86
PARTISAN REVIEW
sized oranges are opened for the sake of quenching the Prince's compan–
ion's thirst, they yield three soprano-singing thirsty princesses, two of
which die immediately with no love lost for them, while the third is
prevented from dying by the timely appearance on stage of a New York
City Fire Department bucket handed over by a gentleman of the chorus
in a dinner jacket. From then on love for the remaining orange becomes
the inevitable conclusion of the story and, in fact, after a number of epi–
sodes involving trap doors, thunderbolts, ascending and descending pig–
eons, the affair ends in a routine fairy-tale marriage
Ii
la Russe.
Prokofiev's music does not attempt to define any characters, nor
give any symbolic significance to the story's horse-play. It is very direct,
lucidly scored, lively and funny music of that charming period of Pro–
koficw's art, when he did not feel compressed into a nationalist corset and
was not compelled to mete out his dissonances and jerky rhythms
in
ac–
cordance with the regulations of Russia's greatest aesthetician, Stalin.
The context of the
Oranges
is full of amusing dissonances and rhythms
which enliven Prokofiev's clear-cut tonal language and, although the
score of the
Oranges
has a direct ideological relation to Rimsky-Kor–
sakov's comic operas, it is pleasantly free from any obnoxious and folk–
loresque Russianisms. The music is, in effect, as urbane and, to use
Muscovite jargon, as "passportlessly cosmopolitan and formalist" as are
all the best compositions of our time. The trouble with the opera is, of
course, that too much of it is built around too little. Its three charming
and famous numbers would fit easily into a match-box. Yet how much
fresher, more ingenious and sincere is that early Prokofiev than the
Prokofiev of the
Ode to Stalin
or even of
Alexander Nevsky,
and how
much sounder is the formal structure of his
Oranges)
now forbidden in
Russia, than the amorphous patchwork of his patriotic opera
War and
Peace.
Nicolas Nabokoy
