Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev 9780253057891, 9780253057907

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T H R E E L OV E S for T H R E E OR A NGE S

RUS S I A N M US IC S T U DI E S Simon A. Morrison and Peter Schmelz, editors

Alexander Golovin, design for the front cover of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto, no. 1–3 (1915). PN2007.L5 1915 no. 1/3. André Savine Collection, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

T H R E E L OV E S for T H R E E OR A NGE S Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev

edited by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig with Maria De Simone

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2021 by Indiana University Press “The Love for Three Oranges” by Sergei Prokofiev © 1922 By Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. A Concord Company All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2021 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gozzi, Carlo, 1720–1806. Amore delle tre melarance. English (De    Simone) | Vogak, K. (Konstantin), 1887–1938. Li︠ u︡ bovʹ k trem    apelʹsinam. English (Posner) | Prokofiev, Sergey, 1891-1953. Li︠ u︡ bovʹ k    trem apelʹsinam. English (Bartig) | Posner, Dassia N., editor,    translator. | Bartig, Kevin, editor, translator. | De Simone, Maria,    editor, translator.  Title: Three loves for three oranges : Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev / edited    by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig with Maria De Simone.  Other titles: Russian music studies.  Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2021. |    Series: Russian music studies | Includes bibliographical references and    index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021020576 (print) | LCCN 2021020577 (ebook) | ISBN    9780253057884 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253057891 (ebook)  Subjects: LCSH: Prokofiev, Sergey, 1891-1953. Li︠ u︡ bovʹ k trem apelʹsinam.    | Vogak, K. (Konstantin), 1887-1938. Li︠ u︡ bovʹ k trem apelʹsinam. |    Meĭerkholʹd, V. Ė. (Vsevolod Ėmilʹevich), 1874–1940. | Gozzi, Carlo,    1720–1806. Amore delle tre melarance. | Opera—Russia. | Experimental    theater—Russia. | Commedia dell’arte. | Italian drama    (Comedy)—Italy—Venice. Classification: LCC ML410.P865 T52 2021  (print) | LCC ML410.P865  (ebook)    | DDC 782.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020576 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020577

For the grandmothers, who understand how serious a matter fantasy can be

Contents Editorial Notes  ix List of Definitions and Abbreviations  xi List of Illustrations  xiii Acknowledgments xix Preface: How Not to Die Laughing in a Lethal Time / Caryl Emerson  xxi Introduction / Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig, and Maria De Simone 1 Part I. The Fiaba 1 Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” by Carlo Gozzi / Translated, introduced, and annotated by Maria De Simone 37 2 The Love of Three Oranges, Venice 1761: A Theatrical Provocation / Alberto Beniscelli / Translated by Maria De Simone 73

3 A Short Note on the First Sacchi Company / Giulietta Bazoli 86



4 Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges: A New Horizon of Expectations / Domenico Pietropaolo 92



5 Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination / Ted Emery 108



6 A Cultural Pastiche of Fantasy, Satire, and Citrus: Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges in Its German Afterlife / Natalya Baldyga 124

viii | Contents

Part II. The Divertissement

7 Love for Three Oranges: A Divertissement in Twelve Scenes, a Prologue, an Epilogue, and Three Interludes by Konstantin Vogak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Soloviev / Translated, introduced, and annotated by Dassia N. Posner 147



8 Carlo Gozzi in The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto / Raissa Raskina 187



9 Meyerhold and the Russian Commedia dell’Arte Myth / Vadim Shcherbakov 207



10 The Miklashevsky Connection / Laurence Senelick 235



11 From Divertissement to Opera: Two Russian Oranges / Julia Galanina 253

Part III. The Opera 12 Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev / Translated, introduced, and annotated by Kevin Bartig 273

13 Tsardom and Buttocks: From Empress Anna to Prokofiev’s Fata Morgana / Inna Naroditskaya 334



14 Notes on the Musical Parody in Prokofiev’s Three Oranges / Natalia Savkina 357



15 Notes on the Notes / Simon A. Morrison 367



16 Boris Anisfeld, an Alchemist of Color / John E. Bowlt 374

17 Oranges in Leningrad / Kevin Bartig 393 List of Contributors  415 Index 419

Editorial Notes

U

nless otherwise indicated, translations from Russian, Italian, and German are the authors’ own in chapters originally written in En­ glish, while those in chapters translated by the book’s editors are the translators’ own. All quotations from the theatrical Three Oranges works are drawn from the translations that appear in this book. Russian transliterations are based on common spellings in the text (i.e., Meyerhold rather than Meierkhol’d) and on a slightly simplified Library of Congress system for references cited in the endnotes. The Julian calendar was used in Russia until 1918; when citing Russian sources, all dates are indicated according to the Russian calendar at the time of the event. To distinguish between three dramatic works with similar titles, we refer to Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance; Meyerhold, Soloviev, and Vogak’s Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam; and Prokofiev’s Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam as the fiaba, divertissement, and opera, respectively. We translate the fiaba title as The Love of Three Oranges and the divertissement and opera titles as Love for Three Oranges to reflect the slight differences between the Italian and Russian names.

ix

Definitions and Abbreviations

balagan  temporary wooden fairground booth; also Russian fairground more generally argomento  brief commedia dell’arte plot outline or summary canovaccio  commedia scenario commedia dell’arte  Italian performance form, beginning in the sixteenth century, that featured masked and unmasked stock characters, lazzi, and improvised or semi-improvised action; literally, comedy (which at the time meant any play genre) of the profession commedia all’improvviso  a common term (that Gozzi also used) for commedia dell’arte in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fiaba/e  fairy-tale play genre pioneered by Gozzi; literally, fairy tale innamorati  unmasked commedia lover characters lazzo (plural lazzi)  self-contained, improvisatory comic bit in a commedia performance. Actors often had a repertoire of lazzi for which they were famous. LTA – Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto MAT – Moscow Art Theatre tipi fissi  commedia stock characters; literally, fixed types servetta  unmasked comic female servant character in commedia; also, fantesca Vecchio/i  masked old man character/s in commedia; also, Magnifico Zanni  masked comic male servant characters in commedia

xi

Illustrations

Frontispiece. Alexander Golovin, design for the front cover of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto, no. 1–3 (1915). Figure 0.1.

Boris Anisfeld. The Prince and Truffaldino pushing the oranges in the desert. Design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921.

Figure 0.2.

Antonio Bertoldi, portrait of Carlo Gozzi. Frontispiece to Opere del Co: Carlo Gozzi. Vol. 1 (Venice: Il Colombani, 1772).

Figure 0.3.

Draft page from The Love of Three Oranges prologue, with excerpt from Fata Morgana’s curse.

Figure 0.4.

Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Krasnaia Svetopis’, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1923.

Figure 0.5.

Invitation to the reading of Love for Three Oranges at Meyerhold’s apartment, 1913.

Figure 0.6.

Portrait of Konstantin Vogak.

Figure 0.7.

Sergei Prokofiev in front of the Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, 1921.

Figure 0.8.

Edouard Cotreuil, caricature of Sergei Prokofiev rehearsing Love for Three Oranges at the Auditorium Theatre, 1921.

Figure 0.9.

Boris Anisfeld. Prokofiev’s four prologue choruses, with the Eccentrics watching from the towers. Design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921.

Figure 1.1.

Title page from Opere del Co: Carlo Gozzi. Vol. 1 (Venice: Il Colombani, 1772).

Figure 1.2.

Sketch for a devil’s mask, by Venetian theatre designer Giuseppe Bertoja.

Figure 1.3.

Folding card table for the game of “biribisse” (Venetian: “biribisso”), second half of 18th century.

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xiv | Illustrations Figure 1.4.

Manuscript page from The Love of Three Oranges preface.

Figure 2.1.

Manuscript page from Gozzi’s The Theatre Competitions.

Figure 3.1.

Stage portrait of Atanasio Zannoni (Brighella) by L. Cittadella, lithograph by Zannoli.

Figure 4.1.

“Vice is corrected with laughter.” Welcome card to the San Samuele Theatre, Carnival of 1758.

Figure 4.2.

Interior of the San Samuele Theatre, showing its “magnificent lighting system” made of mirrors and permanent oil lamps, 1753.

Figure 4.3.

Cups (coppe) suit. Playing cards for Tarocchino, 18th century.

Figure 6.1.

The discovery of Prince Oronaro’s doll, The Triumph of Sensibility. Daniel Chodowiecki, 1787.

Figure 6.2.

Zerbino’s servant Nestor in the Garden of Poetry, 1835. Copper engraving by Auguste Hüssener after a drawing by Joseph Führich.

Figure 6.3.

Nestor and Zerbino released from prison by the canine Stablemaster, 1835. Copper engraving by Auguste Hüssener after a drawing by Joseph Führich.

Figure 6.4.

E. T. A. Hoffmann, double-portrait: Hoffmann as Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy (ca. 1809–13).

Figure 7.1.

Information flyer for Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio, 1914.

Figure 7.2.

Konstantin Vogak’s copy of typescript for the Love for Three Oranges divertissement, ca. 1913.

Figure 7.3.

Photo of the palace courtyard, act II, scene 2, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre, 1921.

Figure 7.4.

Alexander Rykov, costume design for “Harlequin, Dealer of Slapstick Blows.” Borodinskaia Street Studio, 1915.

Figure 7.5.

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, costume design for “proscenium” [forestage] servants, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky, New York City Opera Company, 1949.

Illustrations | xv Figure 8.1.

Iuri Bondi, design for the front cover of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto, no. 1 (1914).

Figure 8.2.

Sergei Eisenstein, scene design for Tieck’s Puss in Boots, State Higher Theatre [Directing] Workshops, 1921.

Figure 9.1.

Alexander Benois, scene design for the ballet Petrushka, 1911.

Figure 9.2.

Nikolai Sapunov, mystical gathering. Design for the production of Alexander Blok’s Balaganchik (The Little Fairground Booth), directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold at the V. F. Komissarzhevskaia Drama Theatre, St. Petersburg, 1906.

Figure 9.3.

Nikolai Ulianov, Vsevolod Meyerhold in the role of Pierrot in Alexander Blok’s Balaganchik, V. F. Komissarzhevskaia Drama Theatre, St. Petersburg, 1906.

Figure 9.4.

Boris Grigoriev. Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold with an archer from the Borodinskaia Street Studio pantomime “The Hunt,” 1916.

Figure 9.5.

Group biomechanics exercise “Bow and Arrow.” Meyerhold State Experimental Theatre Workshops (GEKTEMAS), Moscow, 1927.

Figure 9.6.

Act III, dance of the lads, close-up. Scene from The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand Crommelynck, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, State Meyerhold Theatre (GosTIM), photo from 1928 remount.

Figure 10.1.

Konstantin Miklashevsky around the time his book was first published.

Figure 10.2. Photo from Martha the Pious or the Holy Woman in Love, directed by Miklashevsky at the Antique Theatre, 1911. Figure 10.3.

Title page of the French edition of Miklashevsky’s book (under the pseudonym Constant Mic).

Figure 11.1.

Caricature of Vladimir Soloviev by N. Radlov (Sergei Radlov’s brother), 1924.

Figure 12.1.

Photo of Prince Tartaglia’s bedroom, act II, scene 1, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre, 1921.

xvi | Illustrations Figure 12.2. Boris Anisfeld. Courtyard of the royal palace. Design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921. Figure 13.1.

Boris Kustodiev. Balagany (fairground booths), 1917.

Figure 16.1.

Boris Anisfeld. Self-portrait, 1910.

Figure 16.2. Photo of the royal palace interior, act I, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre, 1921. Figure 16.3.

Photo of Creonta’s castle courtyard, act III, scene 2, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre, 1921.

Figure 16.4. Photo of the desert, act III, scene 3, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre, 1921. Figure 16.5.

Boris Anisfeld. Pantalone, the King, and the doctors. Design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921.

Figure 16.6. Boris Anisfeld. Truffaldino and Tartaglia in the room of the sick Prince, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921. Figure 16.7.

Boris Anisfeld. Inside the royal palace, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921.

Figure 16.8. Boris Anisfeld. Prince Tartaglia and Truffaldino (center) in Creonta’s castle courtyard, with the Cook in the castle doorway (right). The castle of the sorceress, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, 1921. Figure 16.9. Boris Anisfeld, costume design for the Cook, Love for Three Oranges, 1921. Figure 16.10. Alexander Khvostenko-Khvostov, costume design for Fata Morgana. Love for Three Oranges, 1926 (production unrealized). Figure 16.11. Isaac Rabinovich, costume design for a doctor. Love for Three Oranges, directed by A. D. Dikii, State Academic Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, 1927. Figure 16.12. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, costume design for Smeraldina, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky, New York City Opera Company, 1949.

Illustrations | xvii Figure 17.1.

Vladimir Dmitriev, design for act II, scenes 1–2 (Prince’s bedroom and palace courtyard festivities scenes). Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad, 1926.

Figure 17.2.

Photo of the King’s palace, act I, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad, 1926.

Figure 17.3.

Photo of act II, scene 2: the festivities in the royal palace courtyard. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad, 1926.

Figure 17.4.

Photo of act III, scene 1: Wizard Celio summoning Farfarello and his devils. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad, 1926.

Figure 17.5.

Vladimir Dmitriev, design for the second musical interlude curtain. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad, 1926.

Figure 17.6.

Vladimir Dmitriev, design for act III, scene 2. Creonta’s castle. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad, 1926.

Acknowledgments

W

hen we began this book about a hypochondriac prince whose illness can be cured only with laughter, we never dreamed we would be completing it during a global pandemic. Our deepest thanks to all those whose kindness, cheer—and laughter—brought us joy in the face of a world that transformed more quickly than any of us could have imagined. To our authors—whose brilliance, rigor, good humor, and timely diligence (despite quarantines and broken bones) kept the book on schedule for its centenary-year release—and coeditors, for their adventurous spirit, infectious enthusiasm, and many citrus-themed jokes. To our valued colleagues at Indiana University Press, especially our peer reviewers; acquisitions editor Allison Blair Chaplin and the press staff; and series editors Simon Morrison and Peter Schmelz, both brilliant musicologists whose expertise and cheerful advocacy enriched this project in many ways. To the archives and museums that welcomed us into their reading rooms and sent us images despite various unexpected circumstances, including a fire (at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) and a flood (at the Marciana National Library in Venice), that made us value even more the ephemeral fragility of the extraordinary sources on which this study builds. This book could never have been written without the assistance of the staff at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Ekaterina Gunashvili, Ksenia Demyanenko, Natalya Strizhkova, and Larissa Krasavina), the Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music (Alexandra Shtarkman, Tatiana Vlasova, Varvara Ushakova, Elena Fedosova, Oksana Skliarova, Marina Litiushkina, and the staff at the Chaliapin flat), the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum (especially Natalya Mashechkina), the Marciana National Library of Venice (particularly Susy Marcon), the Casa Goldoni Theatre Studies Library (especially Anna Bogo), the Harvard Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Chicago History Museum. Dassia N. Posner’s role in this book’s conception and creation was supported by an American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship and a Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)-ACLS residency at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She is warmly in­ debted to Jill Mannor, Tom Burke, Wendy Wall, Sarah Dimick, Andrew Britt, and

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xx | Acknowledgments

Megan Skord, who provided time, discussion, and space for the book’s individual and collaborative work. Kevin Bartig’s contribution to this book was supported at Michigan State University by a generous Humanities and Arts Research Program grant. We deeply appreciate the kindness of the descendants of some of this book’s central figures: Charles Chatfield-Taylor sent us Three Oranges costume designs by his grandfather Boris Anisfeld; Anna Vagin provided materials from her family collection on her grandfather Konstantin Vogak; and Serge Prokofiev Jr. shared photos of his father in Chicago in 1921. Many others supported this project in myriad ways. Sincere thanks to Northwestern colleagues Elizabeth W. Son; Mary Poole; Inna Naroditskaya; Nina Gourianovna; Tracy C. Davis; and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Research Group at Northwestern. Jessica Thebus lent a director’s eye to the divertissement translation, and Linda Gates brought a voice teacher’s ear to the fiaba’s rhyming verse. Much appreciation to Natasha Bregel, who worked on an early draft of the divertissement translation, and to Elena Kamenskaia, Domenico Pietropaolo, Ted Emery, and Vadim Shcherbakov for answering tricky translation questions. Hillary Coustan’s expertise on legal terms made our translations much funnier; Elena Specht did beautiful work setting the musical examples; and Olga Sugrobova-Roth and Myroslava Mudrak kindly helped with some difficult-to-find images. Harlow Robinson listened generously and intently to ideas about this book from its earliest conception. Special thanks to the graduate students who assisted on various facets of this project: at Northwestern, Jessica Hinds-Bond, David Calder, Matthew Randle-Bent, and Heather Grimm; and, in Moscow, Anastasia Hahalkina. Any errors in the book are the editors’ own. A special shout-out to Maria De Simone, who grew from a research assistant to this book’s Associate Editor. We hope that our work together can provide a model for similar scholarly partnerships, particularly in terms of how professors credit graduate student collaborators. Finally, love and gratitude to our families and partners for their ideas, encouragement, patience, and, through it all, laughter.

Preface How Not to Die Laughing in a Lethal Time Caryl Emerson

T

his book sets itself a counterintuitive task: to provide, through sober scholarly reconstruction, the texture and feel of a multifaceted, many-layered joke. As the reader shall see, the joke is on many things: established genres, theatrical rivals, love stories, tragic stories, mindless box office hits, the stale stage cliché, and the hopelessly unfunny real world beyond the stage. It stretches over several centuries and cultures. But even a portable, panhuman joke depends on a particular responsive context. Jokes must make us laugh, or at least smile. Thus, timing is crucial—and it helps if a joke peaks on an “aha!” moment. Theorists of creativity such as Arthur Koestler have argued for continuity between a burst of laughter and a burst of insight or inspiration; the pleasure of such moments, Koestler claims, is felt not only as a release of pressure but also as a cognitive boost and explosion of new potential.1 Each member of our creative triad—Gozzi, Meyerhold, and Prokofiev— pursues novelty and audience satisfaction through spontaneous, nonscripted humor and through its parody. But they are aware that a joke can fail if the audience knows too securely what is coming or, conversely, has no clue what’s being laughed at. Because jokes are context-bound and topical, they are wonderfully well handled by improvisation. If a joke falls flat, however—if no one gets it, or if people are offended by it—then matters can end up worse, more morose and alienated than ever. At the center of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, which premiered in Chicago one hundred years ago, is that old story of the agelast, “the person who cannot laugh.” At stake is the life of the melancholic Prince Tartaglia, literally dying from being fed a diet of stale, boring verse. No stimulus is strong enough to induce the Prince to forget his ailments and take up an interest in the world—until an unexpected visual joke suddenly injects energy and desire into his life and its dismal stalled plot. But it’s not only the Prince who laughs. Every stock situation and character type is ridiculed, on both sides of

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xxii | Preface

the footlights: the composer and librettist for presuming to plan the action, the actors for taking the plot seriously, the audience for expecting certain outcomes of the action. Following Meyerhold, Prokofiev heightens audience alertness, and further complicates any easy understanding of the story, by scripting in self-referential choruses lurking in the wings and towers. Each of these groups of interventionist onstage spectators is armed with its own weapon. The Tragedians wield umbrellas, the Comedians whips, the lovestruck Lyricals romantic green boughs. (The Empty Heads are also emptyhanded.) As soon as any predictable plot-event happens, it is cheered by its appropriate chorus and, if possible, sabotaged by the others. Only the Eccentrics, the authorial function equipped with shovels, do anything to help the story along. This “meta–commedia dell’arte” construction relieves the reallife audience of any need to formulate an opinion or make sense of events. All they need do is watch. Plot suspense is outsourced to the improvisation of master actors, canned laughter in the wings, and pure present-tense surprise. Just as there is deep history and the deep state, so is there a deep artistic plot. As the authors in this volume luxuriantly illustrate, the three-oranges fable is very deep indeed. It began as an Italian folk tale; matured into an ­eighteenth-century didactic fiaba (theatrical fairy-tale) deployed by the Venetian count Carlo Gozzi against his more “realist” rivals; was developed creatively by Vsevolod Meyerhold, in Saint Petersburg on the eve of the Great War, into a surreal divertissement; and then operatized in the New World by Sergei Prokofiev. It is possibly the most self-aware opera ever composed. In volume 4 of his magisterial Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin opens chapter 55, “Lost—or Rejected—Illusions,” on the “cynical modernism born of postwar disillusion.”2 His examples are both from 1921: Pirandello’s metaplay Six Characters in Search of an Author and Prokofiev’s meta-opera Love for Three Oranges. Although the play is painfully moral and the opera “silly simplicity itself,” what they share is a pervasive irony, disdain for illusionist (i.e., “realistic”) theatre and a mockery of all pretense to authoritative authoring. The centuries-old Oranges plot, Taruskin writes, became “with every telling . . . further encrusted with theatrical artifice and esthetic doctrine, so that by the time Prokofieff was through with it, The Love for Three Oranges was the epitome of ‘art about art,’ almost more Pirandellian that Pirandello.”3 This preface will not repeat any part of that rich story, nor compromise its telling with any spoilers. Instead, I elaborate on one episode only: that pivotal moment, in all variants of the plot, when the agelast Prince breaks into uncontrollable laughter—and teams up for life with Truffaldino, the spirit of improvisation, the “man who knows how to laugh.” Laughter is a

Preface | xxiii

­ echanism—literally, a wake-up call—for a frozen character. What role m do jokes and laughter play in self-reflective staged art, and how might they enhance—perhaps even save—lives? Bits of the Three Oranges cast and dramatic plot will be flagged, or foregrounded, when they suggest answers to that question. Conventionally, there are three reasons why we laugh (if we ignore physiological or chemical causes, e.g., tickling or nitrous oxide). The first was put forward by the ancients: we laugh because we feel superior. Aristotle believed that we laugh at people who are “worse than we are.” Thomas Hobbes, for whom rivalry and a struggle over resources comprised the normal human condition, later refined Aristotle’s idea by pointedly defining laughter in relation to power; laughter is a kind of “sudden glory,” a burst of self-esteem that we feel on contemplating the infirmity and degradation of others. The witches in our fairy-tale Oranges plot laugh, or cackle, in this spirit, as do the treacherous Clarice and Leandro. The second explanation (held by some very famous philosophers: Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Bergson) is gentler and less hierarchical: we laugh when we are suddenly surprised by an incongruity or incompatibility, by something that visually does not fit or logically does not follow.4 This moment, too, has pride of place in the Three Oranges opera plot. The giantess cook Creonta (a cross-dressed bass) is on the verge of whacking the intruding Prince and Truffaldino with her monstrous ladle when she is suddenly distracted by a dainty red ribbon, a hilarious incongruity that permits the Prince to purloin the three oranges from her kitchen. An earlier unpredictable moment is even more enabling. The King and his attendant Pantalone first try to script a cure for Tartaglia, arranging all manner of grotesque court entertainment and amusing games. The Prince will have none of it. He moans and groans louder than ever. Only when an accident occurs—when the uninvited Fata Morgana unexpectedly slips and falls—is the Prince struck with laughter. There is more to his breaking out of chronic hypochondria than mere innocent surprise, however. Enter here a third reason for why we laugh, which is neither political nor cerebral but somatic—and perhaps even hydraulic. This third explanation begins not with an idea but with a reflex: we laugh out of the human need for relief and release from constraint. This need has a long and contested history. Laughter theorists often turn to Aristotle and his idea of catharsis to understand the relief of a laugh. The turn is tricky, how­ever, because Aristotelian catharsis applies to tragedy, not comedy. Can there be a comic equivalent to the purging of pity and fear—say, the purging of anger, envy, irritation, or deadly or paralyzing ennui? Western philosophy knows

xxiv | Preface

many earnest attempts to redirect laughter in wise and benevolent channels, from therapies of reconciliation and relaxation techniques to devices of the carnivalesque.5 But laughter in its social forms can be infectious and, like any infection, need not be ethically marked. Although laughter unites and soothes, it can also become more vicious, aggressive, envious, and intolerant as it spreads. There is no consensus on the content or moral purpose of comic catharsis. Many of the crucial laughing scenarios in a commedia dell’arte work like Love for Three Oranges are erotic while also neurotic, comic while also cheerfully punitive. To explore these dynamics, we need Sigmund Freud. Freud published his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905. Although largely taken up with verbal wit, Freud’s insights (along with others of a sexual nature proclaimed later by Freud and reinforced by folk tradi­ tion) are relevant to Prince Tartaglia and his moment of laughing arousal. The petulant, narcissistic Prince has been oppressed by dead clichéd verse when he needed living lazzi. Misdiagnosed by court doctors, he is on medications designed to numb the body. Thus infantilized and unsocialized, the Prince is fixated on his own moods and sensations; maturation will have to mean awareness of another’s body. The process starts when Truffaldino finally loses all patience, flings the worthless medicinal vials and cups out the window, and carries the howling Prince into the performances. But Tartaglia continues to scowl until the moment that Fata Morgana, disguised as a “caricatural little old lady,” suddenly “falls down, legs in the air.” In a hostile or overcontrolled environment, Freud writes, a well-timed joke can “evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible.”6 Thus it is with our Prince. In all three versions of the story, once he begins to laugh, “in­ stantly, he recovers from all his ailments.”7 But why is the healing accomplished on precisely this human material? In folk narratives, the prince and princess must find each other. Their sexuality is fertile and has a future; the quest is a serious one. But old women (e.g., the crone that Fata Morgana has morphed into) are routinely, repel­ lently comic—and the sight of an old woman’s privates, exposed to public view by an unexpected tumble with legs thrust upward, is irresistibly comic. The catatonic Prince responds by coming to life with a guffaw.8 But his mirth is short-lived. The witch knows her craft, and her curse turns him into a ser­ ious, other-directed, goal-driven lover. There will be no more laughter until the destined princess sits with him on the throne. But laughing is the first indispensable step toward freeing him for desire. It is curious and a bit sad that none of our three theories seems to take at face value—or even to take as a value—the possibility of laughing out of simple happiness or joy, the pleasure

