Concertos Nómadas: Diana Botelho Vieira

Leo Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace is the theme for this recital, which is divided between two great works: On an Overgrown Path, by Leoš Janáček, a metaphorical exploration of the composer’s innermost world, written in peacetime, but ending shortly before the First World War; and Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata, already written during the Second World War and the first of his trilogy known as the War Sonatas, a work that seemed to presage the invasion of Russia in the following year.

Between these two works is a rarity: the only music written by Tolstoy – a composer in his spare time – to have survived until the present day, an unusual waltz that mirrors the great period of European peace between Napoleon’s death and the convulsions of the twentieth century, the predominant dance at the court balls described in the first part of War and Peace.

Tolstoy was an enormous source of inspiration for both Janáček, an admirer of Russian culture, who modelled his first string quartet on the former’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, and Prokofiev, who used War and Peace as the basis for his most famous opera, a great epic fresco that portrays the brutal invasion of Russia by Napoleon’s troops in 1812.

As the Czech writer Milan Kundera said, with War and Peace, humankind experienced an entirely new feeling: «For the first time in the History of the Novel, Man was swept up by the force of history and ceased to be the master of his own fate.»