Love and death; the Met unfurls "War and Peace."(opera)

To make an opera out of "War and Peace" seems like a conceptual mistake. Tolstoy's novel is, among other things, an assault on the great-man theory of history, dismantling the illusions of individuals and exposing the nameless, anarchistic energies that drive life forward. Napoleon's reputation has never quite recovered from the novel's Battle of Borodino scenes, in which the Emperor is made out to be neither magnificent nor malignant but simply irrelevant. This is not how opera sees the world. Opera is an art of grand personalities, of illusion and exaggeration. Our vision of musical history is the great-man theory in excelsis: the canonical composers look down at us ...