The chorus at Budapest’s grand opera house sang fortissimo, over crashing, triumphant orchestral chords: “We have defended our fatherland with blood! Glory to the army! Russia’s glory will never fade!”
The words were not about the war in Ukraine, but from the opera War and Peace, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, and adapted by the composer Sergei Prokofiev in the 1940s, with the Soviet defeat of the Nazis fresh in the mind.
