1

Makiko Hirata

Orientalism in Love for Three Oranges

The original L’amore della Tre Melarance (Love for Three Oranges)

was a fairy tale every Venetian knew. Then, in 1761 Carlo

Gozzi (1720-1806) adapted it into a commedia dell’arte

(improvised Italian comedy with stock characters. fl. 15th-18th

C) play in 1761, which was then adapted by Sergei Prokofiev

(1891-1953) into an opera in 1919. Each time, the story came

to embody each writer’s time and viewpoints, including

Orientalism1.

Different scholars consider the great popularity that

Gozzi’s play attained, as well as Gozzi’s brief friendship

with Da Ponte, to have influenced the very similar plotline

in Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflőte (Magic Flute) which

takes place in ancient Egypt, leading one to wonder if the

unspecified fantasy land in Gozzi’s play could not have been

in the Orient as well. His following nine plays were to be

2

drawn from The Thousand and One Nights, including Turandot. In

addition, Venice has always had special ties to the Orient.

Prokofiev’s opera, L’amour des trois oranges (Love for Three

Oranges), premiered in Chicago in 1921 and came to be

regarded by many as Sergei Prokofiev’s most successful opera.

The libretto was drafted by the composer between his

departure from Russia and arrival in America, when he had a

two-month layover in Japan, waiting for a ship. Moreover, in

the summer of 1913, during his first trip abroad, he was in

Paris where Exoticism2, and particularly Japonisme, was

prevalent. Debussy, the leading proponent of these two

movements, visited Petrograd in November of 1913 and the two

composers met. In addition, Russia has had, as a geographical

and cultural margin of Europe, a close association with the

cultural Other, and the Orient.3 Given this background, this

paper will focus on the evidence of Orientalism in

Prokofiev’s Opera, Op. 33.

1. The Background

3

Sergei Prokofiev’s opera, L’amour des trois oranges (“Love for

Three Oranges” also performed in Russian as Lyubov’ k tryom

apel’sinam), was first conceived when he received a copy of the

satirical play, L’amore delle tre melarance by Carlo Gozzi, adapted

to Russian by an influential avant-garde theatrical director,

Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940). Meyerhold, like Gozzi, saw in

the “slapstick comedy of masks an antidote to the heavy

melodrama and the petty naturalism.”4 He had hoped to produce

Prokofiev’s first opera, The Gambler, in Petrograd, although

it became impossible with the onset of the Russian Revolution

in 1917. Trusting the newly printed Russian adaptation, he

hoped that the 27-year-old composer would apply the same

“anti-opera” style contained in The Gambler to this commedia

dell’arte scenario.5

On May 7, 1918, Prokofiev started out on his journey by

train: Petrograd – Siberia – China, then a sea voyage to

Yokohama, Japan, arriving on June 1st. He was to stay in Japan

until August 2nd, when finally an appropriate ship was to set

4

sail toward America. By the time he arrived in San Francisco

three weeks later, he had drafted the libretto.6 Prokofiev

feared that an opera in Russian would not be acceptable to

American audiences. With his English being less than

adequate, he decided to write the libretto in French.7 In

January 1919, when the director of Chicago Opera, Cleofonte

Campanini, expressed an interest in The Gambler, Prokofiev

offered instead to compose the score for L’amour des trois

oranges.8 The commission allowed Prokofiev to focus on the

work, and he completed the opera on October 1st of the same

year. With the sudden death of Campanini two months before

the scheduled premiere, and some negotiation difficulties,

the premiere was delayed until Dec. 30, 1921. Chicago Opera

gave it its “most lavish production up to that time (Forty-

three thousand dollars per orange, one critic wrote).”9 The

composer himself was at the podium, Nina Pavlovna Koshets as

the Fata Morgana and Hector Dufranne as the Tchelio. However,

it was not received favorably. Even the Russian premiere in

Leningrad in 1926 met with mixed reviews. Prokofiev himself,

5

however, thought it “a success and the press gave it a good

deal of space. The comments of some reviewers were very

sensible,” though he continues by expressing his annoyance at

the fact that “others wanted to know whom I was laughing at:

