http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,899618,00.html (including
useful links)
"The Guardian" (London) on Prokofiev & Propaganda:
An opera written for the Stalinist state is beginning to transcend its time,
says James Fenton
Saturday February 22, 2003
The Guardian
It will be 50 years on March 5 since the death of Prokofiev, who,
among his many other achievements, was one of the notable dramatists of the
lyric stage: that is he wrote, or sometimes collaborated on, his own
libretti.
His earliest opera, The Giant, he composed in 1900 at the age of
nine. His last, The Story of a Real Man, was given a closed concert
performance in Leningrad in 1948. The authorities had apparently
foreordained its failure, and Prokofiev never saw the opera on the public
stage, just as he never saw a complete version of its predecessor, War and
Peace.
Prokofiev interests me as a dramatist because his mature works, like
those of Janácek, are so markedly unlike each other. The Gambler is a
straight version of Dostoevsky, while The Love for Three Oranges, seemingly
so modern and absurdist, is an adaptation of the 18th-century writer Gozzi.
The Fiery Angel is utterly individual, a study of religious paranoia.
Betrothal in a Monastery is Sheridan.
War and Peace is Tolstoy as you would expect, but Tolstoy set to
work on behalf of Stalin's reputation as a general. The better it succeeds
on stage, the more you sense the opera's underlying rhetorical purpose. I
was lucky enough to see it last year in the outstanding production at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York, with all the crowds and uniforms and horses
you could wish.
And at the end I felt: "This meant something tonight, but once it
meant something else. Tonight it was a tale of the 19th century. Once it was
a tale of the 20th." But this feeling, this knowledge, though sinister to a
certain degree, did not for a moment make me want to turn away in horror, as
I would turn from certain works of Brecht. What was left of Stalinism in the
piece had lost its power to harm.
Chandos have just reissued a 1960 recording of The Story of a Real
Man, which, like the other remaining mature opera, Semyon Kotko, is a work
of pure propaganda. The Viking Opera Guide calls this 1960 version
"inauthentic", since it was abridged, doctored and rearranged by the
composer's widow. But it is authentic in this respect: that it represents
what was still tolerable in musical agitprop at that stage of Russian
history.
It would be fascinating to know more of what has gone from the
original as devised by the composer. Zeal to serve one's country is the
subject - rather than zeal to serve the Communist party - and, although
there is a wise old commissar who guides the hero, there is no Stalin figure
left in the script, if there ever was one. The word Bolshevik has been
removed, to be replaced by "man". So instead of defining what it is to be a
real Bolshevik, the opera tells us what it is to be a real man.
The hero, Alexei, is a fighter pilot who crashes in the forest in
German-occupied Russia. He survives through the help of the collective
farmers, and by thinking of his true love back home. Both his legs have to
be amputated, but Alexei becomes determined to return to active service,
since the country is short of pilots. By a supreme effort of will, he
succeeds. The war is won, he survives and his girlfriend turns out to have
waited for him, and not to mind the fact that he is an amputee. They will
live happily. The grass will grow over the trenches.
It sounds a dismal libretto. Considered as the work of the author of
The Love for Three Oranges, it is doubly, trebly dismal. Dismal, that is, on
the printed page. Yet the opera as performed is always interesting and
sometimes beautiful in the manner of War and Peace. Perhaps it will survive.
Perhaps it will enter the repertoire. A few years ago I would have thought
that an art that so obviously toed the party line, an art that so
desperately sought state approval, would never survive the party and the
state.
Maybe that kind of reasoning was wrong. Maybe we were just as wrong
to expect art of this kind to perish as we were to expect dissident art to
survive. Perhaps the art of Soviet Russia will come to resemble the art of
revolutionary France. For a while, for decades after the Terror, there were
paintings of David's that caused such horror that they could scarcely be
shown - for David was notorious as a supporter of terror. But then that part
of their meaning drained away.
Prokofiev we think of not as a Stalinist but as nothing more nor
less than an artist forced to make these huge and damaging compromises with,
these surrenders to, the Stalinist state. But then the meaning of these
compromises begins to fade, and Stalinism itself becomes like one of those
ice-age plants, surviving only in certain hanging valleys.
For 50 years Prokofiev wrote operas. In the 50 years since his
death, these works have begun to make their way. It's the slowness of the
process that's impressive - the slowness and, to be sure, the sureness too.
· Story of a Real Man, Op. 117 by Sergey Sergeyevitch Prokofiev, Chorus and
Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, cond. Mark Ermler. Chandos CHAN 10002(2)
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
Paul Moor
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
Wilhelmsaue 132
D-10715 Berlin
Telefon (4930) 8639-5784
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