Natasha and Pierre's relationship

[asoftplacetoland]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 1:38am

Apologies if this has already been addressed or if I'm just slow but what is exactly the nature of Pierre and Natasha's relationship? To preface this, I have never seen the show. I have never read War and Peace. I have only listened to the cast recordings and done some research on the show and a little bit on the book. Yes, I know Pierre is Andrey's best friend who Natasha was unfaithful to. And Pierre knows Natasha from her childhood. Overall, I find the show pretty easy to follow. I absolutely love Pierre and Natasha. One of my favorites from the show. I interpret it as very emotional especially with Pierre's spoken words. However, the hypothetical proposal doesn't make sense to me. Does Natasha remind Pierre of the life he could have had? I know Pierre has depression and sees himself as less of a man so maybe he sees Natasha as an example of a woman he would never be able to call his?  Was Pierre in love with Natasha the whole time? (Which I thought would be weird with the age difference). If anyone could tell me if there is a straightforward answer or just interpretations, please leave your thoughts below! Please be nice, haha, this is my first post and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little shy 

[VintageSnarker]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 1:53am

I don't know about War and Peace as a whole but at least in the musical, I think it was more about Natasha than Pierre. No, I don't think Pierre is in love with her the whole time. It's the kind of story that makes sense when you read a lot of 1700's-1800's novels that are all about manners and class and status and the rules of polite society. Of course, Natasha shouldn't need a man's validation. But he's a family friend and given the way things were at the time, his reaffirming her worth as a human being and as a marriageable woman is significant after the abduction/aborted elopement. The proposal is more like... you still have value. I don't see you as a fallen woman or this ruined/tainted/broken thing. She's more excitable and passionate but otherwise, Natasha is written as a rather stereotypical ingenue. Thus, we spend most of the show waiting for her to catch up to what we know about Anatole and if you're used to a more modern sensibility, she seems irrationally crushed by the blow when she does find out. I do think there's a part of Pierre who has been lost in drink and burying himself away under the indignities heaped upon him by his "friends" and wife who wishes he could finally do something. If he were younger and unmarried in another novel he might in fact save her through marriage. I think it's more about honor and reputation than love or lust. 

[froote]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 1:56am

In my mind, Pierre has always been somewhat smitten with Natasha but not allowed himself to think of her being a possibility for him, due to his age, looks, stoutness, lack of self-confidence, as well as her eventual relationship with Andrey. I don't think it's the type of unrequited love that he thinks about all of the time because it seems so unlikely to him. Pierre to Natasha is an old friend that she loves but doesn't see in that way due to all of the above. After Natasha experiences her ruin, the war is over etc., the two discover what is important to them and (spoiler alert) fall in love, get married and have children. It's somewhat reminiscent of another Tolstoy relationship, Kitty and Levin from Anna Karenina. In the musical at least, I see the proposal as the moment when Pierre stops seeing Natasha as an unattainable fantasy and starts viewing her as a flawed yet lovable human. It's a moment of maturity for Natasha who has naively jumped into love with Andrey and Anatole where she sees what true compassion looks and feels like.

Updated On: 6/5/17 at 01:56 AM

[Fan123]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 7:41am

A cute little video that the show posted on this topic (although, as with the post above, book spoiler alert):

 

[aimeric]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 9:39am

Froote is the closest here.  To clarify, in the novel, the age difference between Natasha and Pierre is only about 9 years (when they meet at the beginning of the book, she is 12 and he 21, and he's a bit of a man-child, so they get on well), and that would have really been no problem in that time period.  I mean, Andrei's actually even older than Pierre, and though he does briefly worry that he's too old for a young girl like Natasha, they decide to go for it anyway.  For much of the early part of the novel, Pierre visited the Rostov family as a friend, then ended up introducing Natasha to Andrei at her first ball so that she would have someone to dance with.  Of course, Natasha and Andrei fall in love there, and in the book, Tolstoy cryptically indicates that from that very moment, Pierre, while happy for his friends, is suddenly (and without understanding why) thrust into alternately bitter, gloomy, and temperamental states of mind.  Even the beginning of the passage that the novel is based on, the chapter that the song "Pierre" is based on, actually begins as follows: "After Prince Andrei's engagement to Natasha, Pierre, without any apparent reason, suddenly felt it impossible to go on living as before."  I suppose (and the various movie/TV adaptations have supposed) that Pierre began to be in love with Natasha around the time he sees Andrei get together with her, but of course he's married and she's engaged to his friend, so for Pierre (and for Natasha, who remains utterly oblivious almost to the very end of the novel), there's not even a thought that they could be together.  The "proposal" is a moment of spontaneous compassion that gives Natasha hope that someone someday will find her marriageable again, and teaches Pierre yet again that "helping others brings you closer to God" (ahem, thanks, Avenue Q).  They don't instantly fall in love or anything after the comet chapter; as a matter of fact, in the novel, things return pretty much to how they were (he's still married, so he's still only a family friend).  Eventually, the spoiler video above is of course correct, but that's only after a lot of other stuff happening that allows things to get to that point...

