Music
Broadly speaking, the music for Part 1 is lyrical and that for Part 2 is dramatic. There are a number of arias, though these are rarely free-standing and are usually preceded and/or followed by arioso or short conversational passages. Dance music is prominent in Part 1, military music and choruses in Part 2. A number of themes, associated especially with Natasha, Andrei and Pierre, recur throughout the opera. Prokofiev borrowed Natasha's and Andrei's principal themes from incidental music that he had written for a dramatisation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin: Natasha's theme had been associated with Lensky, and Andrei's with Tatyana. Kutuzov's aria in Scene 10 (also sung by the chorus at the end of the opera) re-used music that Prokofiev had written for Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible.
Read more about this topic: War And Peace (opera)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.”
—André Malraux (1901–1976)
“Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass;”
—Alfred Noyes (1880–1958)
“Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free
From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)