the audience, Gozzi, the operatic form or those who had no

sense of humor. They found in the Oranges mockery, defiance,

the grotesque and what not; all I had been trying to do was

to write an amusing opera”.10 Today, many consider it much

more than “an amusing opera”. In Michael Pisani’s view, it

became “one of the first dramaturgically modern operas to

have been performed in either Europe or the Americas…[and]

one of the most important American operatic commissions in

the first half of the twentieth century.”11

2. The Spectators/Commentator in the Libretto

Gozzi wrote his Oranges for the famous Sacci Company12 to

revive the waning popularity of commedia dell’arte, and to show

up his archrival playwrights with their innovative styles:

Goldoni with his bourgeoisie realism and Chiari with his

6

sentimental comedy.13 The conflict is referred to in the

prologue by the comedian with a plea to the audience to give

this old form of comedy one more chance. There is another

brief scene in Act II, Scene 1 where Clarice, Leandro, and

Brighella discuss their respective preference in theatre:

tragedy, comedy, and commedia dell’arte. The adaptation by

Meyerhold had significantly expanded this aspect of Gozzi’s

play, giving this discussion to groups of “Greek Choruses”,

and in Prokofiev’s version, it became even more important.14

The “tragedians”, “comedians”, “lyricists”, “eccentrics” and

“empty heads” provide the temporal frame of the opera. They

open the opera with a five-minute prologue in which the

groups exchange heated arguments over what the opera should

be. During the unfolding of the opera after the Prologue,

they provide commentaries and interventions that mark and

break up the course of the action and music. Spatially, the

stage is surrounded by tiers of balconies from where these

“aesthetes” are to exclaim their comments on how the story

7

should unfold. They sometimes even descend from these

balconies to intercede in the on-going actions.

Pisani states that “Oranges is largely a satire on all

that is elevated: courtly life and operatic extravagance”.15

The opera is set in a kingdom where everyone dresses as a

playing card16. It is where the underground creatures -- good

sorcerer Tchélio and the evil witch Fata Morgana -- deal with

the fate of the aging King and terminally hypochondriac

Prince by playing cards (and the witch wins). The

commentators occupy the best seats in the house, having more

power over the course of the story than the characters

themselves seem to. During the period when he was composing

this work, Prokofiev himself, like these “aesthetes”, was an

outsider, a foreign traveler to Japan, and then America. What

did he think of the unfamiliar world he was observing and did

any of it make it into this opera, particularly his

experience in Japan?

3. Orientalism: Background

8

Love for Three Oranges is an opera that is open to a wide

variety of interpretations and productions for two reasons.

One concerns the improvisational nature of its original

format, commedia dell’arte.17 The other rests on the fact that

“Prokofiev did not spell out the ‘meanings’ in his opera; he

left such decisions to the directors, actors and audience…

[he] confirmed in his diary that the manner in which the

opera succeeded or failed had everything to do with how

director, designer, and actors realized the humor and satire,

without resorting to the bitter edge of sarcasm”.18 Therefore,

a quality that does not appear in the foreground of the

narrative, such as Orientalism, can be difficult to discern.

And to accuse a work of Orientalism is a serious charge:

Edward Said, an extremely influential cultural critic in his

pivotal work Orientalism (1978) defined the term Orientalism

as “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient –

dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing

views of it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in

short, a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and

9

having authority over the Orient.”19 Nevertheless, there is

enough background and musical material to build a case for

Orientalism in this opera.

After Gozzi’s successful revival of commedia della’arte with

Oranges, he went on to write nine more fiabe (dramatized fairy

tales) in the next four years (1762-66), drawing mainly on

The Thousand and One Nights for the plots, including Turandot.20 He

was writing for Venetian audiences that considered Marco Polo

(1254-1324) to be their pride, and fantasized about the Far

East based on his accounts. Venetians had enjoyed a monopoly

over the trade routes to the Arabian lands for centuries that

also provided access to goods from China, though by Gozzi’s

time they had already lost it to other European powers.