[ChairinMain]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 1:50pm

I caught only one ( but one incredibly clever) nod to their eventually marriage in the show. During "Sunday Morning" when Natasha and Sonya perform a ritual which involves shining a candle in a mirror and seeing the shape of their future husbands in the reflection, Pierre is moving back to his onstage study and steps in the path of the mirror's reflection as Natasha sees a vague shape in the mirror. So she DOES in fact see her future husband: Pierre. Rachel Chavkin is a genius. 

[JustAnotherNewYorker]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 1:57pm

Funny story:

 

I was at a talk by Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin at Strand Books, when Dave casually mentions that they end up married. The two Great Comet aficionados next to me gasped. 

 

"you never read the book, huh?"

"no" (looking down, somewhat embarrassed) 

Updated On: 6/5/17 at 01:57 PM

[VintageSnarker]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 3:03pm

aimeric said: "Froote is the closest here.  To clarify, in the novel, the age difference between Natasha and Pierre is only about 9 years (when they meet at the beginning of the book, she is 12 and he 21, and he's a bit of a man-child, so they get on well), and that would have really been no problem in that time period.  I mean, Andrei's actually even older than Pierre, and though he does briefly worry that he's too old for a young girl like Natasha, they decide to go for it anyway."

Given the altered characterization and change in casting, at least with Dave Malloy, I wonder if it's valid to think of the musical and book as two separate entities. I know he said he wrote the show by taking the novel and cutting parts out but I think it's downplayed any possible romance to such a degree that it's not apparent if you haven't read the book. And I happen to think it's a stronger ending if it's more about compassion and friendship and human decency than any romantic feeling. 

[dramamama611]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 3:18pm

I don't think there IS any romantic feelings at the end of the play.  It's totally compassion.  Any romance between them happens in the future.

[aimeric]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 3:40pm

ChairinMain said: "I caught only one ( but one incredibly clever) nod to their eventually marriage in the show. During "Sunday Morning" when Natasha and Sonya perform a ritual which involves shining a candle in a mirror and seeing the shape of their future husbands in the reflection, Pierre is moving back to his onstage study and steps in the path of the mirror's reflection as Natasha sees a vague shape in the mirror. So she DOES in fact see her future husband: Pierre. Rachel Chavkin is a genius. 

 

"

Yep, I believe it's been staged exactly this way since A.R.T.  In the novel, IIRC, the figure Natasha sees in the "candle in the mirror" scene (which takes place when she's much younger, maybe 12 or 13) probably represents both Andrei and Pierre: Andrei is represented by the fact that the man in the mirror is lying down (as also referenced in this scene in the musical: I won't spoil why that would represent Andrei), and Pierre is represented through some obscure color imagery (it's been a while since I've read the book, but I think Natasha sees the figure as being blue, a color she associated earlier with Pierre when she met him for the first time?).  So the scene as staged in the musical is much more straightforward with its foreshadowing.   

 

[Kad]

Posted: 6/5/17 at 5:39pm

In Malloy's lyric annotations for Dust & Ashes, he says he included a reference to the moon (Did I ever look up / And see the moon / And the stars / And the sky?) to subtly link Pierre and Natasha and foreshadow their future connection.

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 6/6/17 at 2:50am

dramamama611 said: "I don't think there IS any romantic feelings at the end of the play.  It's totally compassion.  Any romance between them happens in the future.

 

"

Well, to quote Sondheim, "How quickly pity leads to love!" Of course, that's only if you consider 600 pages later "quickly".

I have to rely on recordings for now, but having read the novel, the eventual ending seemed perfectly foreshadowed at the close of the musical/opera. Very satisfying, IMO, even thrilling.

[Fan123]

Posted: 6/6/17 at 4:19am

In addition to Pierre's 'moon' line, I'm guessing, without having seen the staging myself, that the similarity between looking up at the moon in awe (Natasha) and looking up at the comet in awe (Pierre) provides another hint of the affinity between the two characters. (To my memory, Natasha doesn't have a 'moon scene' in the book, although I might have forgotten?) I do agree with VintageSnarker that playing up the platonic angle is the better choice for this particular telling of this particular segment of the War and Peace story. But I think the knowledge that something else develops for the two of them down the track is a nice bonus, even if it's not essential knowledge (IMO) for 'getting' this show per se.

[aimeric]

Posted: 6/6/17 at 9:07am

Fan123 said: "In addition to Pierre's 'moon' line, I'm guessing, without having seen the staging myself, that the similarity between looking up at the moon in awe (Natasha) and looking up at the comet in awe (Pierre) provides another hint of the affinity between the two characters. (To my memory, Natasha doesn't have a 'moon scene' in the book, although I might have forgotten?) I do agree with VintageSnarker that playing up the platonic angle is the better choice for this particular telling of this particular segment of the War and Peace story. But I think the knowledge that something else develops for the two of them down the track is a nice bonus, even if it's not essential knowledge (IMO) for 'getting' this show per se.