Preface | xxv

a child takes at being alive, relishing a delicious sensation, comfortable in body and spirit. Freud, in particular, has trained us away from such innocent ideas. But Freud would have understood the rejuvenated psychic economy of our initially deadened, then revived Prince. Laughter loosens up and releases, providing “general relief through discharge,” but it cannot guide or direct. Because narratives need to go somewhere and should appear to be in pursuit of something, the laughter moves off the awakened hero—now tethered to his task—and onto the randomly cheering choruses in the towers. This broadening of sites for laughter serves another purpose for all three of our theatre innovators. Bursts of bodily laughter and other joyful physical gestures help emancipate theatre from the calculating intellect, from the self-important literary source, and from all pieties of passive watching. When surrounded by laughing choruses, it is almost impossible to hold back a grin. So far we have considered laughter as a property—or an energy—of the plot and its cast of characters. But in Prokofiev’s operatic Three Oranges (the only fully scripted version of the story, with a sustained production history), there is also laughter in the music itself. This musical irony is sophisticated without being at all subtle, a trait the music shares with the story line. As Simon Morrison observes in his “Notes on the Notes” in this book, the music is tonal but also not tonal, half in and half out of major and minor keys. The hub of the score is the interval of a tritone, a dissonant substitute for the classical interval of the perfect fifth that has a long history in Russian opera (consider the coronation bells in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov). Like our Prince in the desert, Prokofiev stumbles doggedly from one acoustic complex to another. This sense of aural wandering, of being unmoored or ungrounded, is compounded by the composer’s reliance on glissando passages, chromatic runs, and contrary motion. But this wholly unsettled music is also sparklingly madcap, with references to royal fanfares parodically appropriate for this recently awakened, still loony prince. Morrison, also a scholar of dance, notes drily that “the underlying rhythm evokes a tarantella, a dance pattern associated with the delirium caused by spider bites or curses from witches” (368, this book). * * * Tragedy is grim and sleek. It plays on our emotions, demanding our sympathy and serious investment. Comedy is more agile; it appeals to our intellect, rewarding improvisation and resilience, because it is invested in process rather than essence. One laughter theorist has suggested provocatively that “in the usual sense of the word, there is no meaning to comedy. Meaning is what comedy plays with.”9 There are many reasons—all discussed in this

xxvi | Preface

book—why commedia dell’arte as a theatrical form plays with meaning in ways equally convenient for Carlo Gozzi in eighteenth-century Venice and for Meyerhold and Prokofiev in early twentieth-century Petrograd and Chicago. Recall Richard Taruskin’s classification of the Three Oranges opera as a work of “cynical modernism born of disillusion.” This was indeed the condition of its birth. But how do we explain the opera’s enduring popularity after postwar disillusionment has run its course and cynical Modernism has become a cliché? Its Modernism can always be updated to present-day topical crises—a familiar strategy for refurbishing the classics. In the 2018 production of Die Liebe zu Drei Orangen at the Stuttgart State Opera, for example, we are meant to smile early in the playbill at the single-sentence plot summary: “In a dystopian world without water, a royal family struggles to survive.”10 But the Stuttgart opera director also included in the program an interview on the healing, liberating, empathetic effects of laughter—any laughter—in a communal context. He reinforced what the great Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp wrote about the comic: that both the positive and negative poles of humor—­joyful laughter and ridiculing laughter—are infectious and able to unite people, whereas cynical laughter is a lonely, individual affair.11 A postwar “cynical modernism” (Taruskin’s phrase) might well have motivated Pirandello and Prokofiev as individual creators, but individuals pass from the scene. The laughter built into their work will endure. One final laughter theorist (as it happens, another Russian) will set us up to appreciate the enduring popularity of Love for Three Oranges and its commedia dell’arte dramatic envelope. Drawing on the pool of explanations for laughter that we have surveyed (superiority, incompatibility, release and relief) but with modifications, Leonid Karasev published his Philosophy of Laughter in 1996.12 He begins by dividing laughter into two categories: laughter of the flesh (smekh ploti) and laughter of the mind (smekh uma). The laughing mind, or intelligence, is the more complex and is multilayered, resembling a mask. “Mind-laughter” always has a dark, unkind, potentially evil component. It acknowledges that the irrationally bad, the state of the world as we find it, is not our fault; it is always already out there, and our human duty is to develop means for coping with it. We do this through bursts of anger, stabs of bitterness, snorts of helplessness, grinning masks of spleen, but we can also mediate the bad though devices of irony and satire. Part of Karasev’s project is to question the long association in Russian folk etymology between those two rhyming words, laughter (smekh) and sin (grekh). The smekh/grekh rhyme resounds beneath his remark that “everything laughable carries inside itself a

Preface | xxvii

trace left by evil” (40). What does this mean? Part of the answer lies in laughter’s infamous “ambivalence,” so aptly illustrated in Prince Tartaglia’s unkind but liberating laugh at the bad witch, who then curses him with a quest. Karasev urges us not to be too easily satisfied with simple or static juxtapositions of good and evil in matters of humor. The issue is more dynamic. Laughter becomes a moral force “only in the process of opposing it to the evil pole” (56), which is to say there must always be a concrete context, an ad­ dressee, and an element of performative risk. We are most prone to “laughter of the mind” when we realize our own limitedness, helplessness, and impotence as agents to bring about either good or evil or to bring either moral aspect under our control. We must improvise the plot from the resources of the environment and from the strengths of our given type. The courage of the laughing person—its potential sinfulness, in the terms of that rhyming binary—­consists of a willingness not only to smile but to expose oneself by laughing out loud. A great watershed exists, Karasev insists, between ethical philosophers who respect the smile and those who respect the laugh (51–52). Smilers have long demonized the laughers, building on the fact that devils laugh loudly in our faces, whereas God is invisible, immeasurable, and accessible only privately. Jesus was content to smile. Open-hearted laughter, how­ ever, is audible, visible, self-advertising, and glued to the face—a public-square performance event. It must commune and communicate. Then Karasev offers his own theory: The true opposite of laughter, he argues, is not weeping, and not all those piously smiling saviors or saints, but rather shame. Shame (styd) is lonely and cold. The Russian word contains traces of the root stud/stuzh/styn, all signifying bitter cold or freezing wind that “fetters a human being,” “ices over his soul” (73). Laughter, by contrast, is unifying and warming. But they are sides of a single coin. The onset of both laughter and shame can feel like a blow (udar) or an explosion (vzryv) that wells up and seizes us utterly (a wave of laughter, a wave of shame). Blood rushes to the face; we are disoriented, at times even temporarily paralyzed. There are crossovers between the two states: when laughter goes on too long, we feel ashamed; when shame goes too deep, one recourse is to laugh. The big difference (other than that laughter is happy and shame usually excruciating) is that laughter is directed outward, spending itself in public, whereas shame is directed inward and wants to hide. Sharing a shameful act does not lessen its pain; sharing an act through laughter so often makes it better. It is easy to see why Karasev’s philosophy of laughter recommends itself to the commedia dell’arte stage. No one is expected to learn any lessons, only to wake up—or be allowed to escape. Those who survive seem to do so by accident. The Princess becomes a

xxviii | Preface

rat, the Prince almost marries a slave, the King condemns the traitors to death but when they slip away, the wedding goes forward as if they had never been. Memory dissolves, for we are in the bliss of a present-tense world. Among the many values marvelously absent from Love for Three Oranges is any sense of shame. In our era of deep meditation on inward flaws, this is the triumph of the openly physical, well-timed joke. And thus, it is a comedy for all seasons.

Notes 1. See Koestler, Act of Creation, esp. the Jester in chap. IV, “From Humour to Discovery,” 87–97. Koestler makes the case for the cognitive value of comedy; laughing when we “get” a joke and grinning when we solve a mental problem are comparably pleasurable reflexes. Thus, the indispensable triad of types for human productivity is the jester, the sage, and the artist. 2. Taruskin, Oxford History, 495. 3. Taruskin, 498. 4. Bergson’s argument in his essay “Laughter” (1900/1956, 63–64) lends itself well to the Modernist revival of commedia dell’arte: we laugh, Bergson writes, whenever we detect rigidity or automated movement in an organic body, when “something mechanical is encrusted on to something living.” The very genre of the Three Oranges story, with its stylized masks, exuberant gestures, and absurdly interventionist choruses, is a laughing zone in which the morose and introverted Prince can only be an alien, inexplicable presence. 5. George Meredith, in his Victorian treatise “An Essay on Comedy” (1877/1956), credits humor with softening effects that buffer us against loss: “the test of true comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter” (47). Norman N. Holland suggests that “comedy acts out a revolt against control”; Laughing, 90. Both are indebted to Kant’s view of laughter as the result of being pleasurably surprised by a collapse of logic—through word play, puns, trick answers, clever inversions, and other such unexpected mental turns. Spencer, following Kant, explained laughter as a sudden spree: we expected (or dreaded) something big, instead we got something small, and suddenly our burden is less and we have a surplus to spend. The global fame of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque—fearless, free from obligation, idle but energetic, clever and openended—builds on all these predecessors. 6. Freud, Jokes and their Relation, 103. At the end of his study, in his chapter on “Jokes as a Social Process,” Freud advances the hypothesis that “in laughter . . . the conditions are present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto been used for cathexis is allowed free discharge” (148). 7. Freud, 158. 8. Taruskin comments on this “emblematic moment” in his program notes for the San Francisco Opera production (summer 1995), albeit somewhat sanitized: “at the sight of Fata Morgana’s knobby knees and withered behind, Tartaglia goes into gales of laughter, represented in the music by a little set piece over an ostinato, and with the prince’s ‘ha-ha-ha-HAA’ an inevitable parody of the opening four notes of—need I say what?”; “From Fairy Tale,” 221. 9. Williams, Comic Practice/Comic Response, 55. 10. Playbill for Die Liebe zu drei Orangen, 12–13. In his interview (“Regisseur Axel Ranisch im Gespräch mit Ingo Gerlach über das Lachen und Die Liebe zu drei Orangen”), the director Axel Ranisch discusses the metaphysics of laughter. “I am convinced,” Ranisch remarks, “that

Preface | xxix nothing connects people as much as laughing together. A comedy is no fun if you watch it alone.” When queried about the Prince’s callous, destructive laughter when Fata Morgana slips and falls, Ranisch insists that any laughter, even that laughter, was a liberation and also “a sign of empathy, for we can only find something funny if we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.” He admitted to not knowing what Prokofiev might have been laughing at in 1921. 11. Propp, On the Comic and Laughter, 146. 12. Karasev, Filosofiia smekha. Further citations of this work are given in the text.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World (Russian orig. 1965), translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bergson, Henri. “Laughter” (1900). In Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher, 59–190. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1960. Holland, Norman N. Laughing: A Psychology of Humor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement (1790), section 54 on humor, translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Karasev, L. V. Filosofiia smekha. Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1996. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation: A Study of the Conscious and Unconscious in Science and Art. London: Dell, 1967. Meredith, George. “An Essay on Comedy” (1877). In Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher, 1–57. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. Playbill for Die Liebe zu drei Orangen, Staatsoper Stuttgart, 2018. Propp, Vladimir. On the Comic and Laughter, translated and edited by Jean-Patrick Debbèche and Paul Perron. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Spencer, Herbert. “The Physiology of Laughter.” In Vol. 2 of Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 452–66. New York: D. Appleton, 1904. Taruskin, Richard. “From Fairy Tale to Opera in Four Moves.” In Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music, 214–22. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ———. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 4, The Early Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Williams, Robert I. Comic Practice/Comic Response. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.

T H R E E L OV E S for T H R E E OR A NGE S

Introduction

Three Theatrical Oranges On December 30, 1921, Chicago audiences were treated to the premiere of a new opera, the conventions of which were so unfamiliar that most reviewers had difficulty describing the experience. One referred to it as a “singing ballet.”1 Another termed it a “Christmas pantomime.”2 Several others called it a “burlesque.”3 The opera’s structure was equally astonishing. It had no arias and few hummable tunes. One disgruntled opera lover lamented that the composer, Sergei Prokofiev, “might well have loaded up a shotgun with several thousand notes of verying [sic] lengths and discharged them against the side of a blank wall,” concluding that “the music, I fear, is too much for this generation.”4 A dissenting critic effused that Prokofiev’s “hurdy-gurdy rhythms” had leaped “into a gaudy balloon” and “sail[ed] away in marvelous zig-zags.”5 Still another captured the sense of being bombarded with color and sound: “At last an opera which goes straight to the heart of its audience. . . . One hears with [the] eyes and sees with [the] ears.”6 The event? The world premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, with vivid designs by Boris Anisfeld, at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre (fig. 0.1). The story, simple though it was, was as unusual for the grand stage as it was for the music. Respectable theatergoers were startled that an opera should feature spittoons, upended old ladies, bellows-wielding devils, and, yes, oranges. But it was the opera’s framing devices that many were at the greatest loss to interpret. Competing onstage choruses battled one another for primacy, only to be shoveled offstage by a group of Eccentrics who commented on and even intervened in the story. One reviewer theorized that Prokofiev was ridiculing “all the audiences of the world” with these choruses, while another, who attended the single New York showing, puzzled, “Is it satire? Is it burlesque? If so, what does it satirize; what does it burlesque?”7 What was Prokofiev’s source material for this calculated confusion? Nearly a hundred reviews of the premiere claimed it was Count Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century fiaba (theatrical fairy tale), which premiered in Venice in 1761.8 When the fiaba was first published in 1772, it included Gozzi’s ­after-the-fact description of the premiere, along with inserted explanations of his satirical jabs at playwright competitors. But Prokofiev’s source was far

2  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

Figure 0.1. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). The Prince and Truffaldino pushing the oranges in the desert, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Gouache and watercolor, with touches of black fiber-tipped pen and graphite, over green and blue pastel and graphite, on off-white laid paper, 558 × 650 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.82. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles Chatfield-Taylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

closer to home. Three years earlier, Vsevolod Meyerhold gave the composer a copy of a 1913 theatrical “divertissement” that the director had written with two collaborators, Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev. It reimagined Gozzi’s fiaba as a play in scenario form, filled with stage directions and few scripted lines. This polemical work, Prokofiev’s direct source, first introduced the metatheatrical framing choruses that became so important to the opera. The authors of all three Three Oranges designed their unconventional works to be manifestos for a new theatre that celebrated audience responsiveness, imaginative freedom, juxtaposition, and, above all, innovation to be achieved by challenging dominant traditions of the past and present.

Introduction | 3

Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev is the first book to focus on the intertwined legacy of the Three Oranges fiaba, divertissement, and opera. Timed to mark the centenary of the world premiere of Prokofiev’s opera, this collection of essays and translations provides the first interdisciplinary analysis of the Three Oranges authors, their fairy-tale manifestos, and their theatrical revolutions.9 Together, the book’s authors reveal that these revolutions, the ripple effects of which are ubiquitous in modern theatre, can be understood fully only by examining their innovations together. Why, one might ask, does it matter if Prokofiev adapted Gozzi or Meyerhold, aside from correcting a longstanding attribution error? What is to be gained from a close investigation of Prokofiev’s sources—or Meyerhold’s or Gozzi’s? Exploring answers to these questions provokes new, broader questions: How are these three pieces mutually illuminating? What does it mean for an actor-centric improvisatory scenario to become an opera? What formal traces remain in later versions of a work? To what degree are both continuity and change fundamental to the creation process? How do these three works— two of which contain almost no dialogue, the other of which has no arias— provide opportunities to rethink what is primary in stage performance? What formal innovations do we mistake as shapelessness simply because their conventions are unfamiliar? In disciplines that have long emphasized plot, motif, and metaphor, how do we become more adept readers of structural thinking, spatial organization, and the performer–audience relationship? What is to be gained by challenging the false binary of intellect versus fantasy? And what paradigms might be shifted by tracing the threads of theatricalist genealogies that span centuries? These questions shape this book’s complex, multifaceted view of these Oranges and their creators. Theatre is an act of collective creation, despite our peculiar instinct to give solo credit to playwrights, composers, or directors. Gozzi’s fiaba could never have existed without Antonio Sacchi’s troupe of actors. Meyerhold would not have been able to pioneer a new theatre without his artist, musician, and historian collaborators. And while Prokofiev composed the libretto and music for Three Oranges himself, in the process he transposed Meyerhold’s playful, audience-awakening innovations to the opera stage. As this book reveals, how each innovator adapted the plots of these jubilant fairy-tale manifestos was beside the point. Gozzi’s precise careening between immersion in and commentary on his Three Oranges premiere fueled the philosophical structure of Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s very different divertissement. And Meyerhold’s formal devices, his blueprint in Three Oranges for a theatre to be completed by all of a production’s creators together,

4  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

laid the breadcrumbs for the improvisatory, irreverent, and overt celebration of the artist, Prokofiev, in the opera. An important aspect of this opera’s legacy is a lingering sense of ambivalence about its initial success, in part because responses to it were extreme and varied.10 One hundred years on, this book suggests that we view the opera’s first production not in the light of financial gain or universal appeal but of a theatrical philosophy encapsulated in Prokofiev’s source. Meyerhold viewed intense disagreement as the most important marker of a production’s success because it meant that audiences were unable to remain passive.11 Similarly, the disagreement in that first Chicago audience shows that viewers were activated when confronted by the opera’s unfamiliar and overturned rules. Indeed, each of the Three Oranges creators designed their fairy-tale manifestos to provoke, not to universally please. Change—even delightful change—is never an entirely comfortable thing. Yet, as each Orange also reveals, live performance has the greatest potential to thrill when it is unpredictable. —Dassia N. Posner

Gozzi On the morning of December 11, 2003, a boat traversed the Venetian lagoon and unloaded four large boxes coming from Visinale, a small town near Pordenone, at the dock of Marciana National Library. In these boxes, among three centuries’ worth of Gozzi family documents, librarians discovered a number of literary writings by Count Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) (fig. 0.2). The impressive number of unpublished theatre works in what has since become known as Fondo Gozzi (Gozzi Collection) challenged the long-accepted image of Gozzi as a sometime amateur playwright, revealing his close work with Venetian actors and prolific activity as a writer of plays, poetry, literary essays, and political pamphlets.12 In the mid–eighteenth century, when Italians still considered the acting profession the equivalent of low-class craftsmanship, Gozzi challenged social and professional conventions and, as his archive has revealed, was as much a “man of the theatre” as he was a “man of letters.”13 Gozzi began his writing career as one of the leaders of the most reactionary branch of the Venetian Granelleschi Academy, a cohort of young, male literary and social critics who were hostile to ideological innovation and strenuously defensive of their class privilege.14 After Gozzi was introduced in the late 1740s to Antonio Sacchi, an acclaimed commedia dell’arte actor-manager,15 the Venetian count began developing his academic polemics into a concrete agenda. His aim was to revive commedia dell’arte, a partly

Introduction | 5

Figure 0.2. Antonio Bertoldi, portrait of Carlo Gozzi. Frontispiece to Opere del Co: Carlo Gozzi v. 1 (Venice: Il Colombani, 1772). Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 852.1G7491 I, Columbia University in the City of New York. Courtesy of HathiTrust: https://hdl.handle.net/2027 /nnc1.0038978024.

improvised, masked theatre tradition that had flourished in Renaissance Italy but was losing favor with Venetian eighteenth-century audiences.16 Gozzi had already found himself in disagreement with new trends in playwriting. In his Granelleschi writings and early unstaged plays, he targeted Carlo Goldoni (1707–93) and Abbot Pietro Chiari (1711–85), two Venetian rival playwrights.17 In particular, Gozzi attacked Goldoni and Chiari for popularizing Frenchderived egalitarian ideologies, excusing immorality, and justifying what he saw as the dangerous rise of the middle class.18 The Love of Three Oranges (L’amore delle tre melarance) was the first of ten fiabe that Gozzi wrote for Sacchi’s troupe to polemicize with Goldoni and Chiari. It tells the story of Tartaglia, a prince dying of hypochondria brought on by the bad Martellian verse of Goldoni and Chiari, who are satirically represented in the play by Celio the Wizard and Fata (fairy) Morgana.19 After being healed

6  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

by laughter, the prince is cursed to fall in love with three oranges, after which various magical adventures ensue. When the production premiered at the San Samuele Theatre on January 25, 1761, Venice had twenty theatres for a population of 135,000, a higher ratio than any other European capital.20 In such a competitive context, a unique style was crucial. Each season, playwrights signed contracts for exclusive service to one impresario, who expected as many as sixteen plays a year.21 Company managers also held playwrights responsible both for a theatre’s profits or losses and setting stylistic standards to individualize their houses. Battling against Goldoni’s comedies of character and Chiari’s grandiose tragedies, Three Oranges transposed Gozzi’s fight for theatre reform from the Granelle­ schi Academy to the San Samuele Theatre. The production introduced a new option to Venetian drama: “a poetic, allegorical, reasoned, refined dramatic genre” for the light entertainment of “the educated and uneducated alike,” as Gozzi later recalled.22 According to Gozzi, his new fantastical genre—partly scripted and partly improvised, amusing yet thought-provoking—helped Sacchi’s company revivify commedia’s traditional masks (tipi fissi) and recover from financial hardship. The benefits were mutual—having such accomplished actors as collaborators, Gozzi was able to experiment with formal innovations. Familiar commedia masks—Pantalone, Truffaldino, Tartaglia, and Smeraldina—provided grotesque comic relief while also functioning as allegorical social reviewers. Similarly, the fairy-tale setting, in conjunction with the work of Sacchi’s talented stage machinist Domenico Fossati, an expert in “magic appearances” and “thunderous sounds,” allowed Gozzi to test spectacular effects.23 In exchange, Sacchi’s actors could continue to feature their own comic lazzi, as Gozzi’s work offered ample opportunity for improvisation and physic­ al comedy. In fact, as Gozzi himself effused, “the comical masks of improvised Comedy make exaggerated physical and facial expressions and lazzi that are so amusing that no ink can express or Poet surpass them” (62, this book). Unlike Gozzi’s later, scripted fiabe, The Love of Three Oranges was preserved neither as a play nor as a commedia canovaccio (scenario). Published by Paolo Colombani in 1772, eleven years after the premiere, as A Reflective Analysis of The Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” (Analisi riflessiva della fiaba L’amore delle tre melarance), the printed fiaba is a collage of prologue, plot summary, and short scripted parts in Martellian verse, amply interspersed with Gozzi’s memories from the premiere (fig. 0.3). These memories— or, as the Colombani title suggests, “reflective analyses”—include descriptions of mise-en-scène, audience reactions, and Gozzi’s explanations of his formal experiments. Through this latter self-referential commentary, Gozzi revealed

Figure 0.3. Draft page from The Love of Three Oranges prologue, with excerpt from Fata Morgana’s curse. Fondo Gozzi, “Prologhi e Congedi Teatrali,” box 3, folder 3, p. 1-2. Courtesy of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MIBACT) Marciana National Library, Venice. Reproduction prohibited.

