MUSIC CHRONICLE
85
and the fun is far less cautious than
in
the time of Tzar Nicholas II,
-his is more like a drive across freshly tilled fields in a Model T Ford.
True enough, the story is Italian and, more, a
cause celebre
in the
annals of literary squabbles of the 18th century. The
Fabia dell'amore
delle tre malarancie
by Carlo Cozzi was a satire on the
Stile francese
comedies of Coldoni. First produced in Venice in 1761, its triumphal
success all over Italy resulted in Coldoni's retirement, or rather, emigra–
tion to France. Cozzi stood for the traditional Italian fairy tale
Come–
dia dell'Arte
whereas Coldoni wanted to introduce to Italy the French
genre of realist comedy.
Consequently, the point of Cozzi's comedy is a literary polemic
whose real meaning has faded away and is utterly unintelligible to an
audience of 1949 (as I suspect it was to Prokofiev). Having lost its
sense, what remains is the dismembered carcass of a fairy tale which Pro–
kofiev and his producers liven with much horseplay, travesty, magic, and
stale but funny jokes. All this taken together saves the opera from being
a moth-eaten bore like Cozzi's
Princess Turandot,
revived in many guises
allover Europe in the 20's, or like most of the attempts (during the
20's) to revive the paraphernalia of masqued Pulcinellas, Arlechinos and
the rest of the Venetian carnival gang.
Yet the
Oranges
has retained all the flavor of the Russian take-off
(in this case, of fairy-tale opera) and is in many ways a full evening ex–
tension of those burlesque numbers which were a staple of the Russian
so-called
art-cabaret
of 1915-1925.
The story of the
Loue for Three Oranges
is all about a foolish
king and his hypochondriac son who cannot laugh because of a seeming–
ly incurable melancholia. (Apparently Prokofiev's idiot king and his
idiot son burlesque Nicholas II and his heir.) The Prince is brought to
laughter by the sight of a nasty old witch's underpants when she tum–
bles down in front of him (ha-ha-ha-ha, to the tune of the first four
notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony). Suddenly he is obsessed with the
fetishistic notion that he is in love with three oranges apparently unavail–
able in his father's kingdom. The oranges are guarded by a ferocious
female-baritone cook who sings one of the three memorable pieces of
the opera (this, the famous march, and the scherzo). (Curiously enough
during those same years Stravinsky composed an opera,
Maura,
where
there is also a cook, female-impersonator.) But the Prince and his rou–
tine companion are protected by a routine sorcerer who easily helps them
to gain possession of the three oranges despite the obstacles set in their
way by the routine witch (the lady whose underpants made the Prince
laugh in the first place) and when in the following scene the three man-
