The whimsical score of the fairytale avant-garde opera “The Love to the Three Oranges” by Serge Prokofiev (composer and librettist) combines the elements of tragedy, comedy, fantasy and romance in the surrealistic staging. Based on the play by the Venetian Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) “L’amore delle tre melarance”, “The Love to the Three Oranges” exhibits lavish Modernist theatrical techniques and commedia dell’arte which Prokofiev have possessed from the adaptation of Gozzi’s play by the provocative experimentalist of Russian drama theater[1] – the theater director, critic and whiter Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940). Both the plot and the orchestration carry Prokofiev’s satire, charm and imagination which insensibly meet with the theatrical parody, vaudevillian buffoonery, and political and social irony.
Stasie Gonikberg Blog 