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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 like the heroes of Valhalla. It is no surprise that Tolstoy parodied opera alongside Freemasonry as one of the chief idiocies of high society, and praised folk song as the only truly authentic music. But what is "War and Peace" if not a self-consciously great and difficult work? Readers would not bother with it unless they believed in advance that its author was a generalissimo of the written word.
If a "War and Peace" opera had to be done, Sergei Prokofiev must have seemed the wrong person to do it. He had made his name with the "Scythian Suite" and the "Classical" Symphony, with machine-age rhythms and satirical pastiches. But there was an unexpected...
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