8  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

the allegorical meanings of a seemingly trivial fairy tale, meanings he deployed to satirize his adversaries. Gozzi’s recollections also report on the success of actor improvisations, particularly by Sacchi (Truffaldino), Agostino Fiorilli (Prince Tartaglia), and Cesare Darbes (Pantalone), and of well-known lazzi that audiences loved. Soon after Three Oranges first opened, one of Gozzi’s Granelleschi colleagues, Patriarchi, contradicted the only extant review of the premiere, penned by Gozzi’s brother Gasparo. “The actors of the San Samuele are the authors,” Patriarchi wrote, “although I can tell you that some incidents and episodes have been stitched to it by C. Carlo Gozzi to annoy Goldoni and Chiari.”24 In his review, Gasparo had kept the playwright’s identity secret, asserting only that the play was authored by an individual who used literary sources for allegorical ends.25 Conversely, Patriarchi revealed the author’s name but downplayed Gozzi’s authorial role.26 Until the opening of the Fondo Gozzi, experts never questioned Gozzi’s own version of the story, according to which his associations with the working-class Venetian theatre community were limited to “gifting his plays to the actors.”27 Italian theatre scholars now agree that Gozzi’s fiabe and original take on commedia were a product of his close collaboration with Sacchi and his accomplished improvisers.28 Moreover, Gozzi’s playwriting activity was integral to a production process that was still a devised, collaborative operation in eighteenth-century Venice. Gozzi’s repertoire is more multidimensional and complex than many have assumed, and it challenges the assumption that Goldoni’s theatre reform prompted a rapid transition from improvised comedy to fully scripted dramas.29 As Alberto Beniscelli shows in his contribution to this book, playwrights and actors who together responded to varied factors shaping their work—the commercialization of theatres, dramatic trends from France and Spain, and the birth of a dramatic print industry—orchestrated this transition. The Reflective Analysis’s collage of sources, cultural references, and selfcommentary—Gozzi’s “cultural pastiche,” in Natalya Baldyga’s definition (see ch. 6 in this book)—proliferated in many other contexts. Gozzi’s reforms inspired a wave of innovation, for instance, in German Romantic literature, theatre, and opera.30 One hundred and fifty years after the San Samuele premiere, a new Russian version of Three Oranges by three self-proclaimed Eccentrics reconceived Gozzi’s written self-referential frame as an entire metatheatrical world that laid bare the theatre’s formal elements while newly engaging the audience’s creative imagination. —Maria De Simone

Introduction | 9

Meyerhold In 1913, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) (fig. 0.4) and two collaborators, Konstantin Vogak (1887–1938) and Vladimir Soloviev (1888–1941), wrote a new theatrical version of Gozzi’s fiaba. Love for Three Oranges (Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam) follows Gozzi’s plot but replaces reflective analysis with new formal innovations. This “divertissement” became the first Russian publication of a Gozzi-inspired play when it appeared in 1914 in the first issue of the periodical Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto.31, 32 Although commedia had already taken Russia by storm, Gozzi remained little known outside Meyerhold’s circle, in part because his work had never previously been translated into Russian.33 The Three Oranges divertissement, journal, and Meyerhold’s related acting studio, the Borodinskaia Street Studio (1913–17) became a triangle of ­intertwined theatrical practice that together marked a critical moment in Meyerhold’s directorial career. Although Meyerhold was already a prominent director of high-profile productions at Saint Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky and Mariinsky Theatres, the Three Oranges divertissement, journal, and studio marked a transition from staging his more experimental work in small, afterhours venues to founding a studio that would train actors for an entirely new theatre. Meyerhold had launched his theatre career in 1897 at Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). His self-aware acting was at odds with the MAT’s atmospheric reproductions of everyday life, however, and he was pushed out in 1903. After Meyerhold mounted more than one hundred rapid-fire premieres in the provinces, Russian diva Vera Komissarzhevskaia hired him to direct at her theatre, where he played with fourth-wall ruptures, a shallow forestage, and a sculptural approach to actor movement. After two seasons, Komissarzhevskaia fired Meyerhold, frustrated that he seemed more interested in formal experimentation than in the creative contributions of actors. In 1908, Meyerhold was hired as director and actor at the Saint Petersburg Imperial Theatres, where he staged dramas and operas over the next decade.34 Although he was able to transfer some discoveries he made in miniature theatres and cabarets to the Imperial stage, he struggled to innovate in traditionbound theatres attended by “silent, passionless” audiences.35 Thus, he began a double life—Imperial Theatre director by day, and experimental theatre pioneer by night. These experiments were to emphasize the joy of creation, to render the artist’s process visible through metatheatrical devices, to activate

10  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

Figure 0.4. Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Krasnaia Svetopis’, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Photo by Mikhail Leschinsky, 1923. Digital Images & Slides Collection d2017.05063, Harvard Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

audiences, to mine theatre history for kindred practices, to train actors as creator-improvisors, and to give structure to actor improvisations through methodically crafted form. For Meyerhold and his collaborators, Gozzi’s theatrical fairy tales were a shining example of how to realize such a theatre. Commedia—with its emphasis on physical humor, improvisation, flexible relationship of actor to mask, and audience interaction—provided practical techniques for the new actor.36 Gozzi, especially as refracted through German Romanticism, also gave form to directorial practice via self-referential commentary, exaggerated parody, and plays within plays. It was commedia’s inseparable pairings, ­however—improvisation and form, fiction and frame, fantasy and polemic, actor and director—that

Introduction | 11

became the most vital feature not only of Meyerhold’s commedia experiments but of his entire pedagogical and directorial practice. Meyerhold first mentions encountering Gozzi through art historian Pavel Muratov’s book Images of Italy (Obrazy Italii, 1911).37 That same year, Sergei Ignatov, a childhood friend and theatre historian who was writing the first Russian monograph on E. T. A. Hoffmann, mailed Meyerhold a copy of Gozzi’s fiabe.38 Meyerhold’s reply was effusive: “O, how much it has given me!”39 In their continued correspondence, he and Ignatov imagined founding a contemporary troupe “with the enthusiasm” of Sacchi.40 Meyerhold had already been experimenting with commedia themes for several years. His first appearance in a commedia-inspired role was as Pierrot in The Acrobats, a “little-known melodrama of circus life” by Franz von Schönthan.41 However, his experience directing Alexander Blok’s Little Fairground Booth (Balaganchik, premiered 1906) introduced him to the possibility of fusing commedia masks, poetic form, and the irony and self-­referentiality of German Romanticism.42 The early discoveries ignited by Balaganchik’s spark fueled more structured formal experiments, most notably Meyerhold’s 1910 staging of a commedia pantomime, again refracted through a German prism: Arthur Schnitzler’s The Veil of Pierrette (Der Schleier der Pierrette), with music by Ernö Dohnányi. In Meyerhold’s reimagined version, Columbine’s Veil, he paired commedia with the grotesque: abrupt tempo shifts, laughter paired with horror, and a nightmarish Pianist who conducted both Fate and a real wedding band. In 1911, Meyerhold began working with several like-minded commedia enthusiasts, eventually directing the group’s formalized outgrowth, the Fellowship of Actors, Writers, Artists, and Musicians. Their experiments took place in the Finnish seaside resort of Terijoki, where Meyerhold drafted his most famous prerevolutionary theoretical work, “The Fairground Booth” (balagan).43 In it, he called for playwrights to embrace the “intricate task of composing scenarios and writing prologues containing a schematic exposition of what the actors are about to perform,” in the vein of Gozzi’s scenarios for Sacchi, which “left the actors free to compose their own improvised monologues and dialogues.”44 On March 22, 1913, Meyerhold held an invited reading at his apartment of precisely this kind of scenario—one that “left the actors free to compose”— penned by three “Eccentrics”: that is, Meyerhold and two coauthors (fig. 0.5).45 As a graduate student at the University of Saint Petersburg, Soloviev, Meyerhold’s closest commedia collaborator (see fig. 11.1), researched commedia troupes at the Russian court. In 1912, the duo began working with Vogak, also a Saint Petersburg University graduate, whose excellent command of Italian made the Three Oranges divertissement possible (fig. 0.6).

12  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

Figure 0.5. Invitation to the reading of Love for Three Oranges at Meyerhold’s apartment, March 22, 1913. Vladimir Soloviev collection, GIK 11291/61 ORU 10831, St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

The reading of Three Oranges was accompanied by a dream to create a permanent studio for training actors in “the theatre of improvisation.” In September 1913, this studio finally opened; it eventually settled at 6 Borodinskaia Street in Saint Petersburg. It was a modest affair, with teachers who worked for free and a student body that ranged from a dozen students to more than one hundred, but it was indeed permeated “with the enthusiasm” of Sacchi.46 Classes ranged from commedia improvisation (taught by Soloviev) to voice and theatre history (taught by Vogak) to stage movement and the theatrical grotesque (taught by Meyerhold). As the studio gave only one public performance, its main public-facing component was the Love for Three Oranges journal (1914–16) that Meyerhold edited.47 This sophisticated miscellany of manifestos, plays, theatre history

Introduction | 13

Figure 0.6. Portrait of Konstantin Vogak. Photo courtesy of Anna Vagin.

resources, studio notes, poetry, and bitingly playful critiques, published over nine issues, satirically recorded the studio’s activities and aims. Odes to Hoffmann peppered the journal in the form of a dedicated column, whereas the journal’s structure was an homage to Gozzi in the sense that it presented reflect­ ive analysis—musing on one’s work and polemicizing with others—as fundamental to experimentation. Most articles served a dual purpose: to illuminate core principles and to provide practical material for studio participants.48 Like Gozzi’s fiaba, the Russian Three Oranges divertissement, published in the journal’s first issue, tells a two-part story. Although Gozzi’s plot remains intact, aside from a few simplifications, changes to the dramatis personae, the overall frame, and the form are substantial. As Meyerhold scholar Nikolai Volkov has noted, the Russian authors “used Gozzi’s scenario as only a base” for their version.49 By the time the final text was published, more than half of

14  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

its first eight (of twelve) scenes were new. Their primary aim was to rework Gozzi’s reflective record into a playable scenario for actors. In effect, they “directed” the piece by inserting formal structures that would give actors a rigorously theorized framework for improvisation. The divertissement authors’ most substantial (and controversial) innovation, however, was to replace Gozzi’s distinctive commentary with self-­ referential devices that supported their own aims. Four new scenes physicalized Gozzi’s verbal satire while providing practical material for acting classes. They also devised new framing characters: the authors themselves (as the three “Eccentrics”), competing choruses that represented theatrical trends, forestage servants, and two sets of characters (Fools and Extras) who interrupt and comment on the action. Last, the divertissement added concrete architectural elements to Gozzi’s general settings, including proscenium-flanking towers, theatres within theatres, and an “expansive forestage.”50 All were designed to augment the scenario’s framing devices and calls for direct audience contact. By terming their piece a divertissement, Meyerhold, Vogak, and Soloviev aligned it with a long tradition of popular, spectacle-infused incidental pieces accompanied by music.51 How the authors hoped that the genre’s historical association with spectacle, physical virtuosity, and music can be inferred from Meyerhold’s reflections on directing Soloviev’s harlequinade Harlequin the Marriage Broker (Arlekin, khodatai svadeb, 1911, 1912):52 More than any other dramatic form, the pantomime is conducive to the revival of the art of improvisation. In the pantomime, the actor is given the general outline of the plot and in the intervals between the various moments he is free to act ex improviso. However, the actor’s freedom is only relative because he is subject to the discipline of the musical score. The actor in a harlequinade needs to possess an acute sense of rhythm, plus great agility and self-control. He must develop the equilibrist skills of an acrobat, because only an acrobat can master the problems posed by the grotesque style inherent in the fundamental conception of the harlequinade.53

This description encapsulates the purpose of Three Oranges: to create theatre in which the virtuosic actor freely improvises within the temporal structure of music and, I would add, the spatial structure of mise-en-scène.54 From the start, the piece was written to be set to music—a fact that likely made the work appealing to Prokofiev. Early on, Meyerhold and Soloviev discussed possible composers for the divertissement, which they hoped to stage at home in Saint Petersburg and, judging by plans for German and French translations, abroad.55 These plans remained unrealized, as did a production at the Borodinskaia Street Studio, although Soloviev’s students worked on a classroom staging of the second interlude.56

Introduction | 15

World War I curtailed activities at the Borodinskaia Street Studio, but experimentation continued despite the conscriptions of students and collaborators, the emigrations of others, Vogak included, and through the paper shortage that finally forced Meyerhold’s journal to fold in 1916.57 Although the studio also closed in 1917, Meyerhold’s commedia-infused philosophy of the actor-improvisor continued long past World War I, the two Russian revolutions, and the Russian Civil War, although he was, famously, to introduce a new vocabulary to describe this work, one of “reflex” and “biomechanics.” The Russian fascination with Gozzi continued for the rest of the century, though with a prolonged interruption: Meyerhold became one of the most prominent victims of Stalin’s purges when the director was accused of theatrical “formalism,” arrested (1939), executed (1940), and erased for more than a decade.58 In 1918, when Meyerhold no longer had a studio or a theatre of his own, when the outcome of the civil war that raged around him remained uncertain, he gave a copy of the first issue of his journal to Prokofiev, with a suggestion that he compose an opera based on the divertissement. Meyerhold clearly hoped the suggestion would lead to a collaboration. As Julia Galanina’s essay in this book details, when the opera was first produced in the Soviet Union in 1926, Meyerhold and Soloviev were dismayed to learn that Prokofiev had followed Meyerhold’s suggestion without, it seems, understanding the significance of his invisible Russian collaborators’ innovations and without acknowledging them as his source. —Dassia N. Posner

Prokofiev Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) (fig. 0.7) and Meyerhold first met October 1, 1916, at an informal gathering at the Saint Petersburg apartment of conductor Albert Coates. The attraction of the evening was Prokofiev’s first completed opera, The Gambler (Igrok), a four-act setting of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella. If we trust the account in Prokofiev’s diary, Meyerhold was enthralled when Prokofiev played through the work on Coates’s piano. “You cannot know yourself what you have created,” he exclaimed, “it will overturn the entire art of opera.”59 The respect was mutual: Prokofiev judged Meyerhold to be “a gifted director with enormous powers of imagination.”60 Nevertheless, the meeting of these two minds was ill-timed. Meyerhold worked to get The Gambler staged at the Mariinsky Theatre, but the disruptions of revolutions and war thwarted Meyerhold’s plans and convinced Prokofiev to seek his fortunes in the United States and Western Europe. The composer departed on a foreign tour that grew to an eighteen-year sojourn. During Prokofiev’s absence, Meyerhold’s efforts to stage The Gambler failed, as did his attempt

Figure 0.7. Sergei Prokofiev in front of the Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, 1921. DN-0073666, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum. © Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction | 17

to mount Prokofiev’s Constructivist ballet The Steel Step (Le Pas d’Acier).61 When a potent mix of nostalgia and lucrative commissions drew Prokofiev back to Russia in 1936, he renewed his association with Meyerhold, but the advent of the Great Terror and the concomitant chill in cultural politics meant Meyerhold was increasingly embattled. Prokofiev dashed off incidental music for Meyerhold’s staging of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, but the project failed under political pressure.62 At the time of Meyerhold’s 1939 arrest, the director was organizing a mass spectacle on Red Square using Prokofiev’s music and preparing a production of the composer’s first Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko.63 He remained imprisoned as the mass spectacle went on without him, and he did not live to see the opera’s premiere. In a sense, Love for Three Oranges was Meyerhold and Prokofiev’s most successful collaboration.64 Discussing The Gambler’s prospects with the director in April 1918, Prokofiev mentioned his “desire to find an effervescent subject for an opera.”65 He found Meyerhold’s answer, the Three Oranges divertissement, “wonderful.”66 When Prokofiev departed six days later on the journey that would eventually bring him to New York, Meyerhold’s gift was stowed in his luggage.67 This gift might not have become the Three Oranges opera as quickly had it not been for a chance meeting with Cleofonte Campanini, head of the Chicago Opera Association, scarcely three weeks after Prokofiev’s New York arrival.68 Campanini’s promise to stage The Gambler lured the composer to Chicago for discussions in December 1918, but—largely because the full opera score remained in Russia—Prokofiev returned to New York having agreed to compose a new opera from the divertissement Mey­ erhold gave him. He harbored some doubts about the work’s seeming lack of topicality, but he was convinced by Campanini’s attention and generous contract terms.69 The subsequent history of Three Oranges—rapid-fire composition followed by a stalled production, legal wrangling, temporary cancellation, and finally a successful premiere—has been amply detailed by ­Prokofiev’s biographers.70 A critical figure in this story was the soprano Mary Garden, who headed the Chicago Opera Association following Campanini’s untimely death. Her tenure was brief thanks to her profligate spending, but her support meant that Three Oranges finally went on as originally planned— and without the logistical stops and starts, lack of support, and bureaucratic meddling that would plague Prokofiev’s six other completed operas, only three of which made it to the stage during his lifetime.71 Three Oranges was, in fact, the only unequivocal operatic success Prokofiev experienced. In the decade after its Chicago and New York premieres, productions followed in Cologne (1924), Berlin (1926), Leningrad (1926), and Moscow (1927) and

18  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

Figure 0.8. Edouard Cotreuil, caricature of Sergei Prokofiev rehearsing Love for Three Oranges at the Auditorium Theatre. Chicago Tribune (30 December 1921): 7.

further stagings were considered for Cincinnati, Belgrade, Kharkiv, Mainz, Paris, Vienna, and Zagreb.72 Today—one hundred years on—Three Oranges is one of the few twentieth-century operas to have achieved repertory status. Although critics at the premiere remained divided, the work’s popular success was immediate.73 The four-act show about the hypochondriac prince and his princess-in-an-orange charmed its first audiences, and the brilliantly colorful sets designed by Boris Anisfeld (1878–1973) gave the eye as much as Prokofiev offered the ear.74 Following the world premiere, Prokofiev

Introduction | 19

crowed in a letter to conductor and fellow expatriate Serge Koussevitzky that the “very agreeable” Americans had given “such ovations that one couldn’t hope for better. In general, ‘Oranges’ is declared the highlight of the Chicago season.”75 Challenged by unfamiliar style and form, the critics remained unmoved. Edward Moore’s quip about Prokofiev’s musical shotgun, cited at this introduction’s opening, has dressed up many accounts of the opera over the past century, but it says as much about Three Oranges as it does about the conservative, bel canto–laden diet the Chicago Opera Association fed its critics and patrons. Of the thirty-three operas produced during the 1920–21 season, for example, all but two were by Italian and French composers whose careers began in the nineteenth century (Puccini and Verdi alone accounted for almost a dozen of the works).76 By 1921, in other words, the twentieth century had yet to arrive inside Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre, and it would be far more surprising had Moore and like-minded colleagues commended the quirky offering of a thirty-year-old hailing from, of all places, Bolshevik Russia.77 Moreover, the Chicago Opera Association had never staged a Russian opera and had commissioned only a handful of new works. Three Oranges was bound to be under the microscope, its critics hyperaware of the enormous cost—and, therefore, enormous risk—of mounting a work in “ultra-modern” style.78 Yet it was not criticisms of the musical style that stuck in Prokofiev’s memory but rather critique of the work’s plot and framing. In his autobiography, he chided those who “tried to figure out whom I was making fun of, the audience, Gozzi, operatic form, or those who can’t laugh. They found in ‘Oranges’ ridicule, challenges, and grotesque, while all I did was write a cheerful show.”79 What was so uncommon about Three Oranges? Concerning musical style, the complaint was a seeming lack of melody, taken as a sign that Prokofiev was a wrecking ball aimed at opera’s revered lyricism. Had US critics been better versed in Russian opera, they might have sensed a kinship with the then fifty-year-old experimental style of Prokofiev’s compatriots Modest Musorgsky and Alexander Dargomyzhsky. Musorgsky (in his operatic adaptation of Gogol’s Marriage) and Dargomyzhsky (in his adaptation of Pushkin’s The Stone Guest) abandoned arias and their celebrated lyricism for a continuous recitative shaped by the stress patterns and cadence of the text, yielding what has been described as a “sung play.”80 In this respect, The Gambler and Three Oranges are cousins of Marriage and The Stone Guest. Prokofiev said as much in a 1921 interview, asserting that he did not “believe in arias and concert numbers being injected into the action of the music.”81 “It isn’t nat­ ural,” he continued, asking rhetorically, “Why should an individual stop and

20  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

say ‘Listen to my concert aria.’ It’s like putting lengthy and repeated speeches into a play.”82 Yet Prokofiev insisted on his own novelty, fueling the impression that he was an iconoclast rather than a purveyor of Russian tradition: “I loathe imitation,” he insisted. “I hate ordinary methods. Originality is my goal always.”83 This goal is evident in the opera’s stylistic eclecticism. Mixed with the overall anti–lyrical recitative style are Wagnerisms in act II that give way, for example, to quasi-impressionistic moments in act III that recall Claude Debussy’s vocal writing.84 At other moments, Rossini-like patter dots the score, the broad palette of references perhaps suggesting that this is an opera about opera. Finally, infectiously tuneful moments were part of the stylistic mix, just embedded in orchestral interludes rather than vocal numbers. The first two of these interludes—the opera’s famous March and its companion “Scherzo”—are scene-change music, heard between the first two scenes of act II and III, respectively. The third accompanies the comic “chase” of the last scene, in which the opera’s antagonists flee and disappear through a trap door. Prokofiev knew these catchy interludes would have widespread appeal, and he gathered them in a six-movement orchestral suite (op. 33bis) that remains one of his most popular works.85 Prokofiev’s most fundamental operatic innovation came by way of Meyerhold and his collaborators. In the divertissement, Prokofiev discovered the self-referentiality needed to make an opera refer to itself, to reveal its own artifice. Perhaps concerned about appearing original, Prokofiev insisted that his source was Gozzi’s fiaba, a “satirical comedy,” as he called it in a 1919 interview, and critics at the premiere never doubted him.86 But the composer owed his Russian colleagues a great deal. For instance, he left the divertissement’s overall plot intact, jettisoning only moments that he found arcane and rewriting the conclusion to include the aforementioned escape. The divertissement’s choruses of Extra-tragic Tragedians and Commonplace ­Comedians— found nowhere in Gozzi’s fiaba—struck Prokofiev as worthy of expansion, and he developed their opening parade into a full-length prologue (fig. 0.9). It was these metatheatrical characters and their exploits that first caught the attention of that most prickly of Chicago critics, Edward Moore, who described a group of Tragics, Comics, and Lyrics, who come running on the stage at critical moments to extol the merits of their respective arts. They are kept in order by the Ridicules, another amusing group, representing the people of the theater, watching the proceedings from two towers at the sides of the stage. From here they emerge to sweep away the Tragics, Comics, and Lyrics. They even come to the rescue of the Prince himself. In one place, in a desert scene, the princess, who

