GUERRE ET PAIX

Tah-dah! What a massive drum roll to open a season! Prokofiev’s most monumental opera (and probably also of the en- tire Russian repertoire) finally arrives in Geneva: War and Peace should, accord- ing to some, be called Peace and War. Inspired among other things by the recent invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany and the breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Sergei Prokofiev, the prodigal son who had returned to his homeland only a few years earlier, tackled Leo Tolstoy’s colossus to create this work of monumental disproportions.