Opera in a Prologue, four acts and ten scenes on a libretto by the composer from the homonymous comedy by Carlo Gozzi. First performance: Chicago, December 30, 1921.
The birth ofLove of the three oranges is linked to the name of an Italian conductor: that Cleofonte Campanini, from Parma, who alongside a few other illustrious colleagues, such as Giuseppe Martucci and Franco Faccio, was one of the pioneers of the symphonic renaissance in Italy in the last years of the 19th century of the early twentieth century. In January 1919 Campanini, then director of the Chicago Opera, commissioned the twenty-eight-year-old Prokofiev, who had already been in the United States for two years, a new opera for that theatre. The interest and fascination aroused by the figure of the young pianist, whose powerful and unleashed technique and whose compositions with harsh and aggressive sounds were defined as expressions of the “barbaric and primitive” Russian spirit by an industrial society that welcomed such interpretations , had ended up conquering Campanini as well. he could have taken a happier initiative, even if, unfortunately, not being able to witness his crowning, since he died shortly after, in that same year. Stimulated by the commitment undertaken with Campanini, Prokofiev passionately immersed himself in the work of composition, and at the end of the year of 1919 The love of three oranges she was ready.
“Gozzi’s Comedy – wrote the composer in his autobiography- he conquered me for his mix of story, comedy and satire, and above all for his theatrical attitude. Still conceived in the period when I was in Russia, The Love for Three Oranges responds to the orientation of my new research in the theater field, against the naturalism and routine of the great epigones of theater before the revolution”. So also The love of three oranges it was born as a reaction to the naturalist theatre, joining, in some way, the avant-garde movements of that era, which nourished a similar aversion; and it is not surprising that Gozzi’s fantastic theater could feed the inspirations of the “New Art”. Precisely in Russia, in the wake of Prokofiev’s work, “Princess Turandot” by the composer Yevgeny Vakhtangov will have great success in 1922.
In Prokofiev’s work, however, there is absolutely nothing intellectualistic, nothing programmatic or polemical at all costs. The unreality of the characters and the improbableness of the events are not resolved in an abstract game, on the contrary they are composed naturally in a parody of the theatrical conventions which they ironically enhance. The consummate mastery of Prokofiev’s orchestral writing certainly contributes to this, capable of a humorous penetration which perhaps no other composer of those years is, full of outwardly provocative and unscrupulous gestures and artistic attitudes. Campanini’s death delayed the stage performance of the‘Love of the three orangeswhich the Chicago opera was performed two years later, on December 30, 1921.