Oranges does not specifically point to the Orient in its

narratives. However, in addition to these above mentioned

facts, the similarities between the second half of Oranges –

where the Prince goes through “trials and tribulations”21 to

find his love, cure his curse, and reach a happy wedding –

10

and Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflȍte (The Magic Flute)

are striking enough to make one wonder if Oranges could not

have taken place somewhere in the Orient, since Die Zauberflȍte

takes place in Ancient Egypt. Before Da Ponte moved to

Vienna, where he collaborated with Mozart on Le Nozze di Figaro

(The Marriage of Figaro), Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte, he

lived in Venice where he developed “a brief friendship” with

Gozzi.22 Scholars speculate that Da Ponte might have told

“Mozart about the most popular form of theater in Venice at

the time, Gozzi’s fiabe…It was from the fantastical fairy tale

plays of Carlo Gozzi that Mozart and Schikaneder derived the

idea for Die Zauberflȍte”.23

Prokofiev was a descendent of Russian composers who

sought to establish their own unique voice, independent from

the European influence. One of the ways in which they

attempted this was by looking to the Orient. It was also “in

response to increased censorship during the years after the

assassination of liberal tsar Alexander II…that the

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preference for fantastic, exotic plots over historical ones”

came to be.24 For examples, works like Balakirev’s Islamey –

Oriental Fantasy (1869), Rimsky-Korsokov’s Sheherazade (1888), and

Borodin’s Prince Igor (1874) immediately come to one’s mind.

The Russian fascination with the Orient also reflects its

“Eurasianism”– a Russian political movement in the early 20th

century, which posited that Russian civilization was a non-

European, Orthodox Christian one. Furthermore, in the summer

of 1913, Prokofiev had already visited France, where

Orientalism/Exoticism was permeating all art forms.25 He also

met Debussy later in the same year, when this leading

proponent of Orientalism and Japonisme visited Petrograd and

conducted some of his own orchestral works and performed his

own chamber pieces.26 Debussy praised Prokofiev’s own

performance of his Legend, Op. 12 and Etudes, Op. 2, but

Prokofiev thought of the French master’s music as “not

sufficiently meaty”.27 There is no evidence that Prokofiev

came to Japan with a particular interest in Orientalism or

Japonisme. In fact, had he not missed the ship to Valparaiso,

12

Chile, by three days, he would have gone straight on to

America, barely passing through Japan. However, according to

his journal entries, Prokofiev was impressed with Japan:

May 31: “…Having left the prison-like Russia, it is like a vacation to have come to a country with no war or revolutions, with fragrant flowers blooming…I did not think I would be attracted to this country, and honestly I was a little angry with the Japanese that wanted to occupy the eastern Siberia, but I must say that I have never seen a country this wonderful. Enchanting steep green mountains are sectioned into little squares and plowed with love…”28

During the two-month stay, he explored Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara,

Yokohama, Hakone and Osaka, met with various classical music

connoisseurs from Japan and abroad, visited the brothels and

strip clubs, played three concerts (to not-so full houses),

read Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation”,

and wrote short stories. It was also in Japan that he re-read

Meyerhold’s adaptation of Oranges, started reading the original

Italian version by Gozzi and sketched out the dynamics

between characters belonging to the underworld (the wizards

and witches) versus the real-world.29

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4. Prokofiev’s Musical Orientalism

Ralph P. Locke defines musical Orientalism as “ the

dialects of musical exoticism within Western art music that

evoke the East or the orient; in a broader sense, the

attitude toward those same geo-cultural regions as expressed

in certain Western musical works, regardless of whether a

given work evokes the music of the region or not.”30 He gives

a list on musical features often used to evoke the musical

exoticism:

1. modes and harmonies different from the familiar major and minor (such as pentatonic and other gapped scales),

2. bare textures (unharmonized unisons or octaves, parallel4ths or 5ths, drones and static harmonies and – in pieces evoking the Indonesian gamelan – a texture consisting of rhythmically stratified layers),

3. distinctive repeated rhythmic or melodic patterns (sometimes deriving from dances of the ‘other’ country or group), and

4. unusual musical instruments (especially percussion) or performing techniques (e.g. pizzicato, double stops, vocal portamento).”31

Prokofiev wrote several works with Oriental references.

