The Opera Lover's Companion by Charles Osborne

Author:Charles Osborne
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

War and Peace

(Voina i mir)

opera in a choral epigraph and thirteen scenes (approximate length: 4 hours)

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky baritone

Natasha Rostova soprano

Sonya, Natasha’s cousin mezzo-soprano

Maria Dmitrievna Akhrosimova mezzo-soprano

Count Ilya Rostov, Natasha’s father bass

Pierre Bezukhov tenor

Helene Bezukhova, his wife contralto

Anatol Kuragin, her brother tenor

Dolokhov, an officer baritone

Colonel Vasska Denisov baritone

Field-Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov bass

Napoleon Bonaparte baritone

Platon Karatayev, an old soldier tenor

LIBRETTO BY THE COMPOSER AND MIRA MENDELSON, AFTER THE NOVEL WAR AND PEACE, BY LEO TOLSTOY; TIME: 1805‒12; PLACE: RUSSIA; FIRST PERFORMED AT THE MALY THEATRE, LENINGRAD, 1 APRIL 1955 (BUT SEE BELOW)

The gestation period of the work generally regarded as Prokofiev’s operatic masterpiece is an extraordinarily complex one. The first theme of the overture was jotted down in the composer’s notebook as early as 1933, but it was not until 1941, when he was living with Mira Mendelson, who read the novel aloud to him, that Prokofiev drew up a list of scenes from Tolstoy’s War and Peace and began to work on the opera, which he composed very quickly between August 1941 and April of the following year.

His score was submitted to the Committee on Art Affairs in Moscow, as a consequence of which he was asked to revise it, strengthening the patriotic element and emphasizing the parallels between Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the nineteenth century and the war then being waged against the Soviet Union by Hitler. The composer complied, and in this second version War and Peace was given concert performances in Moscow in 1944 and 1945. Two more scenes were added for a stage production in Leningrad in 1946, making the work so long that it was decided to perform it over two evenings. Part One was enormously successful at its premiere at the Maly Theatre on 12 June 1946, and it was performed 105 times during the 1946 and 1947 seasons. However, Part Two was suppressed by the authorities after its dress rehearsal, on the grounds that its historical conception was incorrect. Prokofiev then condensed the opera, deleting those scenes that had most upset the Soviet censors, and it was in the resultant truncated version that the opera first became known outside Russia, when it was staged in 1953 at the Maggio Musicale in Florence. The full thirteen-scene version (or, to be exact, eleven scenes of it) reached the stage in Leningrad on 1 April 1955, after Prokofiev’s death, but it was not until 15 December 1959 that War and Peace, in a choral epigraph and thirteen scenes, was given a relatively complete performance, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow.

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) began to write his masterpiece, War and Peace, in 1860, setting it in the years between 1805 and 1820, covering the invasion of Russia by Napoleon’s army in 1812, and Russian resistance to the invader. There are more than five hundred characters in the novel, representing every social level from Napoleon himself to the peasant Karatayev. Several plots are interwoven with the story of the Napoleonic war, involving such characters as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky

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