netrebko's Natasha
is particularly exciting. There is something dangerous about her
singing. The voice is pure, hard, somewhat boyish and not
especially "pretty" by conventional standards;
moreover, she is always just on the verge of singing sharp. But
she never quite steps over that line; indeed, her security of
pitch in the upper register is extraordinary. Nor does her voice
seem to tire; it sounded just as brilliant and expressive at the
end of Act II as it had four strenuous hours earlier. Her stage
presence was less convincing; she took on that same ninny
tendency to flutter her hands and jump up and down meaninglessly
that D.W. Griffith used to impose on his actresses when he wanted
to convey virginal innocence.
If some of the bloom has faded from Hvorostovsky's voice, it has
been more than compensated for by the nobility and complexity of
his latter-day characterizations; his interpretation of Prince
Andrei was nearly faultless. Grigorian sang the role of Pierre in
a sweet, firm high tenor, while the husky-voiced mezzo-soprano
Mzia Nioradze made something sad and memorable from her cameo as
the Gypsy Matryosha. Obraztsova is now an eloquent character
actress and brought haughty style and spirit to Madame
Akhrosimova's unsympathetic part. There was worthy support from
Semenchuk as Sonya, Nikolai Gassiev as Platon, Vasily Gerello as
Napoleon and -- very late in the day -- Ramey as Kutuzov.
Gergiev conducted with the usual energy and passionate conviction
he brings to Russian music.
Toward the end of Act II, one of the extras, newly
"dead" and rolling rather too vigorously around the
domed stage, tumbled into the orchestra pit. The performance was
halted for several minutes, and a whispery anxiety crept through
the house. Six years ago, the Met premiere of Janacek's "The
Makropoulos Case" was interrupted by the onstage death of a
cast member, who fell off a ladder and brought the evening to an
end only a few minutes after it had begun. This time, there were
no injuries -- a bit of good news to take home from a dispiriting
evening.
(C) The Washington Post, 2002
February 2002 Performance Diary