Tonight I went to the beautiful Grand Hall at the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic to witness a musical suite of Prokofiev’s War and Peace, performed by a large orchestra and including an additional lecture on the background of the war’s personalities.
It is only my third full day in Saint Petersburg, and I have been keen to explore the city’s landmarks, museums, and streets to learn more about Alexander I, the subject of my independent study. In a prior class at Carleton we read through Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, and I gleaned much about the former emperor from that alone. What is difficult about studying someone who lived so far in the past, though, is that they predate audio or video. Normally this is isn’t a consideration in history courses, but as this is my first time studying a personality, I have found myself curious about how Alexander moved, gestured, and what his voice might have sounded like. The musical suite at the Philharmonic was a surreal substitute for any audio or video; I felt like I gained invaluable insight into Alexander’s emotions and thought-process through hearing the orchestra while the images of him were on the slideshow.
At the beginning of Alexander’s portion of the suite, the slideshow showed him in the early years of his reign and slightly before the war. As the musical narrative built up to beginning of the war, and Alexander’s portraits on-screen scrolled to correspond with the same years, the visual and audio elements began to align and offer a full portrait of the emperor. While the first phase of the war was underway, the orchestra performed music which inspired a distinct feeling of fear and anxiety; at some points it even sounded like the soundtrack to a Hitchcock horror film. It didn’t immediately dawn on me, the connection between the orchestra and the slideshow, and I had trouble drawing the lines. I wasn’t sure what the music had to with the visual. Then, when the music washed over me (the acoustics are phenomenal in the Bolshoi Zal) and I grasped the fear in the music, the connection became clear. Earlier in the term, through reading a biography on Alexander, I learned that he had no desire for war with France. Napoleon was a formidable enemy whose personality was particularly challenging to Alexander, who sought to be a reformer, because the French ruler was the product of a people’s revolution. Napoleon was the result of the ultimate reform, if you will. Fear was a dominant emotion in Alexander’s personal approach to this war. After Napoleon took Moscow, Alexander was stricken with fear and pushed to the point of tears in the company of his sister, wishing to return to a better time. The sounds of the orchestra spelled out, in astounding detail, the emotions and level of fear within Alexander.
When the war’s tide began to change, the music gradually grew more triumphal. The famous 1812 Overture was not performed, but the composition contained notes which betrayed a similar feeling of joy and victory. The portraits of Alexander shifted from the frightful young leader, set against a dark background, to the emboldened emperor on horseback at battlefields, culminating in a portrait depicting his arrival in Paris.
The musical suite was a powerful combination of audio and visuals which offered a unique glimpse into the personal and emotional state of Alexander, while the Bolshoi Zal and the orchestra were magnificent.