They are:

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1. “Overture to Hebrew Themes” Op. 34 for Clarinet, String Quartet and Piano

2. Symphonic Suite “Egyptian Nights” Op. 613. “Oriental Dance” Op. 97-6 in his Pieces from the Ballet

Cinderella for solo piano4. “Orientalia” (the same as above, orchestrated) Op. 109-5

from the Symphonic Suite, Cinderella (which also includes selections from Love for Three Oranges)

5. Indian Galop (1896) for Piano, Kazkah Popular Songs (5) for vl & pf (1927), Oriental Piece for Piano (1907) – all Woo., all lost.

The “Oriental” characteristics that are consistent to

these pieces coincide with Locke’s list of musical features

used to evoke musical Exoticism.

1. modal ambiguities, 2. Drone-like perfect intervals that often give a sense of

timelessness, 3. An odd number of repeated notes (see Ex. 2, Cinderella,

mm13-15, 17-18 and 23-25) and/or motivic short-note patterns (see Ex. 3, Hebrew [48] to end) – often in a duration that reminds one of minimalist music,

4. The use of percussion and/or staccato/pizzicato/col legno effects (see Ex. 4, Egyptian Night, P. 58)

For example, the first movement, “Night in Egypt”, from the

Symphonic Suite “Egyptian Nights”, Op. 61 (see Ex.1), is

supported by a movement-long tremolo in the strings and the

bass drum. The C is the most prominent note in this “chord”

15

played by the first violins, cello and bass, while the G and

D are divided between different registers of the second

violins and viola. Their only break from this C-D-G drone is

the three-measure-long lower neighbor chord of B, A, C#, E,

F# (which can be analyzed as an F# minor 7th chord with an

added B, but because B is prominent as a soprano and as an

audible lower neighbor, and because it has no harmonic

function, it does not sound like a typical “harmony”), only

to go back to the original C-D-G tremolo for five more

measures to the end of the movement. The static, minimalistic

dotted rhythms introduced by the flute also distort the

listener’s sense of time. In the third measure the solo flute

alternates between a dotted figure and 16th note figure twice,

creating a sense of pattern which is only to be betrayed two

measures later. The descending chromatic scale between

clarinets, bass clarinet, harp and cello pizzicato at measure

13 will resolve to what sounds briefly like a C triad (with

the added D), but it is not in the tonal context. For more

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examples of Prokofiev’s Oriental qualities in these pieces,

please refer to examples 2, 3, and 4, in the Appendix.

5. Musical Orientalism in Love for Three Oranges

Listing operas written between 1851 and 1898 by French,

German and Italian composers as examples, Ralph P. Locke

summarizes the “paradigmatic plot for Orientalist operas” as

follows: “Young, tolerant, brave, possibly naïve, white-

European tenor-hero intrudes, at risks of disloyalty to his

own people and colonialist ethic, into mysterious, dark-

skinned, colonized territory represented by alluring dancing

girls and deeply affectionate, sensitive lyric soprano,

incurring wrath of brutal, intransigent tribal chieftain

(bass or bass-baritone) and blindly obedient chorus of male

savages.”32 Love for Three Oranges fits this mold, though not

as literally as Magic Flute does. The “white-European tenor-

hero” would be the Prince, who overcomes his fatal

hypochondria by managing to laugh at the evil witch Fata

Morgana in the middle of the opera. The humiliated witch

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curses the prince with an obsession for the three oranges.

The prince abandons his aging father, along with the kingdom

and subjects he is to inherit from his father, to set out

immediately on a journey to seek out these three oranges,

accompanied by the jester, Trouffaldino (he is to the Prince,

Tamino’s Papageno and Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza). The

oranges are kept at the kitchen of a palace of the witch

Creonta, guarded by a giant female cook (bass – this would be

the “intransigent tribal chieftain” in Locke’s formula) with

a lethal ladle. The Prince and Trouffaldino rescue the three

oranges, each of which has a princess (the “alluring dancing

girls”) and find Princess Ninetta (the “deeply affectionate,

sensitive” soprano) in the last one, with whom the Prince

falls in love.

