War and Peace | |
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Opera by Sergei Prokofiev | |
Native title | Война и мир, Voyna i mir |
Librettist |
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Language | Russian |
Based on | War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy |
Premiere | 12 June 1946 Maly Theatre, Leningrad |
War and Peace (Op. 91) (Russian: Война и мир, Voyna i mir) is a 1946 230-minute opera in 13 scenes, plus an overture and an epigraph, by Sergei Prokofiev. Based on the 1869 novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, its Russian libretto was prepared by the composer and Mira Mendelson. The first seven scenes are devoted to peace, the latter six, after the epigraph, to war.
Although Tolstoy's work is classified as a novel, the 1812 invasion of Russia by the French was a historical event, and some real-life people appear as characters in both the novel and the opera, e.g. Prince Mikhail Kutuzov and Napoleon Bonaparte.