Introduction | 21

Figure 0.9. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Prokofiev’s four prologue choruses, with the Eccentrics watching from the towers. Pink Curtain # 2, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Gouache and watercolor, with pen and black ink, and gold metallic paint, and charcoal, over graphite, selectively varnished, on off-white laid paper. 565 × 780 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.84. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles Chatfield-Taylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

has come out of one of the oranges, is dying of thirst. The Ridicules enter with a pail of water and save the situation.87

The Tragics and Comics were, of course, Meyerhold’s Extra-tragic Tragedians and Commonplace Comedians, to which Prokofiev added Lyricals and Empty Heads (pustogolovye), all of whom interrupt the plot to assert their theatrical preferences. Prokofiev merged the divertissement’s Fools and Eccentrics (or “Ridicules,” as chudaki was translated in the Chicago playbill) into an entire crew able to meddle in the fairy-tale plot, not only offering the Prince water to save his orange-hatched princess in act III but also thwarting Fata Morgana’s sorcery in act IV. All of this multilayered action was comical and entertaining. On the hallowed operatic stage, it was also irreverent and a threat to opera’s traditional pretense to realism. As Janet Fairbank wrote in the New Republic, Prokofiev aimed “to heighten the unreality by . . . emphasizing the ‘staginess’

22  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

of the performance.”88 With its metatheatricality and self-referentiality, Three Oranges celebrated opera’s artifice. This challenge provoked conservative critics. Many perceived a kind of satire that reminded them of early twentieth-century burlesque, a genre that questioned cultural hierarchies, often through parodies of other works.89 Yet what confused or threatened the tastes of early critics was exactly what led later scholars to call Three Oranges “the composer’s only pronounced take on modernism” and to write that Prokofiev had never before been “so clearly ahead of his time.”90 The opera’s theatricality and self-conscious ridicule of tradition became central features of musical Modernism in the second quarter of the twentieth century, and Prokofiev’s “cheerful show” was one of their earliest manifestations.91 Had Prokofiev chosen source material that lacked Meyerhold’s innovations, we might choose adjectives other than “Modernist” to describe his early career in opera. Viewing Gozzi, Meyerhold, and Prokofiev together allows us to see the long historical arc that culminated on the Auditorium Theatre’s stage. Although scholars such as Richard Taruskin have already noted the existence of this arc, the essays in this volume deepen our understanding of the layered creative and intellectual engagements with the Three Oranges story that led to this early Modernist opera.92 Such a project involves not only positioning Meyerhold as a central (if tacit) collaborator, but also acknowledging the contributions of figures like Anisfeld, the opera’s 1921 designer, and Sergei Radlov (1892–1958), who staged the 1926 Soviet premiere in Leningrad. Rethinking the opera a century on also involves illuminating the work’s significant debts to Russian musical traditions, debts that were opaque to critics in 1921 and that have remained absent from most accounts since. This historical distance also allows us to recognize how Russian theatrical and musical traditions, when moved beyond their original contexts, collided with existing political and aesthetic debates. To look back on early discussions of the opera is to see a work so provocative and semantically open that it could be nearly simultaneously derided as low-brow burlesque and praised as a means to achieve a socialist revolution in musical theatre. —Kevin Bartig

Three Loves Viewed together, this book’s three fantastical Three Oranges remind us that works written for theatrical production can never be wholly contained within

Introduction | 23

the categories of literature or music; they always invite collaboration and completion in infinite variations. These three interrelated Three Oranges present distinct versions among these variations. Together, they underscore that part of the task of experiencing any dramatic work or opera score is to im­ agine its future possibilities. This book is organized in three parts, each of which contains a full translation of one version of Three Oranges along with essays that examine the context, development, innovation, and reception of that work.93 Part 1, “The Fiaba,” opens with Maria De Simone’s translation of L’amore delle tre melarance, the first full English translation of Gozzi’s fiaba since 1890. Essays in this section treat Gozzi’s theatre wars, collaborations with actors, multifaceted playwriting activity, cultural sources, and European afterlife. Alberto Beniscelli’s chapter demonstrates that Three Oranges was, for Gozzi, the culmination of more than a decade of polemical dramatic activity, transferred to a new context and infused with new content. Giulietta Bazoli’s essay provides a snapshot of Sacchi actors who performed in Three Oranges, many of whom had collaborated with Gozzi since the late 1740s. Domenico Pietropaolo’s chapter argues that Gozzi expanded Venetian theatre’s “horizon of expectations” by collaborating with Sacchi’s troupe and infusing Three Oranges with references that generated the premiere’s “complex aesthetic and cognitive experience.” Ted Emery’s essay challenges the common assumption that Gozzi’s works are primarily either polemical or fantastical by showing how fantasy and Gozzi’s conservative ideology were fundamentally intertwined. Natalya Baldyga traces the legacy of Gozzi’s “pastiche” of familiar and fantastical elements, which German Romantic writers used to create their own aesthetic and social critiques, paired with “fantastical flights of imagination.” Part 2, “The Divertissement,” opens with Dassia N. Posner’s translation of Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam—the first translation of the divertissement to be published in any language. The essays that follow discuss Meyerhold’s Three Oranges journal, commedia-based actor training, Russian commedia historiography, and connections between the divertissement and opera. Raissa Raskina’s essay traces the Russian fascination with Gozzi, through the lens of German Romanticism, and Gozzi’s significance to Meyerhold’s collaborators and journal. Vadim Shcherbakov’s chapter examines how the Russian commedia “myth” shaped Meyerhold’s understanding of a new kind of actor and provided an essential link between the director’s pre- and postrevolutionary experiments. Laurence Senelick’s essay illuminates the central importance of theatre historian Konstantin Miklashevsky’s research to Russian commedia and to commedia historiography

24  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

more broadly. Finally, Julia Galanina’s chapter draws on newly discovered archival sources to reveal the little-known controversy behind Prokofiev’s use of Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s divertissement. Part 3, “The Opera,” presents Kevin Bartig’s translation of the Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam libretto—the first in English to be developed comparatively alongside its divertissement source. This section’s chapters present new perspectives on the opera and its international legacy, with three essays that examine Prokofiev’s music in historical and artistic context and two that analyze the style and reception of early productions. Inna Naroditskaya’s essay, which positions Prokofiev’s Three Oranges within the tradition of Russian commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale operas, reminds us that a work that premiered in the United States and was sung in French nevertheless had distinct debts to many Russian composers. Natalia Savkina’s whimsical piece explores the opera’s unexpected and amusing intersections of music, action, and parody. Simon Morrison’s brief chapter offers an eloquent analytical overview of the opera’s unique style. John E. Bowlt analyses Boris Anisfeld’s vivid designs for the opera’s world premiere in Chicago, revealing Anisfeld’s stylistic interactions with other Russian artists and heretofore underacknowledged influence on the opera’s initial reception. The book concludes with Bartig’s chapter, which examines Sergei Radlov’s 1926 Leningrad production of Three Oranges, a production that engaged preexisting Soviet cultural debates and marked Prokofiev’s first major success in his radically changed homeland. Together, this book’s essays and translations, penned by a multidisciplinary cast of Anglophone, Italian, and Russian scholars, are designed to be read across themes and across sections. The introductions to the theatrical translations (chaps. 1, 7, and 12) build on one another by addressing similar themes in different contexts. Invaluable background on Sacchi and his improvisatory actors provided by Bazoli (chap. 3) and Pietropaolo (chap. 4) illuminates why Meyerhold and his circle were so drawn to them. Baldyga’s and Raskina’s essays (chaps. 6 and 8) together show the importance of German Romanticism as a connection point between Gozzi and Meyerhold, whereas Galanina (chap. 11) explores the politics of the Meyerhold–Prokofiev connection. Shcherbakov, Senelick, and Naroditskaya (chaps. 9, 10, and 13) look back at earlier appearances of commedia in Russia to contextualize their discussions. Beniscelli (chap. 2) and Emery (chap. 5) together paint a rich portrait of Gozzi’s polemical activity and connect it with later Russian creative (mis)interpretations of the Venetian count’s work. Bowlt (chap. 16) and Bartig (chap. 17) analyze two very different productions, showing how Prokofiev’s music was hardly a static entity, and Naroditskaya, Savkina (chap. 14), and Morrison

Introduction | 25

(chap. 15) together give us a deep understanding of Prokofiev’s roots in European theatre and opera traditions. * * * Ultimately, the value of the three Oranges that we offer to readers in this book—the fiaba, the divertissement, and the opera—is most fittingly articulated in a 1921 review about Boris Anisfeld that we adopt here as a metaphor for the creation, reception, legacy, and future of these citrus- and fantasyinfused works. After attending the opera’s Chicago premiere, one reviewer, Lionel Robertson, recalled an exhibit of Anisfeld’s art he had seen the year before at the Art Institute of Chicago. As Robertson mused in wonder and epiphany, “We blinked at the first sight of them, but now we realize that [they were] taking us into a new world of beauty and color. How drab the old world seems when we look back.”94 Like Anisfeld’s vivid art, this book’s dramatic fairy tales, in their varied manifestations, may have been initially startling, but they have been forever altering. —Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig, and Maria De Simone (Three Eccentric Editors)

Notes 1. Draper, “Makers of Music,” 88. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (hereafter RGALI), f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 921, ll. 51–53. All reviews of the opera’s premiere are from this archive folder and will be referred to by sheet number (l. or ll.) only. 2. Aldrich, “Opera,” l. 275. 3. Raymond, “Prokofieff Tilts,” ll. 54–56; “Three Oranges Produced,” ll. 138–39; “The Love of Three Oranges,” ll. 140–41; Henderson, “‘Love for 3 Oranges’ Fantastic Opera,” l. 232. 4. Moore, ‘”Love for Three Oranges’ Color Marvel,” l. 133. 5. Hecht, “Around the Town,” ll. 123–26. 6. Robertson, “Robertson Lavish,” l. 153. 7. Raymond, “Prokofieff Tilts,” ll. 54–56; Aldrich, “Opera,” l. 275. 8. The sole RGALI Chicago review that gives “Maierhold” as Prokofiev’s source is “‘Love for Three Oranges’ in Premiere,” ll. 221–22. Even this article, however, contains several factual errors. 9. For scholarship on connections between Prokofiev’s opera and earlier versions of Three Oranges, see Nisnevich, “Laughter at the Opera House”; Picon-Vallin, “Meyerhold, Prokofiev, et L’Amour”; Robinson, “Love for Three Operas”; Taruskin, “From Fairy Tale to Opera.” 10. The most virulent attacks are variations on the following: “‘The Love for Three Oranges’ cost $130,000 . . . at the rate of $43,000 per orange, to stage, and was so little enjoyed that a repetition was financially a fizzle” (Anonymous, Chicago Examiner, l. 119). Eyewitness accounts

26  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges note enthusiastic ovations, and avowals that the opera was “one of the most successful operas performed this . . . season” were also common; Gottlieb, “Our Opera,” ll. 123–26. Artistic Director Mary Garden seems to have been nonplussed. She arranged a repeat performance in Chicago on January 5, 1922, and included Prokofiev’s opera in the New York tour the following month (although it played only once due to an outbreak of influenza in the cast). New York’s response was even more divided than Chicago’s, with a more aggressive tilt toward the critical. Love for Three Oranges was not performed again in New York until 1949. Chicago audiences had to wait until 1976, when the opera was presented in English at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. 11. See Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 44. 12. Soldini, Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806, 12. 13. Scannapieco, Carlo Gozzi, 9–28. 14. The Accademia dei Granelleschi was founded in 1747 by Carlo Gozzi, his older brother Gasparo, and a handful of aristocratic friends. Starting with their chosen name (“granelleschi” means testicles), the group was satirical in method and content. These young Venetians became increasingly preoccupied with defending class privilege and conservative moral principles. In the late 1750s, their literary critiques turned into incendiary political debates. Opposed by the University of Padua, the academy was disbanded in 1762. Bosisio, Carlo Gozzi e Goldoni, 15–20. 15. See Giulietta Bazoli’s essay in this book (chap. 3). 16. Beniscelli, “Carlo Gozzi,” 177. 17. While at the academy in the 1750s, Gozzi wrote essays critiquing Goldoni’s plays. He also criticized some of Chiari’s “marvelous and heroic productions” and wrote two plays, The Theatre Competitions (Le gare teatrali, 1751) and Comic Theatre at the Pilgrim’s Tavern (Teatro comico all’osteria del pellegrino, 1758, edited 1761), which, although never staged, are a point of origin for the satire in Three Oranges. See Alberto Beniscelli’s essay in this book (chap. 2) and Mangini, “Chiari, Pietro.” 18. Gozzi’s wizard and fairy speak in Martellian verse, a fourteen-syllable rhyming verse that Goldoni and Chiari used in competing plays. See Beniscelli, “Introduzione,” ix–x. 19. In 1761, the year The Love of Three Oranges premiered, Goldoni “excused” himself for having “abused” Martellian verse in his plays, in order to indulge in the “literary fanaticism” of the 1750s; Goldoni, Delle commedia, 12:269. 20. Alberti, “L’invenzione.” 21. This number is based on Goldoni’s record for the 1750 season at the Sant’Angelo Theatre. See Goldoni, Memorie, 2:95. 22. Gozzi, La più lunga lettera, 149–150. 23. Gozzi’s fantastical fiabe relied on experienced designers and stage machinists, most of whom remain anonymous, for successful stagings. Domenico Fossati, one of the few to have been identified (see Fossati, I Fossati, 7–8), was the son of a well-known architect and studied with Venetian painter Pietro Longhi. Between 1764 and 1784, in one of the prefaces in the Colombani edition, Gozzi notes the significance of Fossati’s work to the staging of his fiabe: “I had sketched [a new] fairy-tale play [The Flea (La pulce)], and I was meaning to complete it, in order to prove to my ridiculous enemies that the fairy-tale genre, if well treated, is always fruitful and laudable. The death of the Sacchi company’s talented stage machinist suspended my good intentions”; C. Gozzi, Opere, 14–15. 24. Patriarchi to Gennari, January 31, 1761; Patriarchi, Lettere e letterati, 47. 25. G. Gozzi, Gazzetta Veneta, 103. 26. C. Gozzi, Memorie inutili, 403. 27. Scannapieco, Carlo Gozzi, 9–28.

Introduction | 27 28. The conference “Carlo Gozzi: Entre dramaturgie de l’auteur et dramaturgie de l’acteur” (Paris, 2006), gathered international experts to discuss these themes. Anna Scannapieco, Fabio Soldini, Marzia Pieri, Alberto Beniscelli, Vincenza Perdichizzi, Piermario Vescovo, and CécilePerette Buffaria, among others, presented on Gozzi’s mise-en-scène directions, his relationship with Sacchi company actors, and his role in the Venetian theatre reform. For published versions of these essays, see Fabiano, Carlo Gozzi entre dramaturgie. 29. Goldoni also collaborated with Sacchi, who famously starred in his Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni); Goldoni, Memorie, 1:360. 30. For more on Gozzi and German Romanticism, see Natalya Baldyga’s chapter in this book (chap. 6). 31. Meyerhold’s pseudonym, Doctor Dapertutto, was inspired by the magician in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Tale of the Lost Reflection,” a tale-within-a-tale in “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (A New Year’s Eve Adventure, 1814). 32. Gozzi’s The Serpent Woman was the first fiaba published in Russian. See Gotstsi, “Zhenshchina-zmeia,” 11–82. 33. Fedor Komissarzhevsky (Theodore Komisarjevsky) directed Princess Turandot in 1912, but in Schiller’s adaptation. Soloviev wrote a damning review, in which he faulted Komissarzhevsky for replacing Gozzi’s “theatre of wonders” with “psychology” and “verisimilitude.” Solov’ev, “Turandot Grafa,” 47–48; quoted in Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd, 94–95. 34. Significant examples include Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (premiere, 1909), Moliere’s Dom Juan (premiere, 1910), Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice (premiere, 1911), Strauss’s Elektra (premiere, 1913), and Lermontov’s Masquerade (premiere, 1917), an opulent production that famously opened on the eve of the February Revolution. Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution, 112, 141. 35. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 159. 36. Meyerhold, 126. 37. Volkov, Meierkhol’d, 183. 38. Igantov’s 1914 E. T. A. Hoffmann: Man and Works (Goffman: Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo) became required reading for Borodinskaia students. Letter from Ignatov to Meyerhold. December 2, 1911. RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634. 39. Meierkhol’d, Perepiska, 143. 40. Letter from Ignatov to Meyerhold, September 20, 1912, RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634; letter from Meyerhold to Ignatov, September 22, 1912, in Meierkhol’d, Perepiska,147; letter from Ignatov to Meyerhold, [late February 1914], RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634. 41. Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution, 19. 42. In his preface to Lyrical Dramas, Blok used the term “transcendental irony” to describe Balaganchik; Blok, Puppet Show, 309. 43. Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution, 121–24. The essay first appeared in Meyerhold’s O teatre (On theatre), published December 1912 (copyright 1913). 44. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 127. 45. Actress Valentina Verigina, who attended the reading, feared the scenario could not “inspire contemporary actors to brilliantly improvise,” although that evening’s attendees were possibly distracted by a pet baby bear that entertained the group by climbing houseplants and drinking from a bottle. Verigina, Vospominaniia, 194. 46. Letter from Ignatov to Meyerhold, [late February 1914], RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634. 47. The studio also gave private performances for convalescing soldiers with whom they shared the building and for invited guests, including Filippo Marinetti and Viacheslav Ivanov.

28  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Musical Art (SPbGMTiMI), GIK 11287/3, ORU 10336, l. 8. In Olga Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 243. 48. Articles included, among many others, essays on commedia history by Soloviev and Konstantin Miklashevsky (whose commedia monograph the journal publicized), theoretical essays, bibliographies of suggested readings, and plays by Gozzi and Tieck. 49. Volkov, Meierkhol’d, 309. 50. Vogak, Meierkhol’d, and Solov’ev. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 19. 51. For a fuller definition, see Anthony and Bartlet. “Divertissement.” 52. Translated in Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd, 257–71. Collaborating with different composers on two productions clarified for Meyerhold how music could “hamper” (in the first) or support (in the second) actor improvisations. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 145. 53. Meierkhol’d, O teatre, 200–202. Translated in Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 144. 54. In “The Fairground Booth,” Meyerhold quotes Andrei Bely on time and space in art: “Art dismantles reality, depicting it now spatially, now temporally. For this reason, art consists either in images or in the alternation of images: the first yields the spatial forms of art, the second— the temporal forms.” Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 137. 55. Letter from Soloviev to Meyerhold, May 8/21, 1913, RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 2381, ll. 8 verso‑9. 56. [Solov’ev], “Studiia: Klass V. N. Solov’eva,” 61. 57. Despite the lasting importance of Meyerhold’s journal, there was a forty-year gap between 1929, the year the last book that recalled Dapertutto’s journal was published, and the first publication of Borodinskaia student memoirs. Even then, Meyerhold’s Oranges—the journal and its divertissement—were recalled only glancingly until 2014, when Liubov Oves republished the journal in an annotated, two-volume edition with contextualizing essays. See Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt, 1:15. 58. Meyerhold was arrested in 1939, tortured, and shot in 1940; he began to be politically rehabilitated in the mid-1950s. Despite announcements in LTA that a full Russian translation of Gozzi’s fiabe was forthcoming, this project was not to be completed for forty years. In 1922, Iakov Blokh, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Alexei Gvozdev founded an almanac, The Green Bird (Zelenaia ptichka), an homage to Meyerhold’s Oranges journal. The first Russian translation of Gozzi’s Three Oranges was published in 1923 with two other fiabe: The Raven and The King Stag (Gotstsi, Skazki dlia teatra). Vakhtangov’s version of Princess Turandot was published in a single edition aligned to his 1922 staging (Gotstsi, Vakhtangov, and Il’in, Printsessa Turandot). Gozzi’s complete fiabe appeared only in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death (Gotstsi, Skazki dlia teatra [1956]). Meyerhold is not mentioned, but the book’s release coincides with his rehabilitation. Gozzi’s full fiabe have yet to appear in English. 59. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 141 (entry of October 2, 1916). 60. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 167 (entry of January 1917). 61. On the collaboration, see Robinson, “Love for Three Operas.” 62. On the Boris project, see Morrison, People’s Artist, 141–56; Emerson, All the Same, 362–77. 63. On Semyon Kotko, see Morrison, People’s Artist, 87–96; Seinen, Prokofiev’s Soviet Operas, 20–66. 64. On the opera, see Nice, Prokofiev, 147–49, 154–61, 173, 182–85; Stepanov, Teatr masok; Robinson, “Love for Three Operas”; Cropsey, “Prokofiev’s ‘Three Oranges’”; Dolinskaia, Teatr Prokof ’eva, 91–104; Picon-Vallin, “Meyerhold, Prokofiev, et L’Amour”; Enukidze, “Liubov”; Nisnevich, “Laughter at the Opera House”; Lohmann, “Love for Three Oranges.” 65. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 271 (entry of April 8/21, 1918). 66. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 273 (entry of April 13/26, 1918).

Introduction | 29 67. Prokofiev’s travel permit was granted on April 20, the day before Meyerhold gave him the Three Oranges journal. See Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 270–1 (entry of April 7/20, 1918). 68. Two decades later, Prokofiev claimed that he began work during his “long travels” to the United States (Prokof’ev, “Avtobiografiia,” 164). In reality, he began composing later, in fall 1918. 69. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 359 (entry of November 17/30, 1918). Prokofiev’s description of his meeting with Campanini is in Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 362 (entry of November 21/ December 4, 1918). 70. The most detailed account is Press, “I Came Too Soon.” 71. Although The Gambler (Igrok, 1915–17, rev. 1927–28) premiered in Brussels in 1929, the Soviet premiere came only in 1974. Semyon Kotko (1939) and Betrothal in a Monastery (Obruchenie v monastyre, 1940) premiered in 1940 and 1946, respectively, but quickly fell out of active performance. Prokofiev never managed to get The Fiery Angel (Ognennyi angel, 1919–23, rev. 1926–27) produced, and The Story of a Real Man (Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke, 1948) was shelved amid political criticism. Prokofiev was forced to revise War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1941–52) repeatedly, and it was only partially staged during his lifetime. 72. Prokofiev noted the potential for these productions in his diary; Diaries 1924–1933. On Kharkiv, see entry of March 8–10, 1925 (551–54); on Cincinnati, see entry of December 23, 1926 (396); on Belgrade, see entry of November 8, 1927 (660); on Mainz, see entry of August 31, 1926 (364); on Paris, see entry of August 1930 (964–65, 1005–6); on Vienna, see entry of April 3, 1925 (151); on Zagreb, see entry of August 29, 1927 (626). 73. On the popular success of both the Chicago and New York premieres, see “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Has World Premiere at Auditorium,” l. 128; Devries, “Love of ‘Three Oranges’ Has World Premiere,” l. 134; and Bennett, “Prokofieff’s ‘Love for Three Oranges’ Sung at Manhattan,” ll. 233–34. 74. Most reviews of the Chicago and New York premieres praise Anisfeld’s work. Even the typically critical Prokofiev wrote that the “colours simply leap out at you even without proper theatre lighting”; Diaries 1915–1923, 643 (entry of December 12, 1921). Anisfeld and Prokofiev met in New York in September 1918, and Prokofiev gave his first US performance at Anisfeld’s Brooklyn Museum exhibit a month later. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 348 (entry of October 16/29, 1918). 75. Iuzefovich, Sergei Prokof ’ev, 60 (letter dated January 2, 1922). In his journal, the composer describes a “cheering and clapping audience” that called the performers and the composer to the stage after each act, culminating in a “prolonged ovation” at the start of act IV. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 654 (entry of December 30, 1921). 76. The only non-French or Italian examples were by Richard Wagner (Lohengrin and Die Walküre), although sung in English because audiences balked at onstage German so soon after the First World War. For repertory lists, see Davis, Opera in Chicago, 271–383; Marsh, 150 Years, 249–96. 77. See the examples cited in Press, “I Came Too Soon”; and Pisani, “Kapustnik.” 78. “Chicago Co. Gives Prokofieff Opera,” ll. 223–4. Reviews of the world premiere production cited costs ranging from $100,000 to $250,000. Stanley Krebs introduced the figure $250,000 into the scholarly literature but does not cite a source; Krebs, Soviet Composers, 145–46, n3. 79. Prokof’ev, “Avtobigrafiia,” 177. 80. Taruskin, “Dargomïzhsky,” 74. Musorgsky, Zhenit’ba (1868); Dargomyzhsky, Kamennyi gost’ (1866–69, completed by Cesar Cui and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov). Dargomyzhsky’s opera premiered after the composer’s death in 1872; Musorgsky’s Marriage premiered only in 1908. 81. “Serge Prokofieff,” ll. 3–4.