The singers in Oranges are divided into three levels in

its narrative as well as music: the “spectators”, the

“characters”, and the “manipulators from the underworld”. The

spectators are easily distinguishable from the rest because

18

they always sing in chorus, but to associate the characters

and the manipulators with audible musical characteristics is

a little trickier. Prokofiev seems to use the “Oriental”

musical characteristics in order to give the manipulators

more of an exotic aura. The tendencies to portray the

characters possessing supernatural powers as Oriental are

points made repeatedly by Locke33. The dark force of the

underworld, the evil witch Fata Morgana, gets the most

discernible Oriental musical materials among the characters

in the opera. Fata Morgana is the figure that is associated

with the Queen of the Night from Die Zauberflȍte. Gozzi’s

misogynistic world view and his portrayal of female

characters are retained in Prokofiev’s opera.34

The first time we hear the Oriental elements is in Act

I, scene II: the good sorcerer Tchelio and evil witch Fata

Morgana make their first appearances in the opera to play

three rounds of a card game. The outcome of the game

determines the fates of King and Prince, whom Leandro (the

19

prime minister), and Clarissa (King’s niece) are scheming to

overthrow. If Tchelio wins, King and Prince are safe, if not,

they are doomed. Throughout the game, neither Tchelio nor

Fata Morgana really sings, but only mimes and exclaims at the

dealing of each card. Only when Fata Morgana’s victory is

revealed, do we hear the musical orientalism, as well as them

“singing”, for the first time (see Ex. 5). Her laughter is

scored in descending figures of E-D flat-C-C, although in

some productions, the soprano sings more in sprechtsimme style,

an expressionist vocal technique between singing and

speaking. She laughs five times – an odd number, against

Tchelio cursing her on a repeated C with dotted rhythms, also

five times. The devils accompanying Fata Morgana sing her

name in alternation of third and fourth, five times as well.

It is a very oddly repetitive moment in the opera – things

stand still, and the audience is suspended wondering where

everything (not just the narrative but also the music) will

go from there.

20

The scene of Fata Morgana’s laughter foreshadows the

scene in which the terminally hypochondriac prince – whose

only cure is laughter – laughs for the first time. Comedians

have been summoned to make him laugh, to no avail, because

Fata Morgana’s presence has the power to counteract the

comedians’ efforts, and keep the Prince from laughing. But

when she is shoved by Trouffaldino and falls head over heels,

the Prince laughs (see Ex. 6). The beginning of this hesitant

laughter reminds one of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and

perhaps that was the composer’s intention. The scene may be

prophesizing the blooming of minimalism later in the century,

a movement that scholars such as Robert Fink often associate

with the philosophy of Zen. First, when the Prince begins to

laugh, the violins (gradually joined by the rest of the

strings one section at a time) play an eighth-note pattern

for 48 measures. Once the Prince has mastered his laugh, and

laughs in repeated diminished triads on C#, the entire string

section accompanies him with pizzicatos for 17 measures. Then

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the crowd, characters as well as the spectators, laughs as a

chorus, again repetitively.

The ever-lasting repetitive laughter is interrupted when

Fata Morgana, humiliated, stands up to curse the Prince (see

Ex. 7). The scene opens with a big bang on the Chinese gong

and string tremolos on B-F#-C with an added A-flat in double

bass. The string chorale that follows reminds one of

Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899), Op. 4. When she begins to

deliver her curse (“through trials and tribulations…”) for

three measures before rehearsal number 221 (see Ex. 8), the

chromaticism and tonal ambiguity reaches its height.

Especially because the rest of her “aria” is very triadic

(against very chromatic accompanimental figures), this line

stands out. Then, she disappears with two bangs on the

Chinese gong.

