In War and Peace, Tolstoy arranges for young, impressionable Natasha Rostova to have two musical experiences, placed very close together in the architecture of the novel, clearly meant to shed light on each other and speak together to the reader. In Book VII, in one of those set-pieces that ties the book to the Homeric epic tradition, the Rostovs go on a wolf-hunt. Six chapters of hunting are followed by a night in a simple Russian home. The host plays and sings. Sings "as peasants sing, with full and naive conviction that the whole meaning of a song lies in the words, and that the tune comes of itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists only to give measure to the words. As a result of this the unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily good. Natasha was in ecstasies ..."
Book VIII shows us by contrast a night at the opera, which "after her life in the country, and in her present serious mood seemed grotesque and amazing to Natasha". Everything is artificial and external, alienated, so "pretentiously false and unnatural that Natasha at first felt ashamed for the actors and then amused at them". When she eventually falls under the spell of the bizarrerie on stage, which now seems, in Tolstoy's words, "quite natural", it is because she has submitted to the world she has found herself in, given up on the authentic life of Book VII. The next step in her corruption is her planned elopement with the scapegrace Kuragin, who had flirted with her at the opera.
While I'm not so sure about the terrible moral effects of going to the opera, Tolstoy does highlight one of the dilemmas faced by the performing artist: the tensions and contradictions implicit in the relationship between art and artifice.
One of the worst criticisms, supposedly, that can be made of a performer is that he or she is "mannered". It seems to me that, in fact, this is an accusation without any traction at all; we may not like the particular way in which a performance is mannered, but all artistic performance is artificial, contrived, mannered. Tolstoy's unmediated art, as natural as birdsong, is a useful myth, a shimmering ideal, a fictional but intangible goal. When we perceive authenticity in performance, it is most often because the artist as artificer has been at work - coaxing, striving, editing, experimenting, failing - to produce something that, in its harnessing of technical accomplishment and mannerism appears assured and expressive. It was surely Marina Poplavskaya's craft as a singer that allowed her to achieve such authenticity of expression that night.
