In the first half, he relished dancing rhythms and shifted between Natasha and Andrei’s repeating theme, a quintessentially Prokofiev melody of a long lyrical line leaping upward, and buffo interludes from the likes of Anatole and Dolokhov, with unstoppable momentum. He wrangled the eclectic, if erratic, score - a succession of talky set pieces in which arias are more like brief soliloquies - into a coherent, flowing drama. It’s a drive toward self-destruction that was matched in the pit under Jurowski’s baton. And patriotic pageants that begin innocently turn violently real, feral and ruled by a drunken slob turned warlord. They throw a New Year’s ball with sashes made from newspaper, toss rings onto toy swords and race in sleeping bags. Yet no matter their background, they unite to pass the time - first days, then weeks, then months. People of all classes seem to have come together some are in jeans or threadbare shirts, while the wealthy Pierre wears shined leather shoes, a Barbour coat, and a wool sweater and hat. There are cots throughout, and mats for sleeping. Here, it is densely populated with people sheltering from some kind of conflict, as Ukrainians have in their landmark buildings. Literally: He sets the entire opera in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow, an 18th-century building that survived the fires of 1812 and over the years hosted society balls, the music of Tchaikovsky and the show trials of Stalin it is also where Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Gorbachev, have lain in state. In his staging, Tcherniakov brings both strands under the same roof. Largely lost in translation is Pierre’s meandering search for meaning. Prokofiev and the librettist, Mira Mendelson (his second wife), reduced the plot to a telling parallel between Natasha’s losing her way in her lust for Anatole and the French fashions he represents, and Russia’s falling victim to, then triumphing over, Napoleon’s invasion. The first part, peace, recounts Natasha’s engagement to and betrayal of Andrei the second, war, focuses on the occupation and burning of Moscow. It follows the contrasts of the title, not by juxtaposing the battlefield and the ballroom episodically but rather by dividing them in two. The opera is only an impression of the novel. Putin’s claims of Russian culture being canceled in the West. Moving forward would invite controversy calling it off would play into President Vladimir V. The Bavarian State Opera, which had been planning this production for several years, was faced with a dilemma. That is, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called into question the taste of performing it. Kherson: Three months after Ukrainians celebrated the expulsion of Russian forces from it, the city remains very much a war zone.surveillance drone over the Black Sea, in the first known physical contact between the Russian and American militaries since the war started. Cyberattacks: Microsoft said that a hacking group with ties to the Russian government appears to be preparing new cyberattacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and government offices.A Shortage of Weapons: Ukraine and Russia are running low on ammunition and are scrambling to replenish their stocks and gain a competitive edge.His work was repeatedly inhibited by the state and subject to censorship, though he also took up nationalistic commissions like the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Alexander Nevsky.” And he obliged when ordered to revise “War and Peace” to include, in its martial second half, rallying choruses and a grandly heroic treatment of General Kutuzov as a stand-in for Stalin. By then, Prokofiev, who had left his homeland after the Russian Revolution, had returned and settled in the Soviet Union. Prokofiev began to adapt Tolstoy’s novel - an expansive portrait of Moscow society around Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, and a study in the scattered forces that shape history - in the early years of World War II, as the capital was under threat from another Western European dictator. Rarely performed, it opened this week on the anniversary of their deaths at the Bavarian State Opera here in a darkly urgent and sensitively executed new production haunted by the war in Ukraine. Among the many documents of that is his “War and Peace,” a work contorted through forced revision into strident propaganda. It’s a coincidence you’re more likely to come across in the composer’s biography than in Stalin’s.īecause while Prokofiev barely figures in Stalin’s life, his own was profoundly, inalterably changed by Soviet rule. MUNICH - Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Joseph Stalin: March 5, 1953.
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