30  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 82. “Serge Prokofieff,” ll. 3–4. 83. “Serge Prokofieff,” ll. 3–4. Many critics detected a kinship with Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel (Zolotoi petushok, 1907) and Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka (1911), an impression likely shaped by the harmonic language that all three works share; see, e.g., Krehbiel, “Love for Three Oranges”; Finck, “Fantastic Fairy Opera”; Fairbank, “Love for Three Oranges.” Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera and Stravinsky’s ballet were also fresh in the memories of US critics: Petrushka premiered in New York during the Ballets Russes’s 1916 tour, and the Metropolitan Opera premiered Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera in March 1918. On the former, see Järvinen, “Failed Impressions.” 84. Anna Nisnevich identifies references to Wagner’s Lohengrin in Fata Morgana’s curse in act II, scene 2, and Tristan and Isolde in Truffaldino’s desire for the oranges in act III, scene 3; Nisnevich, “Laughter at the Opera House,” 104–5. 85. Prokofiev often extracted concert suites from his stage and film works, getting more mileage out of large works by turning them into compact, easily programmable instrumental suites. See Bartig, Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, 64–66. 86. “Satirical comedy” was the description Prokofiev offered in an interview published in the Morning Telegraph, March 30, 1919, republished in Russian translation in Varunts, Prokof ’ev o Prokof ’eve, 36. Many later commentators relied on Prokofiev’s autobiography, in which the composer cites Gozzi as his source: “I took with me on the road the little theatre journal ‘Love for Three Oranges,’” Prokofiev wrote, “which received its name from the play by Carlo Gozzi published in the first issue”; Prokof’ev, “Avtobiografiia,” 164. By the time Prokofiev wrote these words, Meyerhold had been arrested and his name could not appear in Soviet publications. Prokofiev obtained a copy of Gozzi’s fiaba in Italian from Alexandre Benois, but he likely would have found much of the fiaba’s archaic Italian impenetrable. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 294 (entry of June 3/16, 1918). 87. Moore, “Prokofieff,” l. 49. 88. Fairbank, “Love for Three Oranges,” 282. 89. On the burlesque, see Allen, Horrible Prettiness, esp. 26–28. See also Cormac, “From Satirical Piece.” For references to burlesque in the criticism of the world premiere, see Raymond, “Prokofieff Tilts,” ll. 54–56; Zeizler, “Prokofieff’s New Opera,” l. 122.; Henderson, “‘Love for 3 Oranges’ Fantastic Opera,” l. 232. 90. Nisnevich, “Laughter at the Opera House,” 99; Taruskin, “From Fairy Tale,” 214. 91. Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 495. 92. Taruskin, “From Fairy Tale.” 93. In the spirit of practicing cross-disciplinary dialogue, this book’s editor-translators collaborated closely to translate the three theatrical versions of Three Oranges comparatively. We found no evidence in the libretto that Prokofiev adapted material from Gozzi’s fiaba independently of the Russian divertissement. Conversely, the libretto is saturated with material that appears in the divertissement only, especially characters, spatial design, and metatheatrical devices. 94. Robertson, “Robertson Lavish,” l. 153.

Bibliography Alberti, Carmelo. “L’invenzione del Teatro.” In La Venezia Barocca—Storia di Venezia, Enciclopedia Treccani. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997. http://www

Introduction | 31 .treccani.it/enciclopedia/la-venezia-barocca-arte-e-cultura-l-invenzione-del-teatro _%28Storia-di-Venezia%29/. Aldrich, Richard. “Opera. The Love for Three Oranges.” New York Times, February 15, 1922. Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Anthony, James R., and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet. “Divertissement.” Grove Music Online. Published 2001. Accessed December 31, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630 .article.07865. Bartig, Kevin. Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Beniscelli, Alberto. “Carlo Gozzi.” In A History of Italian Theatre, edited by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, 177–185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. “Introduzione.” In Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli, vii–xxxv. 3rd ed. Milan: Garzanti, 2008. Bennett, Grena. “Prokofieff’s ‘Love for Three Oranges’ Sung at Manhattan.” New York American, February 15, 1922. Blok, Alexander. The Puppet Show [Balaganchik], translated by Mary Kriger and Gleb Struve. Slavonic and East European Review 28, no. 71 (1950): 309–22. Blokh, Ia. N, M. A. Kuzmin, and A. A. Gvozdev, eds. Zelenaia ptichka. Petrograd: Petropolis, 1922. Bosisio, Paolo. Carlo Gozzi e Goldoni: una polemica letteraria; con versi inediti e rari. Florence: Olschki, 1979. Braun, Edward. Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen Drama, 1998. “Chicago Co. Gives Prokofieff Opera.” Morning Telegraph (New York), February 15, 1922. Clayton, J. Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in TwentiethCentury Russian Theatre and Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Cormac, Joanne. “From Satirical Piece to Commercial Product: The Mid-Victorian Opera Burlesque and its Bourgeois Audience.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142 (2017): 69–108. Cropsey, Eugene H. “Prokofiev’s ‘Three Oranges’: A Chicago World Premiere.” Opera Quarterly 16 (2000): 52–67. Davis, Ronald L. Opera in Chicago. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966. Devries, Herman. “The Love of ‘Three Oranges’ Has World Premiere.” Chicago Evening American, December 31, 1921. Dolinskaia, Elena. Teatr Prokof ’eva. Moscow: Kompozitor, 2012. Draper, Muriel. “Makers of Music.” Vogue (November 15, 1921), 60–61, 88. Emerson, Caryl. All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away: Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and State Adaptations from the Russian Tradition. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. Enukidze, N. I. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam S. Prokof’eva na fone kabare.” In Russkaia muzykal’naia kul’tura. Sovremennye issledovaniia, edited by V. B. Val’kova, 127–48. Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia muzyki im. Gnesinykh, 2004. Fabiano, Andrea. Carlo Gozzi entre dramaturgie de l’auteur et dramaturgie de l’acteur: un carrefour artistique européen. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2007. Fairbank, Janet A. “The Love for Three Oranges.” New Republic, February 1, 1922, 282. Finck, Henry T. “Fantastic Fairy Opera a Farce.” New York Evening Post, February 15, 1922. Fossati, Carlo Palumbo. I Fossati di Morcoti. Bellinzona: Istituto Editoriale Ticinese, 1970. Goldoni, Carlo. Delle commedie di Carlo Goldoni Avvocato Veneto. Vol. 12. Venice: Pasquali, 1761. ———. Memorie del Sig. Carlo Goldoni. Vol. 2. Venice: Antonio Zatta e Figli, 1788.

32  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Gottlieb, E. F. “Our Opera.” Letter to the editor. [Chicago] Herald and Examiner, February 4, 1922. Gotstsi, Karlo. Skazki dlia teatra, translated by Ia. N. Blokh, Raisa Blokh, and M. Lozinskii. Saint Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, Tipografiia Kominterna, 1923. ———. Skazki dlia teatra, edited by Mokul’skii, translated by Ia. N. Blokh, Raisa Blokh, M. Lozinskii, and Shchepkina-Kupernik. Moscow: Iskusstvo: 1956. ———. “Zhenshchina-zmeia,” translated by Iakov Blokh. LTA 2–3 (1916): 11–82. Gotstsi, Karlo, Evgenii Vakhtangov, and M. Il’in. Printsessa Turandot: Teatral’no-tragicheskaia kitaiskaia skazka v 5 aktakh. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923. Gozzi, Carlo. La più lunga lettera di risposta che sia stata scritta. In Opere edite ed inedite. Vol. 14. Venice: Zanardi, 1801. ———. Memorie inutili, edited by Paolo Bosisio. Milan: LED, 2006. ———. Opere. Venice: Colombani, 1772. Gozzi, Gasparo. No title. Gazzetta Veneta, 103 (January 28, 1761). Hecht, Ben. “Around the Town. A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. Fantastic Lollypops.” Chicago Daily News, December 30, 1921. Henderson, W. J. “‘Love for 3 Oranges’ Fantastic Opera.” New York Herald, February 15, 1922. Ignatov, Sergei. E.T.A. Goffman: Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo. Moscow: Tipografiia O. L. Somovoi, 1914. Iuzefovich, Viktor, ed. Sergei Prokof ’ev–Sergei Kusevitskii, Perepiska 1910–1953. Moscow: Deka-VS, 2011. Järvinen, Hanna. “Failed Impressions: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in America, 1916.” Dance Research Journal 42 (2010): 77–108. Krebs, Stanley Dale. Soviet Composers and the Development of Soviet Music. New York: Norton, 1970. Krehbiel, H. E. “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Sung By Chicago Co.” New York Tribune, February 15, 1922. Leach, Robert. Vsevolod Meyerhold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lohmann, Erica Meixsell. “Love for Three Oranges: Prokofiev’s First Comic Opera in the Context of Russian Traditions.” MA thesis, The Ohio State University, 1997. “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Has World Premiere at Auditorium.” Chicago Daily Journal, December 31, 1921. “‘Love for Three Oranges’ in Premiere.” New York Evening Journal, February 15, 1922. Mangini, Nicola. “Chiari, Pietro.” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 24 (1980). http://www .treccani.it/enciclopedia/pietro-chiari_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/. Marsh, Robert C. 150 Years of Opera in Chicago, edited by Norman Pellegrini. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Meierkhol’d, V. E. O teatre. Saint Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1913. ———. Perepiska: 1896–1939, edited by V. P. Korshunova. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, translated by Edward Braun. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1998. Moore, Edward. “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Color Marvel, but Enigmatic Noise.” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 31, 1921. ———. “Prokofieff, Librettist and Composer.” Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1921. Morrison, Simon. The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nice, David. Prokofiev: From Russia to the West, 1891–1935. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Introduction | 33 Nisnevich, Anna. “Laughter at the Opera House: The Case of Prokofev’s The Love for Three Oranges.” Russian Literature 74 (2013): 99–117. Oves, L. C., ed. Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 1914–1916, with author collective Iu. E. Galanina, P. V. Dmitriev, V. D. Kantor, A. P. Kulish, M. M. Molodtsova, I. A. Nekrasova, L. S. Oves, N. V. Pesochinskii, A. V. Sergeyev, L. I. Filonova, A. A. Shepelova. 2 vols. Saint Petersburg: RIII, 2014. Patriarchi, Gasparo. Lettere e letterati a Venezia e Padova a mezzo il secolo XVIII0, da un carteggio inedito, edited by Luigi Melchiori. Padua: CEDAM, 1942. Picon-Vallin, Béatrice. “Meyerhold, Prokofiev et L’Amour des trois oranges.” In Sergej Prokofjew in der Sowjetunion: Verstrickungen-Mißverständnisse-Katastrophen. Ein internationales Symposium, edited by Ernst Kuhn and Gérard Abensour, 157–76. Berlin: Kuhn, 2004. Pisani, Michael. “A Kapustnik in the American Opera House: Modernism and Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges.” Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 487–515. Press, Stephen D. “‘I Came Too Soon’: Prokofiev’s Early Career in America.” In Prokofiev and his World, edited by Simon Morrison, 334–75. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Prokof’ev, S. S. “Avtobiografiia.” In S.S. Prokof ’ev: Materialy, dokumenty, vospominaniia, edited by S. I. Shlifshtein, 13–196. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1961. Prokofiev, Sergey. Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915–1923. Behind the Mask, translated and edited by Anthony Phillips. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. ———. Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1924–1933. Prodigal Son, translated and edited by Anthony Phillips. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Raymond, Emil. “Prokofieff Tilts at Opera with Pointed Lance.” Musical America, November 19, 1921, 3, 33. Robertson, Lionel. “Robertson Lavish in Praise of New Opera. Believes Critics Failed to Grasp Real Idea of ‘Love for Three Oranges.’” Daily News, January 11, 1922. Robinson, Harlow. “Love for Three Operas: The Collaboration of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Prokofiev.” Russian Review 45 (1986): 287–304. Scannapieco, Anna. Carlo Gozzi: la scena del libro. Venice: Marsilio, 2004. Seinen, Nathan. Prokofiev’s Soviet Operas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. “Serge Prokofieff.” Art Review, October 1921. Soldini, Fabio. Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806: stravaganze sceniche, letterarie battaglie. Venice: Marsilio, 2006. [Solov’ev, Vladimir]. “Studiia: Klass V. N. Solov’eva.” LTA 1 (1914): 61. Solov’ev, Vladimir. “Turandot Grafa Karlo Gotstsi na russkoi stsene.” LTA 2 (1914): 47–48. Stepanov, O. B. Teatr masok v opere S. Prokof ’eva “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Moscow: Muzyka, 1972. Taruskin, Richard. “Dargomïzhky and His Stone Guest.” In On Russian Music, 70-75. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ———. “From Fairy Tale to Opera in Four Moves.” In On Russian Music, 214–22. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ———. Music in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. “The Love of Three Oranges.” Music News, January 6, 1922. “Three Oranges Produced,” ll. 138–39. Varunts, Viktor, ed. Prokof ’ev o Prokof ’eve: Stat’i i interv’iu. Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1999.

34  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Verigina, Valentina P. Vospominaniia: Teatralnye memuary. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1974. Vogak, K. A., Vs. E. Meierkhol’d, and V. N. Solov‘ev. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam. Divertissement. Dvenadtsat’ stsen, prolog, epilog, i tri intermedia.” LTA 1 (1914): 18–47. Volkov, N. D. Meierkhol’d. Vol. 2, 1908–1917. Moscow: Akademiia, 1929. Zeizler, Paul Bloomfield. “Prokofieff’s New Opera Presented. ‘Love of Three Oranges’ Is Not New in Libretto, nor Is It Satire.” Chicago Herald and Examiner, December 31, 1921.

Part I The Fiaba Brown: What? . . . You don’t want to hear about the three daughters of Concul, King of the Antipodes, who are inside the three oranges? About the white-clad princess Ginetta, whom Tartaglia rescued from the orange, who drank lemonade from his iron shoe, remained alive and then, by the grace of the evil Morgana, was transformed into a dove? . . . Gray: I can’t take any more! . . . You have gotten your wish. Your jokes and your extraordinary irony have captivated me. . . . I couldn’t help but imagine all this madness onstage, and my head simply spun. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager

1 Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” by Carlo Gozzi Translated, introduced, and annotated by Maria De Simone

The Love of Three Oranges: A Multilayered Manifesto Carlo Gozzi’s theatrical fairy tales, or fiabe, have been translated and adapted into many different languages and national contexts since Venetian editor Paolo Colombani first published them between 1772 and 1774 (fig. 1.1).1 Their appealing combination of familiar fairy-tale plots, commedia dell’arte characters, and opportunities for spectacular production effects firmly grounded their long-term success in Italy and beyond. The Love of Three Oranges, chronologically the first of Gozzi’s ten fiabe, differs substantially from the other nine in the Colombani edition because of its unconventional style. Gozzi’s later fiabe are play scripts in dialogue. In contrast, the Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” (Analisi riflessiva della fiaba L’amore delle tre melarance) appears in a memoir format that passes on Gozzi’s recollections of the production as performed by Antonio Sacchi and his company on opening night, January 25, 1761, at the San Samuele Theatre in Venice. Besides reproducing a plot summary with a few scripted sections in Martellian verse, the published version includes Gozzi’s “reflections” on the production’s satirical goals, mise-en-scène, and reception. Gozzi never articulated a full justification of this stylistic choice: perhaps he never kept a copy of the script, or perhaps the play initially existed only as a plot outline.2 In any case, his memoir format is a compelling component of the work’s successful formula—namely, a corpus of references and self-references that explain the

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Figure 1.1. Title page from Opere del Co: Carlo Gozzi. Vol. 1 (Venice: Il Colombani, 1772). 852.1G7491 I, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Courtesy of HathiTrust, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.0038978024.

production’s staging choices and illuminate the cultural, historical, and polemical context of Three Oranges for later readers. Gozzi’s metatheatrical glosses fall into three categories.3 First, he includes the inspirations for his allegorical parody: “bourgeois” comedies of character by Carlo Goldoni and pompous tragedies by Pietro Chiari, both his contemporaries and playwrights for competing Venetian theatres. Second,

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  39

he explains his choice of subject matter and style. Third, he notes audience responses, especially moments that, according to Gozzi, received the most enthusiastic applause. This self-referential frame comprises roughly half of Gozzi’s Reflective Analysis, yet most English translations have cut it, and no modern English adaptations of the fiaba have ever featured it onstage.4 This short introduction underscores both aspects of Gozzi’s first fiaba— its fantastical content and its self-referential frame. As in many fairy tales, Gozzi’s fantastical characters and plot turns entertain those who take pleasure in recognizing their provenance, allegorical meanings, and morals. The self-referential frame in the Reflective Analysis, on the other hand, explicitly directs the readers’ interpretation of both the text and the performance event that the text reconstructs. The fiaba’s story about an orange-pursuing hypochondriac prince is a mélange of fairy-tale characters and events drawn from eighteenth-century Italian folklore, Venetian culture, and various literary sources. In his review of the premiere in the Gazzetta Veneta (Venetian gazette), Gozzi’s brother Gasparo attributed the play’s source to Giambattista Basile’s Neapolitan “The Three Citrons” (Le tre cetra)—the last tale in The Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunte, 1636), a series of fifty fairy tales framed by the story of a melancholic princess.5 In this framing tale, the princess’s melancholia is cured after laughing at an old woman who slips and falls. The old woman condemns the princess to marry a sleeping prince whom she can awaken only by filling a pitcher with her tears. A Moorish slave steals the filled pitcher and claims the prince in her stead. The new queen demands that her husband entertain her with stories. When the prince hires ten storytellers who each tell five stories over five days, the melancholic princess is among them. The true princess narrates “The Three Citrons,” an allegory aimed at uncovering the imposter. In this tale, a prince seeks a bride of a very particular complexion—the same shade of pink that a drop of his blood produces when mixed with ricotta cheese. Three women give him three citrons—large, sweet lemons—that conceal thirsty maidens; two do not survive, and the third becomes the prince’s bride. A Moorish slave transforms the princess into a dove and takes her place. The imposter’s treachery is disclosed once the dove’s feathers sprout a citron tree with fruit that contains the “reborn” princess. Recent scholars, including Beniscelli and Baldyga in this volume, are wary of restricting Gozzi’s fantastical inspirations to the single text mentioned in Gasparo’s review, noting that Gozzi’s fiaba shares greater similarities with some northern Italian oral versions of the Oranges tale.6 Basile’s stories themselves were drawn from folklore, which further complicates

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questions of origin and authorship. Three Oranges and The Tale of Tales do, however, share several of what became Gozzi’s most whimsical plot points and characters: a melancholic prince, a magical old woman who slips and falls, healing laughter, a cursed quest for three fruits that conceal three maidens, and the princess’s transformation into a dove. Gozzi derives additional elements from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian literary sources. For example, Gozzi’s devil, whose bellows send the prince, Tartaglia, and the royal jester, Truffaldino, forward in their journey, recalls Luigi Pulci’s similarly propelling devil in the satirical epic poem Morgante (1478) (fig. 1.2).7 Similarly, Farfarello, the devil who apprises Wizard Celio, Tartaglia’s protector, of the witch Fata Morgana’s evil dealings, echoes Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (ca. 1304–21).8 These varied references provided an opportunity for all social strata watching Three Oranges to experience the pleasure involved in recognizing sources. Although Morgante and The Divine Comedy were inaccessible to those without relevant education, lower classes were familiar with oral versions of the Three Oranges folk tale told by public storytellers.9 Furthermore, audience members who were frequent theatregoers recognized allegorical references to works by Goldoni and Chiari. For example, spectators familiar with Pietro Chiari’s play Ezelino, Tyrant of Padua (Ezzelino, il tiranno di Padova, ca. 1760) could compare Gozzi’s bellows-wielding devil not only with Pulci but also with the exceptionally fast horse Chiari used to speed the journey of one of his characters.10 As Ted Emery’s essay in this volume argues, the staged version of Three Oranges took into account two kinds of spectators: “a ‘naïve’ viewer who is unaware of the author’s polemic with Goldoni and Chiari but has excellent knowledge of the play’s source” and one who is “able to decode the play’s allegory.”11 Gozzi captured both interpretative frameworks in his Reflective Analysis, but he makes the latter explicit through the self-referential clarifications that he interjects into his recollections of the premiere. Cultural references to contemporary Venice also entertained a variety of spectators. In the fiaba, Gozzi’s villains scheme to serve Tartaglia “panatella,” a dish made from broth and grated bread that was popular with dyspeptic Venetians. They planned to lace it with paper charms (brevi) written in Martellian verse, however, so the soup would upset rather than calm the Prince’s stomach. Like Chiari’s and Goldoni’s plays, which, as Gozzi described, “were written in Martellian verse and bored the audience to death with the monotony of the rhyme,” these paper charms would “slowly kill [Tartaglia] with their hypochondriacal effects.”12 Similarly, the King of Cups and the Knight of Cups—Tartaglia’s father and enemy Leandro, respectively—recall Venice’s

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  41

Figure 1.2. Sketch for a devil’s mask, by Venetian theatre designer Giuseppe Bertoja. Pencil, black ink, and watercolor (40 × 28 cm), undated. Album VI n. 0583, Correr Museum, Venice. 2020 © Archivio Fotografico - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

eighteenth-century gambling culture, as they are costumed as playing cards. Some audience members may also have decoded a reference to Maria Boiardo’s fifteenth-century epic poem Orlando in Love (Orlando innamorato), recognizing that the gambling reference also recalls Chiari. In Three Oranges, Fata Morgana, who supports Leandro’s evil plan to kill Tartaglia, is a caricature of Chiari, a “boorish and preposterous writer” (64). Unlike Boiardo’s Morgana, who distributes gold liberally, Gozzi’s Morgana is a coarse figure who plays cards avidly.13 Thus, Gozzi’s satirical overturning of Boiardo’s poem sharpens

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Figure 1.3. Folding card table for the game of “biribisse” (Venetian: “biribisso”), second half of 18th century. Museum of Carlo Goldoni’s House, Venice. Photo by the author.

the allegorical deployment of playing-card characters: while the Boiardo reference is intelligible only to readers of epic poetry, the allusion to Venetian gambling culture delivers the caricature of Chiari to a broader public (fig. 1.3). In the Colombani edition of Three Oranges, folk, literary, and cultural references are framed by Gozzi’s own explication of his work. In particular, he shapes the reader’s interpretation by illuminating the objects of his satire and by justifying his choices of style and subject. For example, he uses Martellian verse “to criticize Works by Signori Chiari and Goldoni” (51), many recent examples of which had been written in Martellian verse. Similarly, he justifies the legal jargon of Celio (a parody of Goldoni) and the bombastic language of Morgana (to parody Chiari) by writing, “The former used to be a lawyer in the Venetian court,” and “Signor Chiari boasted a pindaric and sublime style” (64). The Three Oranges plot, a fantastical fairy tale for children, further reinforces Gozzi’s allegorical parody. In the preface (fig. 1.4), Gozzi explains, “By choosing this first plot, which is taken from the most common of all the fairy tales that you tell children, and by using simple language, actions, and characters, which are clearly and intentionally simplified, I aimed to

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  43

jokingly ridicule . . . many . . . very plebeian and trivial works by Goldoni” (49–50). Gozzi’s recourse to a fairy tale is not coincidental. The story not only engaged “naïve” viewers who were familiar with the Venetian oral tradition but also simplified the interpretative labor for spectators who were able to decode the piece’s satire. In the self-referential frame of Three Oranges, Gozzi’s playful critiques of his competitors and his defense of a fairy tale as legitimate theatrical material develop into a clear articulation of his theatrical principles. Gozzi expresses his conception of theatre as a partly improvised, collaborative practice through the triumph of characters such as Tartaglia and Truffaldino and, as the reader is told, by endorsing “improvised masked comedy” as the cure for the “hypochondriacal conditions” caused by “melancholic comedies written in verse by Poets of the time” (51). Compared with plays by Goldoni and Chiari, Three Oranges might have seemed to be only a “magical trifle”; however, as Gozzi recollects, “the kind Audience wanted this fictional parody to be restaged for many nights in a row” (67). Thus, in Gozzi’s account, the San Samuele spectators confirmed the playwright’s instincts—they enjoyed the parody, fantastical plot, and “buffoonery and natural speech” of the “excellent players” (52). By the end of his Oranges “reflections,” Gozzi is confident and even self-congratulatory: “In future, great consequences will be found deriving from such frivolous beginnings” (67), he concludes, implying that the entertainment he provided with Three Oranges would have serious implications for Venetian theatre. Indeed, the self-referential and ironic frame around which Gozzi built his work had “great consequence” for many subsequent innovators, especially, as this book highlights, for Vsevolod Meyerhold and, through the Russian divertissement, for Sergei Prokofiev.

