EA memorable evening, a problematic evening, an evening of courage and despair, an evening that leaves everyone who witnessed it torn, full of admiration and yet helpless, even disgusted and at the same time with great respect: Sergei Prokofiev’s monstrous opera “War and Peace” based on the novel by Lew Tolstoy at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich on March 5, 2023, the joint 70th anniversary of the death of Prokofiev and Josef Stalin.
Closing applause: Olga Kuchynska, the singer of Natasha Rostova, and Andrei Zhilikhovsky, the singer of Andrei Bolkonski wear Ukraine T-shirts over their costumes. Zhilikhovsky had painted the colors of the Ukrainian flag on his cheeks for the duration of the entire production, in the manner of football fans. He comes from the Republic of Moldova, Kuchynska is Ukrainian. With these gestures, both testify to their solidarity with a country that has been defying the illegal attack by Russia for over a year.
But both sing here, at the State Opera, on whose roof the Ukrainian flag is waving, in a heroic epic that says that the war has made Russia great again and that no people – according to Field Marshal Kutuzov – can surpass ours. Through the commitment of their person, they place the freedom of art above political commitment; Kuchynska is even violating her homeland’s government’s ban on cooperation, which bans Ukrainians from performing works of Russian art and collaborating with Russian artists for the duration of the war. That evening, Russians sang on stage with Ukrainians, Moldovans, Uzbeks, Lithuanians, Armenians and with people from completely different countries, as at a Soviet All-Union festival of friendship between peoples.
Munich’s general music director Vladimir Jurowski, artistic director Serge Dorny and director Dmitri Tcherniakov had already planned the production in 2018, long before the start of the war. Immediately before the premiere, Dorny published an explanation as to why the play – created between 1941 and 1945 at the time of the Second World War – was played anyway: “We must not limit art to the nationality of those who created it. Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky – these composers left works that belong to mankind. Wouldn’t it be absurd to ban all Russian music, all Russian culture from our halls? Nevertheless, the dilemma is obvious: if you play Russian music, you support Putin’s propaganda, say some. If you don’t play Russian music, you confirm the image of the anti-Russian West and thus also support Putin’s propaganda, others say.”
Jurowski, Russian like Tcherniakov, is one of the most alert artists of our time who are sensitive to political issues. On March 22, 2022, also in this newspaper, he published a cleverly worded open letter against the Ukraine war, but also against the boycott of Russian and Belarusian culture and artists. Long before the war, Jurovsky had decided never again to conduct Prokofiev’s cantata Alexander Nevsky, which was based on the music for Sergei Eisenstein’s hate film of the same name and served as the festival music for Stalin’s annexation of the Baltic States.
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