War, Peace and Propaganda

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Or was it the other way around? Kim and Ilya were kind enough to secure tickets for us for an evening of Prokofiev at the Met, thanks to their acquaintance with "proslavenny rezhisser" Konchalovsky. A memorable operatic outing, not least for the chance encounter of Rory and his girlfriend Olga in the ticket line, detoured from their return trip to Moscow after a week of New Hampshire's wintry delights. 

Quite the stage. A remarkable perspectival play with its steep incline and rotating top. And quite a visual accomplishment between the ballrooms in St. Petersburg and Moscow to the battlefields of Napoleon’s campaign of 1812. It was a fittingly Franco-Russian themed evening, considering our little audience.  

Flo does Modern Opera better than Romas does, who remains stuck in the sing-song pleasantries of the more whimsical Italians or Mozart. The propagandistic bombast  of the second act was a bit of a bludgeoning (Ed: "Look at what they've done to the world with their Communism!"). But all agreed that the production was spectacular. Even Paul, who maintained decent posture throughout the production's four+ hours! I think we were both kept alert by the mounting threat (or promise) of an appearance by Napoleon and the pyrotechnic climax in the representation of the War of 1812. He even caught historical details like the mention of Vilnius in the score. 

As a parenthesis, Romas has returned to the book which he'd been reading intermittently for about as long as the campaign in question, 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow, by Adam Zamoyski. This account of the war is reconstructed almost entirely from previously unheralded primary sources like soldiers' letters home. Totally engrossing. In fact, he's tempted now to try his hand at painting some so-called "Napoleonic" miniatures to add to his Medieval and WW2 repertoire, though we're not sure that would be any more realistic than trying to get through the 1298 pages of War and Peace in the original Russian, for example. 

Interesting to learn from the playbill a little about Prokofiev's struggle to get this opera produced. That it was first staged in its entirety in 1945 gives a distinctly propagandistic flavor to the oft-repeated and deafeningly rousing choruses of unwashed peasants, vowing pitchfork in hand to defend their homeland. "Za Rodinu!" Now, wasn't that what the Soviets were writing on the turrets of T-34 tanks in WW2?