Note on the Translation The only complete English translation of Gozzi’s Reflective Analysis, by John Addington Symonds, dates back to 1890.14 All subsequent English-language versions are either fully scripted or, if they preserve the memoir format, cut most of Gozzi’s self-referential passages.15 The new translation that appears in this book is the full version of the fiaba as it appeared in the Colombani edition of 1772.16 I have annotated it abundantly to illuminate Gozzi’s references to Venetian theatrical battles, Venetian culture, and early modern Italian literature. I have not modernized Gozzi’s language but have attempted to maintain its unique syntax, jargon, and satirical tone. All text that appears in Gozzi only— that is, text that Vsevolod Meyerhold and his collaborators discarded from

Figure 1.4. Manuscript page from The Love of Three Oranges preface. Fondo Gozzi, “Prefazioni,” box 3, folder 1, p. 20. Courtesy of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MIBACT) - Marciana National Library, Venice. Reproduction prohibited.

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  45

their 1913 adaptation—is marked in bold font. This includes most of the fiaba’s self-referential frame. The polemical spirit of these omitted portions nevertheless influenced both Meyerhold’s and Prokofiev’s stylistic choices, despite their erasure from Meyerhold’s divertissement and, hence, from Prokofiev’s libretto. —Maria De Simone

Note on the Verse Translation The verse in Gozzi’s Three Oranges poses a unique translation challenge. On one hand, Gozzi’s rhymes and sing-song rhythm add considerably to the humor of these few but consciously scripted portions. On the other hand, the rhythm and syntax of Italian is different enough from English that it proved prohibitive to maintain rhyme and meter while preserving meaning and, because this book’s editors worked closely on comparative translations, retaining the frequent similarities across versions. We therefore opted for accentual rather than accentual-syllabic verse: instead of having a consistent fourteen syllables with seven accents per line, we used a variable number of syllables with a consistent pattern of either four accents per line (a common English nursery-rhyme rhythm) or four accents followed by three (a familiar rhythm for English ballads and hymns). Occasionally, we added words to preserve this rhythm, but the overall meaning remains unchanged. We have preserved Gozzi’s rhyme pattern throughout. —Dassia N. Posner

Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” A Theatrical Production in Three Acts by Count Carlo Gozzi Translated by Maria De Simone, with verse translation by Dassia N. Posner and Maria De Simone

I in my little vessel will go only as far as a small ship can ever fare, and, then, aside from what my fancy dreams, ‘tis my intention everyone to please; but different things will always be on Earth, as different as men’s intellects’ miens: some like the white, and some the black, and those who like a poem may not cherish prose. I know that often, as Morgante did, I maybe whirled my club a bit too much; but a good judge will tell that what is fit for private rooms is also fit for the alleys; besides, if with a giant long you stay, you’re bound to learn a tiny bit from him: a different clapper I have had to wield, now playing blindman’s bluff or striking shield. Pulci, Morgante17

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  47

PREFACE The Love of Three Oranges, a Fairy Tale for children that I adapted for the stage and with which I began to assist Sacchi’s Acting Troupe, was no more than a buffoonish caricatural parody of the works by Signori Goldoni and Chiari that were shown in theatres at that time.18 I sought no more than to test the Audience’s taste to find out whether they, like children, might like to see such a fairy-tale genre put on Stage. As this accurate reflective analysis will show, the performance was so audacious as to be nearly reckless. But the truth must not be silenced. Never was there seen a theatrical performance as deficient in dramatic roles and as loaded with buffoonery in all its parts as this scenario.19 It was staged by the Sacchi Troupe on January 25, 1761, at the San Samuele Theatre in Venice, with the same prologue that you will read at the opening of this analysis. The two Poets’ angry supporters made every effort to cause its failure. But the kind Audience supported it for seven showings at the end of Carnival that year. Every year since its premiere, it has been remounted but stripped of the caricatural critiques to the aforementioned Poets, the circumstances having changed as well as the motive. This analysis will account for its original version.

PROLOGUE A boy announces to the audience: Your servants of yore, this commedia troupe,   are bewildered and full of shame. They await you backstage, with their ears all a’droop,   faces sadder than when they first came. They’ve heard others say, “You’re a dried-up old group.”   The lies they feed on are to blame, for the plays they prefer have a strong scent of mold. It’s insulting, injustice, a swindle, all told. On all the Earth’s elements now do I swear   that in order to win back your heart, their own teeth and eyes they would willingly spare—   this warm message from them I impart. But careful, my dear ones, be cautious, take care,

48  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges   keep all your indignance apart for just a short while, as I tell you these words, then do as you please, if your anger I’ve stirred. We no longer know how to give you good cheer   and satisfy spectators more. What seems to be honored and lauded one year,   the next flops or is only ignored. The wheel of good taste seems somehow to veer   from a wind that blows it back and fore. We only know that when crowds do inflate, we’re no longer thirsty, our bellies we sate. Today with so many new plots and events,   new characters, loaded with action, the plays must be oozing with thrilling content,   with accidents, frequent distraction. We turn to each other with great puzzlement,   since fear is your new satisfaction. But since our poor bellies must truly be pleased, we plague you once more with these old comedies. We want to do all that we can on our part,   even Poets we may yet become, to win back your love and open your heart.   Be Poets? It’s already done. For ink we’ll just barter our pants at the mart,   For paper the cloaks we’ve had spun. And though we may not have much talent to sell, it’s enough if you like us—that does just as well. We want to stage new comedies, yes, we do,   great things never yet attained. Don’t question me, though, on when, where, or who   such new works we might have obtained. When rain falls after skies long have been blue,   you think of it as a new rain. But even when rain seems new once again, Rain is but water, and water is rain. Those things that now seem eternal do fade,   What’s head one day, now the tail shows.

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  49 In olden-day portraits a gown may be laid   that now has come back into mode. Here is my point: that love, taste, accolades   do beauty and pleasure bestow. But whatever it is that we swear back and fore, you never have seen these new plays here before. We have the scenarios right in our hands   that make the old children again. Parents who are kind, ever patient, at hand   Shall bring their young ones, I maintain. The vastly important will never attend.   Don’t worry, we will not complain. For we will not sniff at the money you’ve brought to see if its owner is learned or not. You’ll see startling things in a magical world   in which you will fully immerse, wonders of which you may only have heard,   but ne’er seen, oh no, quite the reverse. You’ll hear wild beasts, iron gates, and a bird,   applauded when speaking in verse. And if the poems are Martellian, we hope that you’ll clap for us gladly again. Your servants, the players, now soon will come out,   but first let me tell you the plot. Alas, I’m ashamed, I shiver, and doubt,   that for me boos and whistles you’ve got. It’s love for three oranges. I’ve said it. It’s out.   I do not regret it for aught. Imagine it now, my lives and my pillars, to be round the fire with your grandmothers.

In this Prologue, the little satire against the Poets who oppressed Sacchi’s Troupe of improvisors, which I chose to help, is clear enough, as is the intention also to introduce my series of children’s fairy tales to the stage, that the reader will excuse me from providing my thoughts on each of the various meanings scattered in this same Prologue. By choosing this first plot (argomento), which is taken from the most common of all the fairy tales that you tell children, and by using simple language, actions, and characters, which are clearly and intentionally

50  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

simplified, I aimed to jokingly ridicule Il Campiello, a Venetian Comedy, The House Servants, The Chioggia Scuffles, and many other very plebeian and trivial works by Goldoni.20

ACT I Silvio, King of Cups, monarch of an imaginary kingdom, whose clothing was an exact imitation of a playing-card king, bemoaned with Pantalone the misfortune of his only son Tartaglia, the crown Prince, who had been sick with an incurable illness for ten years.21 The medics diagnosed it as a hopeless hypochondriacal condition and abandoned him. The King wept bitterly. Pantalone, satirizing the medics, suggested the wondrous secrets of certain charlatans of the time.22 The King objected that they had already tried all possible means to no avail. Pantalone, trying to imagine the source of the illness, asked the King confidentially, not to be heard by the guards surrounding him, whether his Majesty might have been infected in his youth by some illness that could have been passed by blood to the crown Prince and was reducing him to that misery, and if mercury might be of any help.23 The King, all seriousness, defended his faithfulness to the Queen. Pantalone added that maybe, out of shame, the Prince was hiding some contagious illness. The King, speaking earnestly, reassured him that his own paternal examinations ruled out this hypothesis; that his son’s illness was simply a terminal hypochondriacal condition; that the medics predicted that if he did not laugh, he would be five feet under soon; that only laughter could be the evident sign of his recovery. An impossible thing. To this he added that to think of himself as a doddering old man, with his only son nearly dead and his niece, Princess Clarice, a bizarre, strange, and cruel girl, the inevitable heir to his kingdom, was causing him affliction. He felt sorry for his subjects and wept with great sobs, forgetting all his majesty. Pantalone consoled the King and reflected that if Prince Tartaglia’s recovery depended on him laughing, then the Court should not be kept in mourning. Festivities, games, masquerades, and performances might be declared. Truffaldino, distinguished at making people laugh and a real antidote against the effects of hypochondria, might be given the liberty to associate with the Prince. Pantalone had noticed the Prince’s inclination to confide in Truffaldino. It could well be that the Prince would laugh and recover. The King allowed himself to be persuaded and gave out the appropriate orders. He exited.24 Leandro, Knight of Cups, First Minister. This character was also dressed just like his playing-card likeness. Pantalone, aside, hinted at his suspicions

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  51

about Leandro’s treachery. The King commanded Leandro to arrange the festivities, games, and bacchanalias.25 He said that whoever could manage to make the Prince laugh would get a great reward. Leandro tried to dissuade the King from such a resolution, judging it even more harmful to the invalid. Pantalone insisted on his advice. The King reaffirmed his orders and exited. Pantalone rejoiced. He said, aside, that he noticed a desire in Leandro to bring about the Prince’s death. He followed the King. Leandro was stunned; he said that he could see some obstacles to his aspirations but did not know their origins. He exited. Princess Clarice, the King’s niece. Never has a Princess of such strange, bizarre, and decisive character as Clarice ever been seen on the stage. I must thank Signor Chiari for providing me with multiple examples in his Works for creating caricatural parodies of characters. Clarice, having made a deal with Leandro to marry and raise him to the throne, should she become the heiress to the Kingdom upon her cousin Tartaglia’s death, scolded Leandro for his phlegm, for waiting for her cousin to die from an illness as slow as hypochondria. Leandro cautiously defended himself, saying that Fata Morgana, his protector, had given him a few paper charms in Martellian verse to feed Tartaglia in his bread mush soup.26 These should slowly kill him with their hypochondriacal effects. This was said to criticize Works by Signori Chiari and Goldoni, which were written in Martellian verse and bored the audience to death with the monotony of the rhyme. Fata Morgana was the enemy of the King of Cups, as she lost much of her treasure on the King’s playing card. She was friend to the Knight of Cups because she won back some of her treasure on his card. She lived in a lake near the City. Smeraldina the Moorish Girl, who played the servant in this caricatural parody for the stage, was Leandro’s and Morgana’s go-between.27 Clarice flew into a rage on hearing the slow method being used to kill Tartaglia. Leandro added his own doubts as to the usefulness of the Martellian verse charms. He noticed a certain Truffaldino, a comical character, being shown into Court, he did not know by whom; if Tartaglia were to laugh, he would be cured of his ills. Clarice became agitated; she had seen this Truffaldino before; it was impossible to keep from laughing at the mere sight of him. The paper charms with Martellian verses in bold letters would be useless. From this discussion, the reader will see an explanation of improvised masked comedy’s utility against hypochondriacal conditions, as opposed to the melancholic comedies written in verse by Poets of the time.28 Leandro sent Brighella, his messenger, to Smeraldina the Moorish Girl to discover what the mystery of Truffaldino’s appearance meant and to ask for help. He exited.

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Brighella related on the hush that Truffaldino had been sent to Court by a certain Celio the Wizard, Morgana’s enemy and beloved by the King of Cups, for reasons similar to those aforementioned. Truffaldino was an antidote to the hypochondriacal condition caused by the Martellian-verse paper charms; he arrived at Court to preserve the King, his son, and all the people from the contagious illness of the aforementioned charms. Note that the animosity between Fata Morgana and Celio the Wizard bravely and allegorically represented the Theatrical battles that the Poets Signori Goldoni and Chiari were engaged in at that time and that these two characters, the Fairy and the Wizard, were caricatures of the two Poets. Fata Morgana was a caricature of Signor Chiari and Celio a caricature of Signor Goldoni. The news Brighella reported about the Truffaldino mystery threw Clarice and Leandro into great confusion. They proposed various secret death techniques for killing Truffaldino. Clarice suggested arsenic or a harquebus.29 Leandro, Martellian-verse paper charms in bread mush soup or real opium; Clarice said that Martellian verse and opium are two similar things and that, it seemed to her, Truffaldino had a stomach strong enough to digest such ingredients. Brighella added that Morgana, knowing that performances were ordered to amuse the Prince and make him laugh, had promised to appear and oppose his healing laughter with a curse that should send him to his death. Clarice exited to allow the commanded performances to be prepared. Leandro and Brighella exited to arrange them. The scene opened in the hypochondriac Prince’s room. This comical Prince Tartaglia was dressed in the most amusing clothing of an invalid. He sat in a large armchair. He leaned against a small table to his side that was loaded with vials, ointments, spittoons, and other paraphernalia appropriate to his condition. He bemoaned his unfortunate fate in a feeble voice. He recounted the treatments he had endured in vain. He explained the strange symptoms of his incurable illness, and as he had in hand only a scenario (argomento), this esteemed actor could not have played this character more fruitfully.30 His buffoonery and natural speech caused a continuous burst of universal laughter in the Auditorium. At this point, the most comical Truffaldino entered to make the invalid laugh. The improvised scene that these two excellent players made from the scenario could not have been merrier. The Prince looked favorably on Truffaldino, but no matter how many attempts he made, he could not laugh. He wanted to talk about his illness, wanted Truffaldino’s opinion. Truffaldino invented satirical disquisitions on physics, the most convoluted and funniest ever heard. Truffaldino sniffed the

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  53

Prince’s breath and caught the scent of indigestion from undigested Martel­ lian verses. The Prince coughed, wanted to spit. Truffaldino handed him a cup; he collected the spit, examined it, and found some putrid, stinky rhymes. This scene lasted for a third of an hour with continuous laughter from the audience. Musical instruments were heard, signaling the merry performances taking place in the Palace’s great courtyard. Truffaldino wanted to take the Prince out to the terrace to watch the performances. The Prince protested that it was impossible. They got into a ridiculous argument. The choleric Truffaldino threw the vials, cups, and everything that was used for Tartaglia’s illness out the window; Tartaglia shouted and wept like an imbecile. At last, Truffaldino forced the Prince onto his shoulders and carried him out to enjoy the performances, while the Prince howled as if he were being disemboweled. The scene opened on the Palace’s great courtyard. Leandro indicated that he had carried out the orders for the performances; that the somber populace, eager to laugh, had disguised themselves and would go to the courtyard for the festivities; that he had taken precautions to put many people in gloomy disguises, so as to increase the Prince-spectator’s melancholy; and that the time had come to open the courtyard so the people could enter. Morgana entered, transformed into a caricatural little old lady. Leandro was puzzled that such a thing should manage to enter through closed doors.31 Morgana revealed herself and said that she had come in that guise to destroy the Prince, as Leandro would see; the festivities should begin, she said. Leandro thanked her and called her Queen of Hypochondria. Morgana withdrew. The doors to the courtyard were opened wide. The King, the hypochondriac Prince all bundled up in fur, Clarice, Pantalone, the Guards, and, at last, Leandro appeared on the front terrace. The performances and festivities were just as you describe them when recounting the three oranges fairy tale to children. The people entered. There was a joust on horseback; Truffaldino, the marshal, prescribed comical gestures to the jousting Cavaliers. At each gesture, he turned to the terrace, asking his Majesty if the Prince was laughing. The Prince was weeping, complaining that the air bothered him and that the noise made his head rattle; he begged his fatherly Majesty to have him taken to his warm bed. The people flocked to two fountains, one gushing oil, the other wine, to provision themselves: some very trivial and plebeian quarrels ensued. Nothing made the Prince laugh. Morgana entered as a little old lady with a vessel to provision herself from the fountain. Truffaldino insulted her in a variety of ways; she fell down, legs up in the air. All these trivialities, typical of this trivial fairy tale, amused

54  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

the Audience with their novelty as much as The House Servants, Il Campiello, a Venetian Comedy, The Chioggia Scuffles, and all the other trivial works by Signor Goldoni.32 On seeing the little old lady fall, the Prince burst into prolonged, resonant laughter. He recovered from all his ills at once. Truffaldino won the reward, and upon hearing the comical Prince laugh, the Audience, delivered from the oppression caused by the infirmity of this unfortunate one, also laughed unreservedly.33 The entire Court was merry at this turn of events. Leandro and Clarice were sad. Morgana got up from the ground in a rage, emphatically rebuked the Prince, and hurled at him the following terrible, charmed, Chiarian curse: Open thine ears, barbarian; my voice thy heart shall invade.   By highest mountain or by wall, my wrath’s sound cannot be stayed. As lightning bolts split open the earth, so my words shall pierce thy breast.   As a towline pulls its boat by the bow, my curse thy nose shall wrest. This terrible curse! O terrible curse! To hear it is to die,   like a quadruped that would breathe in the sea, like a fish in flowery fields dry. To dread Pluto and flying Pindar, now, I pray and I implore   that three charmed oranges may become the things that you adore. Threats, prayers, and tears shall ever be senseless babble and empty desire.   Run now to the terrible oranges that you, O cursed one, must acquire.

Morgana vanished. The Prince was seized by a heightened frenzy of love for the three Oranges. He was led away, to the Court’s great confusion. What nonsense! What mortification for the two Poets! The Fairy tale’s first act ended at this point with universal applause.

ACT II In one of the Prince’s rooms, Pantalone, desperate and out of his mind, described the Prince’s agitated state—the result of the curse he had received. It was impossible to placate him. He wanted his father to give him a pair of iron shoes to wander the world and find the fateful Oranges, the source of his love. Pantalone was ordered to ask the King for these shoes under penalty of disfavor. The situation was very serious. It was a fitting subject (argomento) for the theatre. Pantalone jokingly satirized plots that were popular at that time. He exited to run to the King. The possessed Prince and Truffaldino entered. The Prince was annoyed because the iron shoes were delayed. Truffaldino made ridiculous requests. Tartaglia declared that he wanted to set off to acquire the three Oranges, which, according to his Grandmother’s stories,

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  55

were two thousand miles away, under the power of Creonta, a Sorceressgiantess.34 He called for his armor and ordered Truffaldino to arm himself, as he wanted him for his squire. A buffoonish scene followed between these two always comical characters. They armed themselves with breastplates, helmets, and long, large swords with utmost caricature. The King, Pantalone, and the guards entered. A guard carried a pair of iron shoes on a platter. This scene was played among the four characters with a gravity that in this case made it doubly ridiculous. With tragic and dramatic majesty, the father tried to dissuade the son from the perilous undertaking. He begged, threatened, turned pathetic. The possessed Prince insisted. He would sink into hypochondria again if they would not let him go. He went so far as to make brutal threats against his Father. The King was sorrowfully shocked. He reflected that his son’s disrespect was due to the example set by new Comedies. In one Comedy by Signor Chiari, a son was seen unsheathing his sword against his own father to kill him.35 Such examples abound in the new Comedies but are censored in this trifling fairy tale. The Prince would not calm down. Truffaldino put the iron shoes on the Prince. The scene ended with a quartet of whimperings, farewells, and sighs in dramatic verse. The Prince and Truffaldino set off. The King swooned and fell into a chair. Pantalone called for vinegar to help. Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella rushed in; they rebuked Pantalone for the clamor he was raising. Pantalone told them that it was because the King had swooned and the Prince had gone to his death on the arduous Oranges quest. Brighella responded that it was mere twaddle, like in the new Comedies, in which things go topsy-turvy for no reason. The King came to and did tragic exaggerations. He bewailed his son as if he were dead. He ordered the whole Court to wear mourning and left to shut himself in his study to finish out his days under the weight of grief. Pantalone declared that he would join the King in his weeping, that he would mix mutual tears in a single handkerchief, giving the new Poets subjects for endless episodes in Martellian verse, and followed the Monarch off. Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella, cheerful, praised Morgana. The bizarre Clarice wanted to agree on who would be in charge before she raised Leandro to the throne. In time of war, she wanted to command the army. In the event of a defeat, her charms would make the enemy Captain fall in love with her. In love and distracted by her enticements, he would approach her, and she would stick a knife in his stomach. This was a playful critique of Attila by Signor Chiari.36 Clarice wanted the right to distribute Court appointments any which way. Brighella requested, based on his merits, the

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position of Master of the King’s Revels. A dispute among the three on the choice of Theatrical entertainments followed.37 Clarice wanted tragic Performances with characters who hurl themselves out of windows and off towers without breaking their necks, and other such astonishing situations—namely, Works by Signor Chiari. Leandro wanted Comedies of character—that is to say, Works by Signor Goldoni. Brighella suggested improvised masked Comedy, suitable for the innocent entertainment of the people. Clarice and Leandro were angry.38 They did not want such bumbling buffoonades and obscene rot in an enlightened century.39 They departed. Brighella gave a pathetic speech to have pity on Sacchi’s Acting Troupe without naming it, but making himself clear in his reference. He pitied the honorable, commendable, and oppressed Troupe, which had been reduced to losing the favor of the same Audience that once had adored them and whom they had entertained for a long time. He exited with the applause of the Audience, who thoroughly understood the true meaning of his speech. The scene opened in the desert. We see Celio the Wizard, Prince Tartaglia’s protector, tracing circles.40 He summoned the Devil Farfarello. Farfarello entered and spoke with a dreadful voice in Martellian verse: Who calls me here from my dreadful, dark hole?   Are you a real Wizard or theatre role? If you’re from the Theatre, it’s needless to say,   imps, Wizards, and Spirits are passé to play.

The two Poets had declared that they want to leave Masks, Wizards, and Devils out of their plays. Celio replied in prose that he was a real wizard. Farfarello added: Be what you will, but if onstage you play, in Martellian verses all this must you say.