The modal ambiguities associated with Fata Morgana are

noticeable elsewhere. Earlier in the opera, Leandro and

Clarissa – desperately scheming to keep Prince from laughing

22

in hopes of taking over the kingdom – sing Fata Morgana’s

name as if praying, wishing for her power to suppress the

Prince in his hypochondria (see Example 9). Their song

outlines a pentatonic scale F-G-Bb-C-Db (Db is only in the

accompaniment)35. In this pentatonic, parallel perfect-

interval passage, one is briefly transported in to the world

of Madame Butterfly (1904). There is another pentatonic

passage, not associated with Fata Morgana, but with Princes

Ninetta from one of the three oranges. After she has

introduced herself, and the Prince has declared his love to

her, she tells him that she has always waited for him (see

Ex. 11). Her line, with the addition of flutes and clarinets

in high registers in parallel-fifth motion, outlines the

pentatonic scale of G-A-B-D-E. Though her later lines also

suggest pentatonic scales, it is never this distinct. Why the

use of pentatonic here? Is it because of the association

between passivity, innocence, fragility (she is dying of

thirst, only to be rescued by the intervention of the

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“eccentrics” bringing a bucket of water down to the stage)

and the Orient? Is it to mock cio-cio san?

Tchelio, the good sorcerer, has his Oriental moment as

well, though it is curious that one of the few places he gets

it is when he is calling on Farfarello, the devil, to find

out Fata Morgana’s scheme against the Prince. At the

beginning of Act III Scene I, the sorcerer calls on

Farfarello 20 times in total. At the end he repeats

“Farfarello” so quickly that it reminds one of Rossini’s

“Figaro”. The beginning of this act is also marked by an

eerie tremolo drone. As the tempo picks up towards

Farfarello’s appearance, strings begin to switch gradually

from tremolo to pizzicatos to col legno to eventually

accelerating 16 notes. This is also a harmonically ambiguous

place in the opera, with many voices moving in parallel

motion. Tonal centers – if there is one clearly at any point

– shift with every phrase.

6. Conclusions

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The Orientalism and/or Exoticism in Prokofiev’s music

may not be as prevalent as in some of the other composers of

his time, but his use of it in Love for Three Oranges seems to be

consistent and purposeful. And the use of the term

Orientalism with its negative connotation associated with

cultural imperialism seems to be perfectly appropriate.

Prokofiev never missed a day of journal entry during his stay

in Japan, but the evidence of his actively seeking out

Japanese music, theatre, or any form of traditional culture

cannot be found. People mentioned in his journal are mostly

Russians and other Europeans living in Japan, and the

majority of the Japanese mentioned are “professional”

females. One of the few Japanese males he mentioned by name

is Duke Yorisada Tokugawa, a musicologist. Prokofiev’s

description of him is “very European, attractive, ingenuous –

I felt nothing Oriental about him”.36 He played concerts in

Japan after a two-month-and-a-half of no practicing, but

claims the Japanese audience unworthy of such effort37.

Surprised by their acceptance of his rather dissonant pieces

25

(among other pieces, he played his own Visions Fugitives, and the

last movement of his fourth sonata), he says “they are so

used to incoherent sounds, that I suspect they cannot hear

the difference between our consonances and dissonance”.38

Though he did admire the Japanese landscapes, geishas, the old

cities of Kyoto and Nara, the disrespect he expresses toward

many of the other aspects of the country rules out the

possibility that he would attempt to incorporate some kind of

Japaonisme in his music. This is also evident in the fact

that, though many of his eleven short stories were at least

drafted, or started in Japan, there is no mention of Japan,

or anything remotely relatable to Japan in any of them.

Prokofiev might have claimed, if asked, that Love for Three

Oranges would have come out the same had he written it in

Russia. But the fact remains that many of the musical

gestures he used to portray the “Other” in the opera were

used in his pieces that portrayed the Orient, and that he was

exposed to the Orient itself and Orientalism around this

time.

1 Locke points out how since Edward Said’s pivotal work Orientalism (1978), “’Orientalism’ has become a term that can refer to any world population – including Caribbean and blond Scandinavian-Americans – that differs from whatever a work of art constructs as its mainstream European or white-American persona or viewpoint. And, with rare exceptions, it accuses the West of intolerance (condescension, etc.) toward whatever ethnic Other is in question” See Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37. I have chosen this term,being fully aware of its negative connotations. However, I also agree with Locke’s following proposal: “Cultural Imperialism – or any other ideology or political trend that a given individual today finds repellent – can be condemned in the realm of politics but, I would propose, can and should be allowed to find expression in art, especially when the work in questions isworthy enough…the ‘unbeautiful’ ideological implications in (a masterpiece – he uses Les noces as an example) are part of what led (the creator – in theexample, Stravinsky) to use certain style features in the work. It is enriching for us to know more about what the creator and his contemporarieswould have read into those style features, and to ponder possibly analogousimplications in other repertoires, including ones of our own day” 38-40.

