When Sergei Prokofiev started work on a new opera, having just finished his opera Betrothal in a Monastery, he could not have envisaged that the theme, borrowed from Tolstoy{u2019}s novel War and Peace, would very soon become dreadful reality. It was just two months later that the German invasion of the Soviet Union began. By way of the conscious parallel to Napoleon{u2019}s historic invasion of Russia, Prokofiev{u2019}s opera became an attempt to strengthen the defence morale of his fellow countrymen in this 2patriotic war3, as soviet historians of the Second World War call it. One of the reasons why this work is so diffi cult to put on is the huge number of performers {u2013} more than were ever used before. Even for the shortened version at the Paris opera, 43 singers and actors, making up a total of 62, were engaged for the original 72 parts. Even if one considers that some have only a few words to sing and that some of the parts are divided between the scenes in such a way that a singer can double up, the mere dimension of the work is a challenge in itself.