Celio swore at the Devil, saying that he meant to speak in prose in his own fashion. He inquired whether Truffaldino, whom he had artfully sent to the Court of the King of Cups, had had any effect on Tartaglia, and whether he had been forced to laugh and recover from his hypochondriacal condition. The devil replied He laughed and was cured, but Morgana your foe   spoiled it with a curse and redoubled the woe. The Prince, all excited, his cheeks now on fire,   craves three magic Oranges with fiercest desire. The Fool travels with him. An imp dark as pitch,

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  57   blows them on their way, from Morgana the witch. A thousand miles they have flown and now shortly will land   at Creonta’s castle. Their death is at hand.

The Devil disappeared. Celio railed against his enemy Morgana. He explained the great danger Tartaglia and Truffaldino were in, as they were sent to Creonta’s castle, not far from here, where the three fateful Oranges were held. He withdrew to make the necessary preparations for saving two worthy persons of great use to society. Celio the Wizard, who represented Signor Goldoni in this trifling story, was not supposed to have protected Tartaglia and Truffaldino. This is a mistake worthy of criticism, if a devilish thing like this scenario ever is worthy of reprimand. At that time, Signor Goldoni and Signor Chiari were enemies in their poetic art. Through Morgana and Celio, I wished to caricature the adverse genius of their two talents, and I did not trouble myself to double the characters in order to save myself from criticism in this immoderate capriccio. Tartaglia and Truffaldino entered, armed as aforementioned, running very fast. A Devil with a bellows made them run faster by blowing at them from behind.41 The Devil stopped blowing and disappeared. The two travelers fell on the ground, due to the pace at which they were running when the wind stopped. I am infinitely obliged to Signor Chiari for the very successful effect that this parody with the devil created. In his scenes from the Aeneid, he made his Trojans make titanic journeys in a single scene, and without my Devil with the bellows.42 This writer, who pedantically insulted all others for irregularities, attributed particular privileges to himself.43 In one scene in his Ezelino, Tyrant of Padua, Ezelino is a prisoner, and a Captain is sent to conquer Treviso, which is subjected to the tyrant’s army. In the following scene in the same act, the Captain returns triumphantly.44 He has covered more than thirty miles, won Treviso, and killed the oppressors. He justified his impossible achievement with a detailed chronicle of the sturdiness of his most excellent horse. Tartaglia and Truffaldino had to cover two thousand miles to reach Creonta’s castle. My Devil with the bellows explained their journey better than Abbot Chiari’s horse. These two always most comical characters got up from the ground, bemused by the situation and marveling at the wind blowing from behind. They gave an exorbitant geographical description of the lands, mountains, rivers, and seas that they passed. The wind having ceased, Tartaglia concluded

58  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

that the three Oranges were close. Truffaldino, gasping and hungry, asked the Prince whether he had brought with him a supply of coins or bills. Tartaglia scorned all these petty and useless requests; he saw a castle on a mountain nearby; he thought that it was the castle of Creonta, guardian of the Oranges. He set out; Truffaldino followed him, hoping to find food. Celio the Wizard entered; he frightened the two characters; in vain, he tried to dissuade the Prince from the perilous undertaking. He described insurmountable dangers, the kind you tell children with this fairy tale, but Celio described them with wide eyes and a terrible voice, as if they were all grand things. The dangers consisted of an iron gate coated with the rust of time, a hungry dog, a well rope half rotted with damp, and a Baker-woman who, having no broom, swept the oven with her breasts. The Prince, not at all intimi­ dated by those terrible things, wanted to go to the castle. Celio, seeing that he was determined, supplied him with magic tallow to grease the bolt, some bread to throw to the hungry dog, and a bunch of brushes to give to the Baker-woman who swept out the oven with her breasts. He reminded them to stretch the rope out in the sun and pull it out of the damp. He added that if by lucky chance they managed to kidnap the three guarded Oranges, they should leave the Castle immediately and remember not to open any of the Oranges, except by a source of water. He promised that if they were to successfully escape uninjured with the kidnapping accomplished, he would send the same devil with the bellows who, blowing from behind, would push them back to their country in a moment’s time. He recommended them to Heaven and left. Tartaglia and Truffaldino took the objects they were given and set out for the Castle. At this point, a curtain depicting the Palace of the King of Cups was lowered. What an irregularity! Nay, what misapplied criticism! Two little scenes followed, one between Smeraldina the Moorish Girl and Brighella, who rejoiced at Tartaglia’s demise, and the other with Fata Morgana, who angrily ordered Brighella to warn Clarice and Leandro that Celio had been helping Tartaglia in his endeavor. Devil Draghinazzo had told her so. She ordered Smeraldina to follow her to her lake, where Tartaglia and Truffaldino were bound to arrive if they escaped Creonta’s clutches safely, and where Morgana would scheme another trap. They exited, perplexed. The scene opened on Creonta’s Castle courtyard. I had the opportunity to recognize, with the opening of this scene that contained entirely ridiculous objects, the great power that the marvelous has on humankind. The upstage gateway with its iron grillwork, the hungry dog that howled and roamed, the well with a coiled-up rope, and the Baker-woman who swept

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  59

the oven with two very long breasts kept the entire Theatre in a silence and attention that was no less rapt than during the best scenes of Works by our two Poets. Outside the gate we saw Prince Tartaglia and Truffaldino working away at greasing the gate’s bolt with the magic tallow, and lo! the gate swung wide open. Great wonder! They entered. The dog, barking, attacked them. They threw it some bread, and it grew calm. Great marvel! While Truffaldino, filled with fear, stretched the rope out in the sun and gave the brushes to the Baker-woman, the Prince entered the Castle and came back out happily with the three enormous abducted Oranges. The dire events did not end thus. The sun grew dark, the earth quaked, and loud thunderclaps were heard. The Prince handed the Oranges to Truffaldino, who was trembling badly. They prepared to flee. From the Castle came a horrendous voice, which, just like in the text of the children’s fairy tale, shouted thus; it was Creonta herself: O Baker, dear Baker, endure not my shame. Seize them by the feet and throw them in the flame.

The Baker-woman, a faithful guardian of the fairy-tale text, replied: Not me: now recall that for months and for years my white breasts I wore out in pain and in tears. Cruel witch, you gave me not even one brush. They gave me a bunch. May they all go untouched.

Creonta, in accordance with the text, shouted: Oh rope, my dear rope, hang them.

And the rope, in accordance with the text, replied: Cruel witch, now recall that for months and for years you left me abandoned, all filthy, in tears. Long lost in the damp, you left me out of view. They hung me to dry. Let them go now, adieu!

Creonta, ever faithful to the text, shouted: O dog, loyal guard, tear these scoundrels apart.

The dog, a diligent guardian of the text, replied: How can I? Creonta, for you have no heart.

60  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Long months and long years I served you without bread. In vain do you shout, for my hunger they’ve fed.

Creonta, in accordance with the text, shouted: Shut tight, iron gate, and crush these vile thieves.

The gate, in accordance with the text, replied: O cruelest Creonta, in vain are your pleas. Long months and long years you left us in sad rust. They greased us, and now it is them that we trust.

It was a pleasant sight: Tartaglia and Truffaldino being astonished at the Poets’ eloquence. They were surprised to hear even Baker-women, Ropes, Dogs, and Gates speaking in Martellian verse. They thanked those objects for their devotion. The audience was immensely delighted by those admirable and childish innovations, and I confess, I laughed at myself, realizing how, against my will, my soul humbled itself to delight in such childish images that brought me back to my childhood days. The very tall giantess Creonta entered in her nightgown.45 Tartaglia and Truffaldino fled at the terrible sight. Creonta, gesticulating despairingly, spoke these desperate Martellian verses and did not forget to invoke Pindar, with whom Signor Chiari boasted he had close brotherly ties:46 You unfaithful servants, O Dog, Gate, and Rope,   Most wicked of Bakers, you traitorous folk! Sweet Oranges! Who stole you right out of my bowls?   O my dearest Oranges, my lives and my souls. I’m bursting with rage. Ah, my breast feels each blow,   the Elements, Chaos, the Sun and Rainbow. O thundering Jove, I can’t live, so goodbye.   From head to toe rend me, strike down from the sky. Who’s helping me, devils? Who’s setting me free?   Here comes my friend lightening, to burn and soothe me.

No other caricatural parody could explain Signor Chiari’s emotions and style better than this last verse. Lightning struck and reduced the giantess to ash. Thus ended the second act, which was favored by louder applause from the Audience then the first. I began to feel less at fault for my audacity.

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ACT III The scene opened at a lake, Fata Morgana’s dwelling place. A large tree was visible; beneath it was a large rock shaped like a seat. Several boulders were scattered on the meadow, as well. Smeraldina, whose accent was that of an Italianized Turk, was on the lakeshore awaiting Fata’s orders. She ran out of patience and called out. Fata Morgana rose up from the lake. She told of her journey to Hell, where she learned that Truffaldino and Tartaglia, helped by Celio, were coming victorious with the three Oranges, pushed by some Devil’s bellows. Smeraldina reproached Fata for her ignorance in magic; she was angry. Morgana told her to spare her breath. Due to a mishap she had plotted, Truffaldino would arrive separately from the Prince. A magical hunger and thirst would plague him. As the three Oranges were in his custody, great disasters would ensue. She gave Smeraldina the Moorish Girl two hexed hairpins.47 She told her that she would see a fair maiden sitting on the rock beneath the tree. That would be Tartaglia’s chosen bride. Smeraldina was to contrive to stick one of the hairpins into the maiden’s head. The maiden would turn into a dove. Smeraldina would sit on the rock in her place. Tartaglia would marry her instead, and she would be Queen. That night, while sleeping with her husband, she would stick the other hairpin into Tartaglia’s head; he would turn into a beast, and the throne would thus be left vacant for Leandro and Clarice. The Moorish Girl raised some doubts regarding this venture, especially the fact that she was known at Court. But Morgana’s magical art would smooth any obstacle. Morgana led the Moorish Girl away to further instruct her and because she saw Truffaldino coming, blown by the infernal wind. Truffaldino entered, running, with the Devil blowing him forward and the Oranges in a sack. The Devil disappeared. Truffaldino recounted that the Prince fell down somewhere not far off because of the speed of his running; he would wait for him. He sat down. A prodigious hunger and thirst assailed him. He concluded that he should eat one of the three Oranges. He felt remorseful, enacted a tragic scene. At last, plagued and blinded by the prodigious hunger, he resolved to make a great sacrifice. He reasoned that he could make up for the damage with a couple of coins. He cut open an Orange. What a miracle! Out of it came a maiden dressed in white, who, a faithful follower of the fairy tale text, immediately said: Give me to drink, unfeeling one. O misery. I shall die. I’m dying of thirst. O quickly, cruel one. Alas, God. Hear me cry!

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She fell to the ground, struck by a mortal languor. Truffaldino did not remember Celio’s orders not to open the Oranges except near a water source. Being a fool by instinct, and in despair from the incredible turn of events, he did not see the nearby lake; the only reserve plan that came to mind was to cut open another Orange to rescue the maiden dying of thirst with its juice. Then and there, he did the beastly deed of cutting open another Orange, and lo! another beautiful maiden came out with her text on her lips, thus: Alas, fine tyrant, please give me to drink, or it shall mean my death. I’m dying of thirst. O God. I faint. I cannot draw a breath.

She fell down like the other. Truffaldino showed strong agitation. He was beside himself, desperate. One of the maidens continued in a feeble voice: O cruelest of fates! Shall I die of thirst? I am dying! I am dead!

She breathed her last. The other continued: I’m dying now, O barbarous stars. None will comfort my deathbed.

She breathed her last. Truffaldino wept, speaking tenderly to them. He resolved to cut open the third Orange to help them. He was about to cut it open when Tartaglia entered in a rage and threatened him. Truffaldino, frightened, abandoned the Orange and fled. His stupefaction and the reflections that this grotesque Prince made about the two Orange peels and the two maidens’ corpses are inexpressible. In such situations, the comical masks of improvised Comedy make exaggerated physical and facial expressions and lazzi that are so amusing that no ink can express or Poet surpass them. After a long and ridiculous soliloquy, Tartaglia saw two peasants passing by and ordered them to give the two maidens an honorable burial. The peasants took them away. The Prince turned to the third Orange. To his surprise, it had grown prodigiously to the size of an enormous pumpkin. He saw the lake nearby, remembered Celio’s words, and judged the place suitable for opening it; he opened it with his sword, and out stepped a tall and beautiful maiden, dressed in thin white cotton, who, fulfilling the text of the solemn scenario exclaimed: Who pulls me from my deepest core? This thirst brings me mortal pain.   Give me to drink, ah, quickly, now, or you will mourn me in vain!

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  63

The Prince comprehended the reason for Celio’s orders. He was in a quandary, as he did not have anything to hold the water. The situation did not allow for attention to niceties. He removed one of his iron shoes, ran to the lake, filled it with water and, begging forgiveness for the impropriety of the cup, gave relief to the maiden, who rose up strong and thanked him for the aid. She told him that she was the daughter of Concul, King of the Antipodes, and that along with her two sisters, she had been imprisoned by Creonta’s cruel spell within the peels of an orange for reasons as absurd as the circumstance itself. A comical love scene followed. The Prince vowed to marry her. The city was close by. But the Princess did not have appropriate clothing. The Prince bade her wait sitting on the rock in the shade of the tree. He would return with rich clothing and the whole Court to retrieve her. That settled, they parted with sighs. Smeraldina the Moorish Girl, astonished at what she had seen, entered. She saw the shadow of the fair maiden in the water of the lake. There was no danger that she would not diligently execute what is told in the Fairy tale about this Moorish girl. She did not speak Italianized Turkish anymore. Morgana had put a Tuscan Devil into her tongue. She defied all the Poets to speak with greater literary correctness.48 She came upon the young Princess, whose name was Ninetta. Smeraldina flattered her, offered to fix her hair, moved closer to her, and betrayed her. She stuck one of the two magical hairpins into the princess’s head. Ninetta turned into a dove and flew away. Smeraldina sat in her place, awaiting the Court. She prepared to betray Tartaglia that night with the other hairpin. The Spectators had been informed by their nurses and grandmothers of all these marvels mixed with ridicule, and of the childish simplicity of these scenes, since their earliest years. They were deeply immersed in the subject, and their souls were strongly captivated by the daring novelty of seeing such an accurate representation of it in the Theatre. To the sound of a march, the King of Cups, the Prince, Leandro, Clarice, Pantalone, Brighella, and the whole Court arrived to ceremonially retrieve the Princess bride. The new likeness of the Moorish Girl, whom they came upon but did not recognize due to Morgana’s witchcraft, infuriated the Prince. The Moorish Girl swore that she was the Princess who has been left there. The Prince did not fail to provoke laughter with his despair. Leandro, Clarice, and Brighella were merry. They saw the source of the mystery. The King of Cups

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grew serious; he obliged his son to keep his princely word and marry the Moorish Girl. He threatened him. The Prince was all sadness but submitted with many buffoonish grimaces. Musical instruments played. The procession moved to the Court to celebrate the wedding. Truffaldino did not go with the Court. He had obtained the Prince’s forgiveness for his errors. He was appointed to the office of Royal Chef. He was in the kitchen preparing the wedding banquet. The scene following the departure of the Court was the boldest in this playful parody. The two claques supporting Signor Chiari and Signor Goldoni, which were present in the Theatre, sensing the biting elements of the parody, tried by any means to stir up the indignation of the audience, yet all their efforts were vain. I have said that the character of Celio the Wizard was a likeness of Signor Goldoni, and Morgana, of Signor Chiari. The former used to be a lawyer in the Venetian court. His manner of writing was influenced by the writing style of lawyers in that respectable court. Signor Chiari boasted a pindaric and sublime style.49 But you will be patient with me if I say this, there never existed a more boorish and preposterous writer in this century who could surpass Signor Chiari’s disproportionate blunders.50 Celio and Morgana, adversarial and furious upon meeting, made the scene that I report here in full, with the same dialogue with which it was played.51 Consider that if parodies do not spill over into caricature, they do not achieve the desired purpose; thus, be indulgent with this capriccio, which was born of a playful and purely joyful soul (anima allegra), and in fact is essentially very amicable to Signori Chiari and Goldoni.52 Celio (entering impetuously, to Morgana): Most wicked of witches, I know all your deceits, but Pluto will assist me. Infamous witch, damnable witch! Morgana: You would speak to me like this, you charlatan wizard? Don’t jab at me, or I will give you a rebuff in Martellian verse that will make you die yawning. Celio: Me, you insolent witch? I’ll give you bread for focaccia.53 I challenge you to a Martellian verse duel. En garde: Attempted crimes, each one in vain, shall always be detected   And treacherous conniving deeds shall ever be corrected. To wit, all linked herewith to the destructive and malicious   Morgana with her foul, imprudent witchcraft so pernicious. All evidence of machinations criminal, frustrated,   Shall be convicted, thwarted, laid to waste, incarcerated.

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  65 Morgana: O the bad verses!54 I parry, worthless wizard. First the beauteous golden rays of Phoebus, heaven blest,   shall be transformed to vile lead and East shall change to West; the waning moon will overcome her beauteous, silver horns;   th’celestial Kingdom change its place with all the stars of morn; first the babbling rivers of clear crystal change their course   to mount into the clouds above on Pegasus the horse; before thou, hateful servant of dread Pluto’s deepest realm   shall thwart the course of my well-rosined ship’s great sail and helm. Celio: O Fata, bloated like a bladder! I counter parry. As per my opening, I’ll win the verdict in this suit.   You are the one whose guilt shall be unearthed in this dispute. Princess Ninetta you have turned into a dove, I know,   but she shall be restored again, all evidence does show. And once I prove your liability, then comes the sentence.   To poverty: Clarice and Leandro, unrepentant, while Smeraldina, she whose merits have been misconstrued   shall feel the flames on her behind, this is her justice due. Morgana: O clumsy, clumsy rhymester! Mark my words, I will terrify you. On feathers, prideful Icarus ascends to heights untold,   then plunges to the waves, at once incautious, babbling, bold. Mount Ossa’s placed on Pelion, Olymp on Ossa’s mount.   Intrepid Enceladus, who would shake the heavens’ fount sends Icarus down, plunging, to the salty, foaming splash.   To Enceladus Jove hurls lightning thundering to ash.55 Clarice shall mount the throne, for your arrogance severe   And Prince Tartaglia, like Actaeon, become a deer.56 Celio: (aside) She wants to overpower me with poetic excess. If she thinks she can trap me in a sack, she is mistaken. I’ll prove my case against your crimes and rebut your reply.   Soon now, foul witch, I’ll raise a sound objection to your lies. Morgana: From Kings of Cups may this great land regain its liberty. (She exits.) Celio (shouting after her): I object again, with prejudice, and you will pay my fees. (He exits.)

The next scene opened in the royal kitchen. Never has a royal kitchen looked more miserable than this one. The rest of the Production was but a faithful staging of the remainder of the Fairy tale, to which the spectators’ souls were already very drawn.

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The parody revolved simply around the pettiness and triviality of some of the works of the two Poets, and the vilification of theatrical roles that their plays entail.57 Exaggerated mendicity, improperness, and pettiness gave the parody its edge. Truffaldino was seen in the process of skewering a roast. In despair, he related that, because there was no roaster in that kitchen, he was turning the roast himself; that a dove had appeared in the little window; and that they had exchanged the following dialogue. The words are from the Fairy tale text. The dove said, “Good morning, cook of the kitchen.” And he replied, “Good morning, little white dove.” The dove added, “I pray to Heaven that you may fall asleep, that the roast may burn, that the Moorish Girl, that ugly mug, may not eat it.”58 A prodigious drowsiness assailed him; he fell asleep, and the roast burned to cinders. This incident happened twice. Two roasts were burnt. He hastily put a third roast on the fire. The dove appeared again, and the dialogue was repeated. The wondrous slumber overcame Truffaldino. This funny character did all he could to stay awake; his lazzi were most comical. He fell asleep, and the third roast was burned to cinders. The audience should be asked why they liked this scene so very much. Pantalone arrived, shouting. He woke up Truffaldino. He said that the King was angry because they had eaten the soup, the boiled meat, and the liver, but the roast had not appeared. Long live a Poet’s courage. This surpassed the pettiness of the brawls over pumpkins in Signor Goldoni’s The Chioggia Scuffles.59 Truffaldino told him about the incident with the dove. Pantalone did not believe in such marvels. The dove appeared and repeated the wondrous words. Truffaldino was about to fall asleep. These two characters chased the dove, which flew fluttering about the kitchen. This chase interested the audience very much. The dove was caught, put on the table, and caressed. A little bump was felt on its head: it was the magic hairpin. Truffaldino pulled it out and, lo! The dove turned into Princess Ninetta! All were most astonished. His Majesty the King of Cups appeared; with Kingly gravity and scepter in hand, he rebuked Truffaldino for the delayed roast and for the shame that someone of his stature had endured before guests. Great superiority of the author! Prince Tartaglia entered and recognized his Ninetta. He was mad with joy. Ninetta briefly recounted what happened to her; the King was astounded. The Moorish Girl could be seen with the rest of the Court, looking for His Majesty in the kitchen. With haughty bearing, the King ordered the Prince and Princess to retire to the scullery. He designated

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the kitchen hearth as his throne and sat down with regal gravity. The Moorish Girl and the whole Court arrived. The King, faithful guardian of the fairy tale, presented the case in all its details and enquired what punishment the culprits deserved. All, in confusion, said their opinion. The King in his rage sentenced Smeraldina the Moorish Girl to the flames. Celio appeared. He exposed Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella’s covert guilt. They were sentenced to cruel banishment. The Prince and Princess were summoned from the scullery. All were joyful. Celio urged Truffaldino to keep the diabolical Martellian verse away from the royal pots and instead to make his King and Queen laugh. He did not let the fairy tale end without its usual finale, which all children knew by heart: for wedding feasts, pickled turnip greens, shaved mice, skinned cats, and so forth. And as newspapermen were wont to pay endless tributes to new Works by Signor Goldoni, we concluded with a warm recommendation for the audience to intercede with the newspapermen in favor of this magical trifle. I was not to blame. The kind Audience wanted this fictional parody to be restaged for many nights in a row. The audience attended in droves. The Sacchi company began to recover from its oppression. In future, great consequences will be found deriving from such frivolous origins that all those who know Italy and are not congenial enthusiasts of French refinement will not judge by comparing them with parodies from that nation.

Notes Epigraph: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager (1818). Translated by Dassia N. Posner, from E. T. A Hoffmann, Sobranie sochinenie vol. 1. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991. http://lib.ru/GOFMAN/dirteatr.txt. Accessed December 23, 2005. 1. Most prominently, The Serpent Woman, The Love of Three Oranges, and Turandot were translated and adapted into opera librettos by Wagner (The Fairies, 1833), Prokofiev (1921), and Puccini (1926), respectively. For other opera adaptations of Gozzi, see Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 186–87. 2. The only surviving manuscript portions are an undated prologue with a draft of Morgana’s curse on the back and the complete document that Gozzi prepared for Colombani; C. Gozzi, Opere. Whereas the latter is already in “reflective” form (Marciana Library, 1930 purchase: codici It. IX, 680–83 = 12070–73), the former could potentially be a fragment from an older, now lost scenario (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Fondo Gozzi, Gozzi 3.3.–cc. 1r-164r: Prologhi e congedi teatrali, 1–2). 3. See Emery’s essay in this book (chap. 5). 4. For recent versions, see Hillary DePiano, Love of Three Oranges; and Doreen Heard, Love for Three Oranges.