2 “Orientalism” has become for some music critics, scholars – just as for literary critics and such – a curse word, a sharply disapproving substitutefor a word – “exotic” – that had so long been used in a (now-considered-naïve?) spirit of delighted endorsement.” ibid, 38.

3This can be seen in works such as Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880) and Prince Igor (1890) or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade (1888). Locke proposes that “nationalism/folklorism/vernacularism” and “exoticism” display certain inherent similarities, and therefore, achieve similar musical effects. ibid, 27-29.

4 Richard Taruskin. "Love for Three Oranges, The." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed March 26, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/O902857.

5 Meyerhold had already been experimenting with the commedia characters. According to Michael Pisani, “His production in 1906 of Alexander Blok’s symbolist drama The Fairground Boothwith, with its Pierrot and Harlequin, may have, as one critic wrote, ‘launched the “Petrushka era” in Russian culture’ (Virginia Bennett, “Russian Pagliacci: Symbols of Profane Love in ThePuppet Show,” in Drama and Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 141-78) …In 1913, Meyerhold suggested Love for Three Oranges to Richard

Strauss as an opera subject.” Strauss was already working on his own commedia project, Ariadne auf Naxos, and declined. See Pisani, “’A Kapustnik’ in the American Opera House: Modernism and Prokofiev’s ‘Love for Three Oranges’” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Winter, 1997): 498.

6 Taruskin’s article in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera states “By the time Prokofiev docked in San Francisco he had a draft libretto in hand”. However, in his autobiography (1941) Prokofiev himself wrote “during the long journey I had even sketched a plan of sorts in my mind”. Prokofiev, “Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings,” 265.

7 “Prokofiev may have conceived parts of the libretto in Russian, but, purportedly with the assistance of the soprano Vera Janacopolus, he translated them into singable French…He may have also been fashioning the Russian simultaneously with an eye to performances back home” Pisani, 511.

8 Prokofiev had the piano score with him, but the orchestral score was in revolutionary Petrograd, the retrieval of which would have been extremely difficult. See Prokofiev’s “Autobiography” in Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings,265.

9 Pisani, “A Kapustnik” in the American Opera House, 490.

10 Prokofiev, Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings, 281.

11 Pisani, “A Kapustnik” in the American Opera House , 489.

12 “…there just happened to be a highly accomplished commedia dell’arte troup working in Venice at the time, the famous Sacchi company…they had been performing in Lisbon, Portugal, when the terrible earthquake of November 1, 1755 occurred, killing around 40,000 people. Although all the members of the Sacchi troupe survived, they knew they could not continue tomake a living in Lisbon, given the circumstances, so they returned to Venice, leased a theater (the San Samuele), and worked to attract a loyal audience. But they were not having much success. See John Louis DiGaetani, A life in the 18th Century Venetian Theatre, and Afterlife in Opera (London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2000), 107

13 “since Goldoni obstinately refers to his crowded house as a proof of the value of his theatrical compositions, I one day impenitently expressed the opinion that crowded houses were no demonstration that the shows were good and that I could guarantee to draw still larger crowds than did he with hisrubbish by working into dramatic from the fiary-tale of The Love of the Three Pomegranates which grannies narrate to their grandchildren” – Gozzi quoted inPisani “A Kapustnik” in the American Opera House, 497.

14 Taruskin, Love for Three Oranges, The.

15 Pisani, “A Kapustnik” in the American Opera House, 509.

16 This was from Gozzi’s original. It “had the immediate effect of parodyingVenice’s famous obsession with gambling…for much of the 18th century, Venicewas the only city in Europe that had legalized gambling”. See DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi: A Life in the 18th Century Venetian Theater, an Afterlife in Opera, 110.

