IU Opera turns its focus to ‘The Love for Three Oranges’
By Peter Jacobi
November 9, 2008
The stage director describes it as “a blast, like a fast-moving Broadway show, lots of fun.”
The conductor says, “It’s a riot of actions and colors. The audience will not be bored.”
The stage director is the visiting Nicholas Muni, former artistic director of the Cincinnati Opera. The conductor is Robert Wood, also a visitor and a peripatetic man of music with strong ties to the San Francisco Opera.
The “it” they refer to is Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges,” the work opening at the Musical Arts Center Friday evening as the next production of the IU Opera Theater. For both gentlemen, this is a first time with the opera, one each says has intrigued him for a spell, one each says he’s delighted to work on and master, one both say they now, and they used the same word in separate interviews, “love.”
Muni, in fact was so delighted at the invitation that he’s written a new English translation for this Russian piece, a translation Wood says is “wonderful and witty, very much in keeping with the opera’s fairy tale and comic nature.” Both fellows insist that rehearsals have been going “very well.”
“It’s a very complex show technically,” Muni adds, “with lots of scene changes for a short opera.” The score holds just under 90 minutes of music. That score, says Wood, “is wonderfully complicated. The music is so rich for the orchestra.” The Jacobs School’s premier ensemble, the Philharmonic, will do the honors.
Wood adds that the singers face their own challenges. Most of the roles are short, he explains, requiring “characterizations to be developed quickly. But everyone is having a ball.”
Muni and Wood speak glowingly of each other, each crediting his colleague with an enthusiastic and collaborative spirit. That, apparently, is not how things went back in 1921, when the Chicago Opera Company prepared the world premiere production. Prokofiev came to conduct. During rehearsals, however, he attempted to do more. Watching the stage director carry out his work, the composer became increasingly uncomfortable.
As he later put it: “I went backstage and explained their parts to the soloists, and I told the chorus how to sing the choruses.”
The stage director, so goes the account, raged. “Who’s in charge here?” he shouted. “You or I?”
“You are,” answered Prokofiev with emphatic quiet. “You are, to do what I say.”
Attendees at the two performances given the new work came away with split reactions, some pleased with what they experienced or at least proud that a major composer had written an opera for Chicago, others puzzled by the strange music. They weren’t helped by the words, sung in French, a language most didn’t know. No supertitles in those days!
The production was lavish, to say the least, having cost the company $100,000, a healthy sum even now, an inconceivable one back then. Wrote a reporter for the Chicago Tribune: “Never was paint applied to scene cloth more lavishly or gorgeously.” Said the New Republic: “Rose and scarlet, orange and purple, sapphire and gold, backdrops of wild sunset skies, foregrounds of burlesque court furnishings, deserts, mountains and witches’ caverns, all are beautiful beyond reality, and all share the happy overemphasis of the whole production.”
From what I can recall of what you’ll see, C. David Higgins’ sets previously used in 1994 and 2000, IU Opera Theater’s production is not quite so lavish. But it is colorful and appropriate for this quirky tale.
In brief summary, the story involves the King of Clubs, a monarch deeply worried about his son, victim of illnesses curable only through laughter. The problem is that nothing seems to make him laugh. When the sorceress Fata Morgana takes a tumble, he breaks into laughter. That, unfortunately, angers the sorceress so that she casts a spell on the young man, a spell that causes him to fall in love with three oranges. Ah, but what are the oranges? To find out, come to the MAC.
The opera is based on a theater piece by the Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi. It’s of commedia dell ’arte style, manic and fanciful in nature. “A comedy of the absurd,” adds stage director Muni, with music that is “brash, energetic, and makes for uplifting entertainment.” Wood says the music “will remind people of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony as well as the harmonies and spiky, interesting stuff in his ‘Romeo and Juliet.’”
“Peter and the Wolf” may come to mind, too, in the orchestration, the display of rhythms and a pervasive prankish nature. And if you haven’t seen “The Love for Three Oranges” before, you’ll be surprised when the Scherzo and the March pop up, tunes you are more than likely to know and may go away whistling.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
