If there is anything absolutely contradicting a noble salon, it is nature, the earth. The earth in which the trees are rooted and the grain is planted is made by those farmers who once nourished the exploiting aristocracy. So it is logical that the rebellious and socially committed aristocratic son Andrei took the stage in Rebecca Ringst’s Grand Théâtre de Genève Unbuttoned his shirt and smeared himself with earth. It is a revolutionary act. Natascha, Ruzan Mantashyan, who admires him, makes her the shining wonder of this grandiose performance, and he does the same. Yes, the two young people rebel like Greta Thunberg today against the property-oriented and environmentally destructive caste of the elderly.
Just 160 years ago. The Social Revolutionary, dropout and religious seeker of meaning Leo Tolstoy described this at the time in the giant novel “War and Peace”; Sergei Prokofiev set thirteen scenes from it in a three-and-a-half-hour opera of the same name in the 1940s, which is now being premiered in Switzerland in Geneva experienced.
There is peace for seven scenes until the break. Alejo Pérez conducts discreetly and clearly and always makes sense. He never brings the singers into trouble. Director Calixto Bieito, who likes to fall in love with scandals, subtly works out the fragility of the nobility system. All singers, fourteen large and fourteen small roles, demand almost infinite financial resources from every opera house, are always on stage and amuse themselves to death in their futility. The theater salon, in which they are imprisoned here like the nobles in Luis Buñuel’s thematically related film “Der Würgeengel”, means the Moscow Bolshoi Theater.
But the boys, Andrei and Natascha, want out, want the new. As a man, he has completely different options than the woman who, without education, profession or sex education, is amazed at the world of men that lies at her feet, the unsuspecting beauty. Ruzan Mantashyan sings effortlessly and wonderfully, her voice is always present and clear, her appearance is never diva-like. She sings the maturing process of Natascha with a wonderful naturalness, she shows an uninhibited and innocent woman who of course has to fall in love with the rigid beautiful Andrei, but then immediately succumbs to a womanizer. The tangles of love in peacetime.
Before the break, love – afterwards: war
After the break there is the confusion of war. Now the choir stands there, filling the stage, and for the first time there is a thundering forte-fortissimo. Napoleon invaded Russia, and Prokofiev means in his opera Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. There is a popular uprising and a war of liberation against the occupiers. Tolstoy and Prokofiev do not leave out any horror of the war, the music, which has been eaten up from the beginning and charged with annoying sonances, becomes harder, edgier, more deadly. The patriotism is therefore bearable, only in the final large chorus, which celebrates the liberator general Kutuzov and with it the conqueror of Hitler, Stalin, does the otherwise sophisticated, multi-layered Prokofiev practice an unrestrained and shameless ingratiation to the domestic criminal regime. As a voluntary return home from exile, he probably needed that, it just didn’t help him too much because as a musician he was too complex and ambiguous for the simple Soviet aesthetic. Unfortunately, the composer died on the same day as the dictator.
Nevertheless, Prokofiev managed to create a masterpiece. By radically turning away from the harmlessly apolitical romantic opera wallowing in individual sensitivities. Prokofiev, who wrote the libretto himself with his wife, embeds the failing love story in world history. That is radically new, that intertwines the individual and society inexorably, that relativizes the individual, enhances the collective. All are victims of war, there are only dead, wounded and injured. The bloody Western Afghanistan adventure, which is just coming to an end, confirms Tolstoy and Prokofiev’s gloom, which looms over all patriotism.
They all go astray and play great singing. In Björn Bürger’s case, Natascha’s sweetheart is an overly rigid, but baritone-radiant moralist, Daniel Johansson portrays the social thinker and seeker of meaning Pierre (Tolstoy’s alter ego) as well as enthusiasts who are devoted to love, Aleš Briscein is a triumphant mega-macho seducer, Alexander Kravets is a moving godly fool, Alexey Lavrov, a Napoleon astonished at his unhappiness in front of Moscow, and Dmitry Ulyanov and Alexander Roslavets are benevolent liberation heroes known only from legend, but not from history. But Ruzan Mantashyan as Natascha, who is increasingly asserting herself against all misfortune, is the sun around which all these broken men revolve: bravissima!