Epic opera is a very rare breed in a large kennel, and its
successes are even rarer in number. “Grand Opera,” that
nineteenth-century invention that updated (without even knowing
it) the spectacle opera of the seventeenth century, is not epic opera,
because for all its vocal and scenic extravagance it is still
confined to the operatic stage. Epic opera, however, seeks to
travel beyond, and it is not surprising that most operas of this
limited genre are based on epic literary works. Even the
overreaching failures, like August Bungert’s operatic trilogy on
the Homeric poems, are connected to literature, as are the most
celebrated epics of Berlioz (Virgil) and Wagner.

There is a good case to be made that the gap-toothed, antic fable
created by Emanuel Schikaneder for Mozart’s genius—Die
Zauberflöte—is some sort of epic, and certainly its journey of
discovery from youth to maturity, from naïveté to wisdom and
understanding, has about it a whiff of the epic. Enlightenment,
in its epic sense, is the goal.

So it is with Tolstoy’s “baggy monster,” the epic novel War and
Peace. When all the stucco, panelling, and decoration have been
stripped away, we are left with a tale that begins with two
people, Natasha Rostova and Pierre Bezukhov—both “wet
behind the ears”—and ends with what Tolstoy saw
as an ideal couple, annealed through the vicissitudes of their
separate lives. The “fire and water” trials of Schikaneder are
here, as are the much more immediate cruelties