Column salvo – Newspaper Kommersant No. 48 (7493) dated 03/22/2023

The premiere screenings of the opera War and Peace took place on the stage of the Munich Bavarian State Opera. The grandiose work by Sergei Prokofiev, staged by director Dmitry Chernyakov and chief conductor of the Bavarian Opera Vladimir Yurovsky, for obvious reasons, turned out to be the most resonant opera performance of the European, if not the world season. I never saw the abolition of Russian culture on the Munich stage Sergey Hodnev.

The scenery throughout the entire performance on the stage is the same – the Hall of Columns of the former Noble Assembly, and then the House of Unions, conscientiously reproduced right up to the last acanthus leaf on Corinthian capitals. And to the crystal pendants on the chandeliers, which are covered with funeral crepe in the second, “military” act.

Dozens of people bivouacked in the hall, singly and in families, on mattresses, folding chairs, “spectator” folding chairs and folding beds. Trouble has come – open the gate, but at first everyone tries, even under these conditions, to reproduce all that sweet and cozy that was familiar in a past life. They arrange, for example, a New Year’s ball (the same “Natasha Rostova’s first ball”), making fans, tiaras and sashes from a newspaper – hello to desperate home entertainments in Chernyakov’s earlier performances up to the ball at the Larins in “Eugene Onegin”. They flirt, play serso, make visits – although it all looks about as stuffy as the last picture of “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, where even the most painful is always in front of everyone. But then everything is distorted – gradually, but radically.

In what we are accustomed to seeing in War and Peace from the school bench – well, the “family thought”, the spiritual searches of the Russian intelligentsia on the example of Pierre Bezukhov, by and large, nothing changes. To discern the ringing humanity of the characters behind the opera gloss is something that Dmitry Chernyakov has always been able to do, and everything that is most important and most poignant in the images of Tolstoy’s heroes is presented here in full accordance with the text. Whether it’s Natasha performed by Olga Kulchinskaya, Prince Andrei, who was sung by Andrei Zhilikhovskiy, or Pierre Bezukhov, performed by Arsen Soghomonyan.

There is only one thing missing: an external enemy. That is, he seems to be there, they are waiting for him, but trouble and violence do not come from outside, but are born from the crowd itself. Everyone is trying to enthusiastically look at the military sports games (in the scene of the Battle of Borodino), and, moreover, like Pierre and Andrei, they convince themselves that in modern times there is no escape from this: “Enter this common life, enter it with all your being their own, to be imbued with what makes them so. They laugh at a propaganda booth where a frightened clown-Napoleon (Thomas Tomasson) chews on a tie. But a little more – and this very recently cute society naturally produces from itself both arsonists and paramilitary thugs who throw themselves with a pig’s head and shoot, to the horror of the unfortunate Pierre, whoever they get. And Prince Andrei, already at the very beginning, in Otradnoye, who thought to shoot himself with the words “Is there sun, spring and happiness?”, Still shoots himself after the fire of Moscow and total dehumanization – from which the scene with fever, delirium and Natasha arises, Chernyakova is absolutely heartbreaking.

The “military” part of the opera is watched over as either an observer or a puppeteer by an untidy pot-bellied Kutuzov (Dmitry Ulyanov), who, however, has cropped the hit aria about Moscow, along with the entire council scene in Fili. A few more fragments were also cut out, which the directors attributed to, relatively speaking, the “Stalinist text” of the opera, to what Prokofiev against his will introduced into the original, still pre-war plan under ideological pressure. In the end, the premiere of the play took place on the day of the death of not only Prokofiev, but also Stalin, and the final scene with the funeral triumph of Kutuzov clearly refers to this circumstance.

For all that, Prokofiev – Prokofiev the artist – in the case of the Munich production has an absolutely indisputable apologist. And this, of course, is the same Vladimir Yurovsky. Musically, these “War and Peace” are exceptional, and partly, of course, due to the amazing performing staff. Singing and experienced celebrities – Sergei Leiferkus (Old Prince Bolkonsky / Matveev), Olga Guryakova (Peronskaya / Shopkeeper), Violeta Urmana (Akhrosimova). And very young artists – say, Alexandra Yangel (Sonya) and Victoria Karkacheva. The regular soloists of the main Russian theaters (Bekhzod Davronov – Anatole, Mikhail Gubsky – Platon Karataev, Maxim Paster – Abbot and others) and foreigners sang. Natives of Russia and immigrants, as the authors of the performance noted, sang almost from all over the former Soviet Union (for example, Olga Kulchinskaya is Ukrainian, Andrei Zhilihovsky was born in Moldova). And all these several dozen soloists not only worked perfectly together: almost every one of this host is a piece of luck and a neat hit in the image, vocal and acting.

And yet it is worth saying that the context here was primarily set precisely by the conductor’s reading – its power, volume, enormous internal persuasiveness. Even by the standards of the former works of Vladimir Yurovsky, Moscow and non-Moscow, they are perceived deafeningly. There has never been a gap between the artistic logic of music and the logic of what is happening on the stage. But even in the score, which, as it turned out, was presented surprisingly whole, without retouching, everything sounded – lyricism and jubilation, horror and grandeur, colossal uplift and human suffering.