Some Christmases have themes, and some Christmases have very strange themes. For me, the theme of this Christmas was War and Peace . It all began last Tuesday, the 18th. Deirdre got us tickets to Prokofiev's opera of War and Peace at the Metropolitan Opera, and we drove into the city to see it. The curtain went up at 7:30 and when we staggered out to the subway, it was nearly midnight. Prokofiev knew that he couldn't possibly include all the various plots and subplots of Tolstoy's novel in his opera, so instead he chose 13 scenes divided in two parts, relying on the audience's knowledge of the novel to fill in the gaps. (I read War and Peace when I was a teenager oh so many decades ago, but Deirdre read it in the spring of 2003 and loved it.) Part I of the opera mostly centers around Natasha Rostov and the three men in her life — the dashing military man Prince Andrei, the kind and gentle humanist Pierre, and the rake Anatole. These were some of my favorite scenes at the various Read More...