Tolstoy, Digested

Ever since the late Serge Prokofiev's War and Peace got its first concert performance in Moscow in 1944, the world's opera houses have hankered to stage it. For one reason or another, none ever got far. The opera's jumbo length (eleven scenes which would spread over two four-hour performances), its 40 individual roles and choruses of several hundred, all proved too discouraging. But last week the Italian city of Florence put on a digested, four-hour version as the high spot of its May music festival, and as a triumphant coup over Milan's lordly La Scala.

Chief credit for both the production and the coup belonged to Veteran Conductor Artur Rodzinski. La Scala had arranged with the Soviet Ministry of Culture to produce next season a revised version of the opera (on which, the ministry said, Prokofiev had been making "technical changes"). Conductor Rodzinski, who now lives in Florence, had an idea that he could beat La Scala to the punch. He remembered that the Metropolitan Opera had once planned to produce War and Peace and that Manhattan's Leeds Music Corp. had a copy of the score.

Peaceful Salons. Rodzinski dickered with Leeds, and last March Florence got busy. The festival commissioned ten sets, five of them elaborate"; and an Italian translation. Rodzinski tricked up musical interludes to connect a series of five short scenes in Act I. The countryside was scoured for singers willing to tackle an unfamiliar score. Total cost: close to $400,000. When Milan's La Scala (and the Soviet Embassy) protested, the Florentines retorted that Russia does not adhere to the International Copyright Convention--and kept on working.

Florence's version turned out to be more of a musical epic than a traditional opera, but the music was Prokofiev's most melodious and the performance first class. The first act, most of it set in the gardens and salons of Moscow's early 19th century aristocracy, took care of "peace." The music of this act was light and tuneful, almost in the style of French or Italian chamber music. The other two acts turned warlike, and their music was richly Russian. At the end of Act II, a powerful chorus of defiance was chanted while Moscow burned in the background. Says Rodzinski: "The best thing Prokofiev ever wrote."

Howling Massacre. The last scene began with a tableau of Napoleon's Grande Armee struggling in the snow. Then came a band of howling partisan-patriots to massacre the exhausted invaders.

Prokofiev's aristocrats were snobbish, idle, worthless people; his masses were the salt of the earth. Officially, the Communists did not attend, but the Communist press turned handsprings in praise of Prokofiev's work and its ideological message. Some critics, obviously unfamiliar with Leo Tolstoy's monumental novel, had trouble following the plot, and small wonder: about the only original characters who came through were Pierre, the high-born hero who learned to love the Russian people through suffering with them, and Natasha, the simple girl who returned to her first love when he was on his deathbed. Tolstoy himself got the most unkindest cut of all: his name did not even appear on Florence's programs.

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