17 “Gozzi depended largely on the legendary improvisational abilities of thewonderful actors in the Sacci troupe.”See John Louis DiGaetani Carlo Gozzi : Translations of The Love of Three Oragnes, Turandot, and The Snake Lady with a Bio-Critical Introduction (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1988) , 10.

18 Pisani, “A Kapustnik” in the American Opera House, 500.

19 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 3-4, 119-120.

20 Barbara Reynolds. "Gozzi, Carlo." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed March 27, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/O901955.

21 Fata Morgana, “You will be tormented by the love for three oranges. Through trial and tribulations, by night and by day you shall roam and wonder in search of the three oranges” Act II, Scene II, rehearsal number [220]

22 DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi: A life in the 18th Century Venetian Theatre, and Afterlife in Opera, 200.

23 ibid

24 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 226

25 Dorothea Redepenning. "Prokofiev, Sergey." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed March 27, 2013,http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/22402.

26 Prokofiev mentions having heard Debussy conduct La Mer and Nocturne. See Motoo Otaguro. “Purokofiev to Kataru (Conversing with Prokofiev)”, Ongaku to Bungaku (Music and Literature) 8 (1918): 7.

27 Israle V. Nestyev, Prokofiev, trans. Florence Jonas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1960), 82.

28 Sergei Prokofiev. Purokofiev Tanpen-shu. Trans. Sabrina Eleonora and Nahoko Toyota (Tokyo: Gunzo-sha, 2010), 174-5.

…(今 今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今 今今今今今今今今今 今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今 今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今、、、、?...今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今、。、今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今今…”。、English translation by Hirata

29 Journal entry dated June 16 in Prokofiev, Purokofiev Tanpenshu, 187.

30 Ralph P. Locke. "Orientalism." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed July 5, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/40604

31 For a fuller typology of style aspects that have been used in exotic portrayals, see Locke, Musical Exoticism, 2009, Fig. 3.1, pp. 51–4”. Quoted from Ralph P. Locke. "Exoticism." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed July 5, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/45644

32 Ralph P. Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saȅns’s ‘Samsonet Dalila’” Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Nov. 1991): 262-3

33 See Locke, Musical Exoticism, 196 - Chapter 8 “Impreialism and ‘the Exotic Orient’”, section “Rituals, priests and crowds”

34 DiGaetani identifies his misogynistic views as something that is attributable to his difficult relationship with his mother. “Carlo’s memoirs and his plays contain…loving fathers set against neurotic and monstrous mothers, Turandot and Fata Morgana being only the most famous examples. Perhaps because of his difficult relationship with his mother, Carlo Gozzi’s own character early began to display a streak of misogyny, and that taint persisted in many of his writings.” See DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi:a Life… 16-17

35 For a discussion of pentatonic scale being associated with Oriental female characters, See Locke Musical Exoticism, 188. “Fragile Women, Fatal Women, and the Pentatonic” in Chapter 8 “Imperliaism and ‘the Exotic Orient’”

36 Prokofiev, Purokofiev Tanpenshu, Journal entry dated July 12, 199.37

Ibid, entry dated June 28, 192.38

Ibid, entry dated July 6, 196.

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DiGaetani, John Louis. A Life in the 18th Century Venetian Theater, and Afterlife in Opera. London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2000

Frolova-Walker, Marina (2005). "11. Russian opera; Two anti-operas: The Love for Three Oranges and The Nose". Ed. Mervyn Cooke. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera. London: Cambridge University Press. pp. 182–186. 

Locke, Ralph P. Exoticism. Oxford University Press, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, accessed July 5, 2013,

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Otaguro, Motoo. “Purokofiev no Insho (Prokofiev’s Impressions),” Ongaku to Bungaku (Music and Literature) 9 (1918): 4-22

Pisani, Michael. “’A Kapustnik’ in the American Opera House: Modernism and Prokofiev’s ‘Love for Three Oranges’.” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Winter, 1997): 487-515, http://jstor.org/stable/742283 (accessed March 27, 2013).

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