 

"

Yeah, I thought that, too, from very early on, that the comet and the moon have been singled out by Malloy as parallel scenes.  I say "singled out by Malloy" because Natasha does in fact have a moon scene in the book, but it's not in this section, so Malloy had to pull it from an earlier part of the book to make the parallel.  (It's in the part of the book where Andrei has first met young Natasha at her family's country estate and he overhears some girly sleepover-type talk between her and Sonya on their bedroom balcony--some of the lyrics from "No One Else" are taken from Natasha's dialogue in this part of the book.)

[aimeric]

Posted: 6/6/17 at 9:11am

...To be fair, Malloy's not the only one who's made that connection.  When Google did a Tolstoy animation a few years back (see here: https://youtu.be/Sa_4nTY0Z4U), the two scenes from War and Peace they included were Natasha looking up at the moon and Pierre looking up at the comet, so.

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 6/6/17 at 7:21pm

dramamama611 said: "I don't think there IS any romantic feelings at the end of the play.  It's totally compassion.  Any romance between them happens in the future.

 

"

dmama, I hate to quibble because I disagree with you so rarely, but Pierre first sings that at the sight of Natasha's tears "his heart is filled with pity, tenderness and love."

Then the only spoken line in the play is Pierre's (paraphrasing): "If I were the handsomest and best man, and if I were free, I would drop to one knee right now and ask for your hand... and for your love."

Natasha replies, "Oh, Pierre" and leaves the room, only glancing back once at him through her tears. Pierre is so moved he starts to cry himself and quickly throws his coat over his shoulder and leaves before his tears are noticed. Outside, he sees the comet and sings (still paraphrasing), "Mankind seems so pitiful, compared to that glance she gave me through her tears." Then Pierre thinks about how the comet was said to harbinger death and destruction, but for him, it has meant the opposite: "My newly melted heart, now blossoming into a new life."

I think that's about as romantic as you can get from Victorian literature. To me, it is clear that Pierre and Natasha have fallen in love, but tentatively, because Pierre is not free and she is not yet recovered from her illness.

[Fan123]

Posted: 6/7/17 at 6:57am

A romantic interpretation of those lines does make sense, but personally I think that a platonic-love(-for-the-time-being) interpretation of them all also works. However, in fairness, the addition of 'Dust and Ashes' pushes the romantic interpretation more, with its (IMO) rather Chekhov's gun-esque mention of the necessity of Pierre's "fall[ing] in love". I think that's part of why I haven't warmed to that song! I like my 'wrong', platonic interpretation, darn it.

Personally I find that the platonic angle provides a richer through-line for Pierre for the show, if not necessarily for his extended storyline in the entire novel. I think it's more coherent to see a character start to come out of depression/existential anxiety because of a reawakening of a general sense of connection to humanity, triggered by an act of kindness  / feelings of compassion towards somebody (anybody, really); rather than due to a hint of romantic satisfaction, which (IMHO) doesn't really have anything to do with an existential crisis.

To my mind, Pierre's line "Mankind seems so pitiful, so poor / Compared to that softened, grateful last glance she gave me through her tears" is sort of a newly-enlightened variation of "I pity you, I pity me, I pity you". In this moment Pierre is no longer pitying himself, but he still pities those deprived fellow human beings who haven't grasped the secret that he's just discovered, as quoth aimeric: "helping others brings you closer to God".

Anyway, as Helene might say with a terrible accent, vive la difference of opinion on this one. Both interpretations are interesting.

[dramamama611]

Posted: 6/7/17 at 8:20am

GavestonPS said: "dramamama611 said: "I don't think there IS any romantic feelings at the end of the play.  It's totally compassion.  Any romance between them happens in the future.

 

"

dmama, I hate to quibble because I disagree with you so rarely, but Pierre first sings that at the sight of Natasha's tears "his heart is filled with pity, tenderness and love."

Then the only spoken line in the play is Pierre's (paraphrasing): "If I were the handsomest and best man, and if I were free, I would drop to one knee right now and ask for your hand... and for your love."

Natasha replies, "Oh, Pierre" and leaves the room, only glancing back once at him through her tears. Pierre is so moved he starts to cry himself and quickly throws his coat over his shoulder and leaves before his tears are noticed. Outside, he sees the comet and sings (still paraphrasing), "Mankind seems so pitiful, compared to that glance she gave me through her tears." Then Pierre thinks about how the comet was said to harbinger death and destruction, but for him, it has meant the opposite: "My newly melted heart, now blossoming into a new life."

I think that's about as romantic as you can get from Victorian literature. To me, it is clear that Pierre and Natasha have fallen in love, but tentatively, because Pierre is not free and she is not yet recovered from her illness.

 

"

I hear you, and totally get what you mean with the Victorian sensibilities.  Something for me to ponder upon.

 

I took Pierre's line NOT to mean he was IN love with her, but as a feeling and compassionate person being able to forgive her indiscretions and see she was a good person, worthy of love.  And HIS being a good person, would like to give her the joy she deserves.