68  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 5. G. Gozzi, Scritti scelti, 412; Basile, Il Pentamerone, 2:195–208. 6. Angelo Fabrizi’s analysis of six versions of the fairy tale underscores the divergence of Gozzi’s play from Basile’s Tale of Tales and highlights affinities to northern Italian folk tales. Fabrizi, “Carlo Gozzi,” 337. 7. Pulci, Morgante, canto XXV, sts. 204–211 (616–18). 8. Alighieri, Inferno, canto XXI (143). 9. Fabrizi, “Carlo Gozzi,” 337. 10. Bartoli, Notizie istoriche, 2:28. 11. See Emery’s essay in this book (chap. 5). 12. Translation from 51, this book. Further citations from the fiaba translation are given in the text. 13. Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, bk. I, canto XXV, st. 5 (210). 14. C. Gozzi, Reflective Analysis, 112–46. 15. DiGaetani (Carlo Gozzi), DePiano (Love of Three Oranges), and Heard (Love for Three Oranges) adapted the fiaba by adding dialogue throughout. 16. Alberto Beniscelli’s edition of Fiabe teatrali is our annotated reference text; C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali. 17. English translation of Pulci reproduced from Tusiani’s translation; Pulci, Morgante, 759, esp. canto xxvii. Gozzi misnumbers Pulci’s cantos; they are instead sts. 140 and 142 in canto xxviii. The penultimate couplet may refer to the contributions of Antonio Sacchi’s company to Gozzi’s fiabe. “If with a giant long you stay, / you’re bound to learn a tiny bit from him,” meaning, if you associate with actors, you learn from them. Gozzi’s actor-collaborations may also have facilitated his stylistic transition from the Granelleschi writings to fantastical dramatic pieces—the latter may be the “different clapper” he “has had to wield” in the Venetian theatre wars. 18. “Caricatural parody” is translated from the Italian parodia caricata. Caricata literally means “loaded,” but it also has connotations of caricature. Gozzi’s critique of Chiari and Goldoni combines parody and caricature; he both imitates their writing style (parody) and exaggerates it through ridiculous distortions (caricature). 19. In Italian, scenico abbozzo. This likely referred to a commedia dell’arte canovaccio, a written outline for stage improvisation. In contrast, parts to be memorized (especially the Martellian verse) appear to have been fully scripted, as a recently discovered manuscript draft of Morgana’s curse suggests. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Fondo Gozzi, Gozzi 3.3.–cc. 1r-164r: Prologhi e Congedi Teatrali, L’Amore delle tre melarance, 1–2. 20. Il Campiello, a Venetian Comedy (Il Campiello, 1756), The House Servants (Le Massere, 1755), and The Chioggia Scuffles (Le Baruffe Chiozzotte, 1762) are plays by Carlo Goldoni known as tabernariae, or plays about common people and topics. In the 1772 Colombani edition of his fiabe, Gozzi (Opere) anachronistically referred to The Chioggia Scuffles, which opened exactly one year after Three Oranges, as Pietro Chiari announced in the Gazzetta Veneta (Venetian gazette) on January 23, 1762. 21. Almost every region in Italy had its own traditional deck of playing cards. They differed in color and style, but the suits were the same: cups, golden coins, swords, and rods. 22. In Italian, the word ciarlatano referred to street vendors who sold “magic medicines” and extracted teeth. In contemporary Italian, the word charlatan has acquired more derogatory tones. 23. Pantalone alludes here to syphilis, which was treated with mercury. 24. Gozzi used the verbs entrare (enter) and uscire (exit) interchangeably to note stage entrances and exits. I translate according to the action required by the logic of the plot.

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  69 25. “Bacchanalias” is translated from the Italian baccanale, which in ancient Rome referred to the orgiastic cult of the god of wine, Baccus. The word came to describe any loud, festive gathering involving food and drink. 26. For his Fata Morgana, Gozzi was likely inspired by Matteo Maria Boiardo’s fifteenthcentury epic poem Orlando in Love (Orlando Innamorato), although Morgana’s origins can be traced to Morgan le Fay, a Welsh fairy-tale character dating back to the medieval period. In Boiardo’s story, Fata Morgana distributed gold, whereas in Gozzi’s parodic overturning, she is an avid player of cards; Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, bk. I, canto XXV, st. 5 (210). In Italian, paper charms are brevi. I am indebted to Domenico Pietropaolo for the following definition: a “breve” was a ribbon of parchment or paper with printed or handwritten protection spells on it. It would be worn as part of a necklace underneath clothing to keep evil spirits away. Regarding bread mush soup, in Venetian dialect, the word panadele refers to a traditional dish made of broth and breadcrumbs. The expression “stare a panadele” came to mean “eat like a sick person”; Boerio and Manin, Dizionario del dialetto veneziano, 401. 27. In Italian, mora simply means “dark.” The adjective was used indistinctly for people of North African descent or of dark complexion (who were considered less attractive for the beauty standards of the time). As Gozzi specifies at the beginning of act III, Smeraldina was a “Turk,” a vague ethnic descriptor referring to people of Muslim faith. For eighteenth-century Europeans, Turks were not residents of contemporary Turkey but an ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse group residing within the Ottoman Empire. At the time, this empire included parts of North Africa (contemporary Algeria, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and northern Egypt), Greece, the Balkans, and contemporary Syria and Iran. It is thus hard to pinpoint Smeraldina’s skin tone and geographic provenance. Nevertheless, it is clear that she plays the fiaba’s servetta. On representations of race, gender, and foreign labor in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European empires, see Viktus, “Turning Turk”; Linebaugh and Rediker, I ribelli dell’Atlantico. 28. The word “masks” here refers to commedia tipi fissi (stock characters) and to literal masks. 29. A harquebus (also spelled arquebus) was the first gun, resembling a rifle and fired from the shoulder or a support. It was invented in Spain in the mid-fifteenth century. See “harquebus” in Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/technology/harquebus. 30. In Italian, siccom’egli eveva il solo argomento della scena: Symonds incorrectly translates this phrase as “the eminent actor, who sustained this scene alone.” The word argomento refers, however, to a written scenario from which the actor playing Truffaldino would improvise, not to the scene. Gozzi, Reflective Analysis, 120. 31. Gozzi literally refers to Morgana as quell’oggetto (that object). 32. Gozzi employs the adjective triviale (trivial) for both his play and works by Goldoni. When referring to Goldoni, the adjective should be read as meaning “everyday” or “popular.” When referring to his own play, triviale describes the “unimportant” fairy-tale subject. 33. The “audience” here may refer to the fictional spectators at the royal festivities, the spectators of Three Oranges, or both. 34. Creonta derives from Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, which Gozzi quotes in his epigraph. In both Three Oranges and Morgante, Creonta is the giant-guardian of an enchanted and impenetrable castle. Pulci, Morgante, canto XX, st. 19 (422). 35. Gozzi refers to Chiari’s The Betrayed Mother (La Madre Tradita), which premiered in 1760. 36. Despite the play’s popularity, as attested in Francesco Bartoli’s Historical News about Italian Actors (Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani), no script survives for Pietro Chiari’s Attila. Bartoli, Notizie istoriche, 2:28. 37. In Italian, contrasto in terzo: a witty repartee among three characters.

70  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 38. Literally, choleric. 39. In Italian, goffo means both “clumsy” and “foolish.” 40. A reference to the esoteric practice of using a stick to trace circles on the ground to trap the devil. 41. This is another reference to Pulci’s Morgante. In canto XXV, the devil Astaroth speeds the heroes’ journey from Egypt to Roncisvalle by making their horses fly like dragons. Pulci, Morgante, canto XXV, sts. 204–211 (616–18). 42. Shortly before the premiere of Three Oranges, Chiari wrote Aeneas’s Journey after the Destruction of Troy, (La Navigazione di Enea dopo la Distruzione di Troia, 1760) and Aeneas in Lazio (Enea nel Lazio, 1761) as part of a Virgilian trilogy that he began in 1759. Chiari, Commedie in versi, vol. 8. 43. Likely a reference to Chiari’s Historical and Critical Considerations on Ancient and Modern Theatre (Dissertazione Storica e Critica sopra il Teatro Antico e Moderno), the preface to his collection of plays published in ten volumes by Giuseppe Bettinelli from 1754–74. Chiari, Commedie in versi, vol. 1. 44. The script for this play has not survived, but its staging is confirmed by Bartoli, Notizie istoriche, 2:28. 45. In Italian, andriané or andrienne, a ladies’ nightgown with a train that became popular after actress Therèse Dancourt wore it the 1704 production of Andrienne, an adaptation of Terenzio’s Andria. Migliorini and Ghinassi, Storia della lingua italiana, 715. 46. In Italian, confratello, meaning “brother” in a brotherhood or religious order. 47. In Italian, spillone can be a hatpin, cloak pin, or hairpin. As Smeraldina offers to arrange the Princess’s hair, I have used the translation “hairpin.” 48. I owe the phrase “to speak with greater literary correctness” to Domenico Pietropaolo. 49. Legal and “sublime” language are the styles that Morgana and Celio employ in their Martellian verse duel in scene that follows. 50. Regarding “But you will be patient with me if I say this,” in Italian, ma sia detto con sopportazione, literally meaning, “may this be said with patience.” Before uttering disturbing words, etiquette requires that one beg for “patience” and only later for forgiveness. Regarding “blunders,” in Italian, trascorsi means either practical or moral faults. Gozzi may be referring to Chiari’s mistakes in writing, which he also references in act II, or to his arrogance. 51. This Martellian-verse duel is one of only two scenes in the reflective analysis that Gozzi notes having reproduced from the original production. The second is the prologue, about which Gozzi wrote in the preface to the Colombani edition; Gozzi, Opere. 52. Gozzi’s “purely joyful and playful soul” became a central idea for the German Romantics and, later, for Meyerhold in the context of what collaborator Viktor Zhirmunsky called “comedy of pure joy.” See Raissa Raskina’s essay in this book (chap. 8). 53. In Italian, ti renderò pan per focaccia, meaning tit for tat. 54. Literally “evil ones”; we have preferred Symonds’s “bad verses.” Gozzi, Reflective Analysis, 142. 55. To parody Chiari’s sublime style, Gozzi has Morgana refer to Greek mythology, in particular, to the Gigantomachy, the war between the gods, led by Athena and the Giants, the offspring of the Goddess of Earth (Gaea) and the God of the Skies (Uranus). Enceladus, one of the Giants, is said to be buried under Mount Etna in Sicily, the volcanic eruptions of which are caused by his tossing and turning. Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 3 (79). 56. This is a reference to the myth of Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When Actaeon sees the goddess Diana naked, she punishes him by turning him into a stag and letting his own dogs tear him apart. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 28–29.

Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” by Gozzi  |  71 57. Possibly a reference to Goldoni’s supposed “desecration” of traditional commedia characters early plays such as Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, 1745) and The Antique Dealer’s Family (La Famiglia dell’antiquario, 1750). 58. Ninetta is the only character in Three Oranges who speaks in Venetian dialect——and only while in bird form. In subsequent fiabe, Gozzi uses Venetian more frequently, especially to mark the provenance of characters such as Pantalone. 59. Gozzi praises himself here for having the courage to write a scene that risked being criticized as low-brow——even “pettier” than the “brawls for the pumpkins” in Goldoni’s The Chioggia Scuffles. These latter skirmishes are fought over “zuche baruche,” a type of yellow pumpkin grown in Chioggia.

Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Milan: A. Mondadori, 2013. Bartoli, Francesco. Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno MDL, fino a’ giorni presenti: opera ricercata, raccolta, ed estesa. Vol. 2. Padua: Conzatti, 1782. Basile, Giambattista. Il Pentamerone del cavalier Giovan Battista Basile: overo, Lo cunto de li cunte, trattenemiento de li peccerille di Gian alesio Abbattutis. Vol. 2. Naples: Giuseppe Maria Porcelli, 1788. Boerio, Giuseppe, and Daniele Manin. Dizionario del dialetto veneziano. Venice: A. Santini, 1829. Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando Innamorato = Orlando in Love, translated by Charles Stanley Ross. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2004. Chiari, Pietro. Commedie in versi dell’abate Pietro Chiari bresciano. 10 vols. Venice: Giuseppe Bettinelli, 1756–74. DePiano, Hillary. The Love of Three Oranges. Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2003. DiGaetani, John Louis. Carlo Gozzi: Translations of The Love of Three Oranges, Turandot, and The Snake Lady: With a Bio-Critical Introduction. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Fabrizi, Angelo. “Carlo Gozzi e la tradizione popolare (a proposito de L’Amore delle tre melarance).” Italianistica 7, no. 2 (1978): 336–45. Gozzi, Carlo. Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli. 3rd ed. Milan: Garzanti, 2008. ———. Opere. Venice: Colombani, 1772. ———. Reflective Analysis of the Fable Entitled the Love of the Three Oranges: A Dramatic Representation Divided into Three Acts. In The Memoires of Count Carlo Gozzi, translated by John Addington Symonds, 112–46. New York: Scribner & Welford, 1890. Gozzi, Gasparo. No title. Gazzetta Veneta 103 (January 28, 1761). ———. Scritti scelti, edited by Nicola Mangini. Torino: UTET, 1976. Heard, Doreen B. The Love for Three Oranges. Louisville, KY: Anchorage Press Plays, 2002. Hoffmann, E. T. A. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, edited by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. I ribelli dell’Atlantico. La storia perduta di un’utopia libertaria. Rome: Feltrinelli Editore, 2004. Migliorini, Bruno, and Ghino Ghinassi. Storia della lingua italiana. Milan: Tascabili Bompiani, 2007. Ovid. The Metamorphoses, translated by Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Sir Samuel Garth, Samuel Croxall, and Joseph Addison. New York: Pantiano Classics, 2016.

72  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Pulci, Luigi. Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante, translated by Joseph Tusiani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Virgil. The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2008. Vitkus, Daniel J. “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (2): 145–76.

2 The Love of Three Oranges, Venice 1761 A Theatrical Provocation Alberto Beniscelli Translated by Maria De Simone

Carlo Gozzi’s Theatrical Beginnings For many years, scholars have believed that The Love of Three Oranges was Carlo Gozzi’s first play, a fiaba staged on January 25, 1761, at the San Samuele Theatre in Venice and handed down to us only in “reflective analysis” (analisi riflessiva) form, first published by Colombani in 1772 and reedited by Zanardi in 1801. Historical records did not suggest otherwise. Nor did Gozzi, who does not mention any previous playwriting experiments in his Useless Memoirs (Memorie inutili, 1797) and comments on the “unexpected” success of Three Oranges. In both published and private accounts, theatre critics and observers also expressed surprise at the premiere, prompting a common conclusion that Three Oranges marked the start of Gozzi’s playwriting activity. Scholars were convinced that Gozzi’s dramaturgy was inspired by his polemical–parodical militancy at the Granelleschi Academy—where he wrote satirical and denunciatory pieces—but that his theatre debut did not take place until his close collaboration with Antonio Sacchi’s acting troupe.1 As is now known in the field of Gozzi studies, the discovery of Gozzi’s original papers in his family archive in Visinale (Pordenone, Italy; subse­ quently acquired by the Marciana National Library in Venice) has illumi‑ ­nated a new chronology of his oeuvre and significantly altered prior convictions about the nature and timeline of Gozzi’s theatrical origins.2 Although the rich

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account of the premiere of Three Oranges at the San Samuele demonstrates Gozzi’s influence on Venetian theatre, as well as marking the official start of Gozzi’s participation in the Venetian theatre battles, we now know that Three Oranges grew from tilled soil and was the fruit of an already operative profession, albeit one that Gozzi regarded only as diversion.3 The Theatre Competitions (Le gare teatrali), an unpublished play dated 1751 but never staged, has emerged from Gozzi’s newly discovered manuscripts (fig. 2.1). This play is the first in a trilogy of unpublished plays that allow us to resituate the start of Gozzi’s playwriting an entire decade earlier and to revise the historical narrative of his theatrical path. Together with two subsequent plays, The Convulsions (Le convulsioni) and A Poorly Arranged Dinner (La cena mal apparecchiata), The Theatre Competitions also preceded Gozzi’s Granelleschi writings of 1757–61.4 Although Gozzi’s Granelleschi critique of rivals Abbot Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni has traditionally been interpreted as preparatory work for his “unexpected” provocation in Three Oranges, The Theatre Competitions reveals that Gozzi’s derisive power had been active since the 1749–50 theatre season. At that time, Chiari and Goldoni competed for resident playwright positions, the former for the San Samuele Theatre, where opera buffa alternated with plays in prose, and the latter for the Sant’Angelo, then managed by Girolamo Madebach. In addition, the editors of the 2018 collection of Gozzi’s Verses for the Actors (Versi per gli attori), discovered a prologue that Gozzi wrote for the Sacchi’s troupe visit to Ferrara; this prologue allows us to backdate Gozzi and Sacchi’s collaboration as early as 1747.5 This document further supports the hypothesis that Gozzi’s supposed “rescue” of the actors was actually a longstanding relationship. With new discoveries pending, for now it is safe to assume that Gozzi’s denunciatory playwriting actually began with The Theatre Competitions in 1751 and culminated with Three Oranges in 1761. The Theatre Competitions stages the rivalry between Chiari and Goldoni by representing the playwrights as commedia masks. Hiding the real targets of theatrical controversy under masks and pseudonyms was a widespread custom in satirical-parodical eighteenth-century plays. Gozzi parodies Goldoni as the commedia character Pasticcio, alludes to a Goldoni supporter in the character of Count Tamburo, and uses the character of Girandola to represent Chiari. In the play, the competitors submit to their own theatrical choices and to their respective supporters’ volitions. The parodic use of the theatrical medium enables Gozzi to invert, through antiphrasis, the principles of Goldoni’s The Comic Theatre (Il teatro comico, 1750), the primary target of Gozzi’s criticism.

Figure 2.1. Manuscript page from The Theatre Competitions. Fondo Gozzi, “Le gare teatrali. Commedia,” box 9, folder 9. Courtesy of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MIBACT) - Marciana National Library, Venice. Reproduction prohibited.

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Gozzi’s Critical Notes on the Play “The Comic Theatre” (Annotazioni critiche alla commedia “Il teatro comico”) provides further evidence of the long duration of Gozzi’s early obsession with Goldoni. He wrote these notes shortly after the publication of Goldoni’s “programmatic” text as an early draft of his 1758 prose operetta Comic Theatre at the Pilgrim’s Tavern (Teatro comico all’Osteria del Pellegrino), which he edited between 1760 and 1761, just before Three Oranges premiered.6 The Theatre Competitions thus functioned as a point of origin for Pilgrim’s Tavern and, before that, for The Tartana of Influences (La tartana degli influssi, 1756) and Critical Writings on the Tartana (Scrittura contestativa al taglio della Tartana, 1758)—both anti-Goldonian texts, the former in verse and the latter in prose.7 Like later satirical Granelleschi pamphlets, The Theatre Competitions cites Goldoni but in distorted form, so as to negate him and highlight internal contradictions. Although this play may have not originally been intended for theatrical performance, it initiated comic and parodic “situations” that Gozzi later conveyed in pamphlets and fiabe.8 At last, we are back to the night of January 25, 1761, at the San ­Samuele—at this point securely directed by Sacchi after the many mishaps and management changes of the previous decade.9

A “Masked” Fairy Tale: The Narrative Structure of The Love of Three Oranges “Mysterious absurdity,” “novel oddity,” “trifling fairy tale,” “magical trifle.”10 The play’s subject was described in a variety of ways, with Gozzi contributing to the many formulations in his Ingenuous Disquisition (Ragionamento ingenuo, 1772) and Useless Memoirs. What surprised the audience and critics most was the fiaba’s folk origins. This tradition is articulated by the Prologue, who opens the performance by inviting the audience to “Imagine it now, my lives and my pillars / to be round the fire with your grandmothers.”11 The preface that frames the prologue in the Colombani edition continues: “this first plot (argomento) . . . is taken from the most common of all the fairy tales that you tell children” (49),12 thus correcting Gasparo Gozzi’s statement on January 27, 1761, in the Gazzetta Veneta (Venetian gazette) that Three Oranges is based on a literary source, The Tale of Tales.13 Surprised by the performance, some spectators of rank expressed doubts that Gozzi was the play’s author. Gasparo Patriarchi, for instance, wrote to Giuseppe Gennari on January 31 that “the players at the San Samuele are the authors, but they say that Count Carlo Gozzi added some incidents or episodes.”14 Judging by Gozzi’s later account in Useless Memoirs, however,

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Patriarchi, who was also a Granelleschi Academy member, should have known the real state of affairs. As Gozzi wrote, “I was dissuaded from performing this strange concoction, which I wrote and read to the erudite members of the Granelleschi Academy: although their laughter seemed a good sign, in the end they begged me not to stage such childish work, suggesting that it would be whistled down and that it could compromise the academic decorum that thus far had been maintained with such honor.”15 But Patriarchi was not entirely wrong. Recent reexaminations of Gozzi’s theatrical “prehistory” convincingly reveal a playwriting collaboration between a deliberately “amateur” author and professional actors, especially experienced ones who could write for the stage, such as Antonio Sacchi and Agostino Fiorilli (Truffaldino and Tartaglia in Three Oranges).16 References to “strange subjects” to be presented onstage appear frequently in Gozzi’s many prologues.17 In his 1747 “Introduction to Ferrara” (Introduzione per Ferrara), for instance, Gozzi wrote, “My generous souls, my theatre mates / have entrusted me with giving you / rare plays, astonishing works, plots / as never seen before, unexpected incidents, / witty lines mixed with surprises.”18 Similarly, in a closing salutation to a performance in Ferrara that same year, he wrote, “We were met with large turnouts, honors, applause and cheers / despite the trivial and boring plots / and ordinary children’s tales.”19 These prologues allow us to revise the timelines for both Gozzi’s inclination to adapt children’s tales for the stage and his collaboration with Sacchi. We now know that the 1761 prologue to Three Oranges—mistakenly attributed to Gasparo Gozzi in Pietro Gradenigo’s Observations (Notatori) and recorded as Love of Three Oranges: A Play for the San Samuele Theatre, with a Prologue by Gasparo Gozzi, Printed—was at least the eighth play in the sequence discovered thus far.20 Gozzi’s theatrical background was, then, crucial to his first fiaba—in particular, to its unusual low comic subject and acting techniques. In Three Oranges, Morgana, the wicked fairy (fata) who retaliates against the prince’s laughter, was a travestied version of Chiari. Wizard Celio, who represents Goldoni, defends the prince, who has been cursed by Morgana’s spell. In his Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges,” Gozzi wrote, “At that time, Signor Goldoni and Signor Chiari were enemies in their poetic art. Through Morgana and Celio, I wished to caricature the adverse genius of their two talents” (57).21 As in The Theatre Competitions, written ten years earlier, a dispute scheme anchors the first scenes of Three Oranges. In the earlier work, Chiari-Girandola and Goldoni-Pasticcio dueled by exchanging theatrical blows. In both pieces, the world of the play refers back to current theatre wars, with objects of satire reproducing contemporary

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Venetian situations directly in The Theatre Competitions and more obliquely in the imaginary setting of Three Oranges. As in The Theatre Competitions, intertextual references surface often in Three Oranges, transforming Chiari’s and Goldoni’s “serious” incidents into gags. Gozzi’s occasional use of Martellian verse is similarly deployed; as he explains in his Reflective Analysis, “This was said to criticize Works by Signori Chiari and Goldoni, which were written in Martellian verse and bored the audience to death with the monotony of the rhyme” (51).22 Prince Tartaglia’s absurd rebellion against his father mocked Chiari’s The Betrayed Mother (La madre tradita, 1760), for instance, while Morgana’s unrefined tumble recalled a scene in Goldoni’s The House Servants (Le messere, 1755). This repositioning of noble roles to the low comic register (and of comic roles to the higher register in later fiabe) suggests continuity between Three Oranges and the “common fairy tales for children” that were typical of the Sacchi troupe’s wide variety of repertoire and characters.23 Clarice, the king’s niece, and Leandro, who aspires to the throne, are constrained by a caricatural matrix that alters their character traits as innamorati (lovers). The tradi­ tional Magnifico (old man) roles—Pantalone and Silvio, the King of Cups— feature chiefly in opening scenes, in which they frantically express concern for the prince’s life.24 This frees up space later for the adventures of the comic Zanni and sobretta characters, Brighella (played by Atanasio Zannoni) and Smeraldina the Moorish Girl (Adriana Sacchi), who complemented the performance of the foolish prince Tartaglia and the authentic outsider Truffald­ ino. The style is predominantly farcical, with the actor-coauthors onstage to pull the strings of these “never yet attained” plots (48).25 Nevertheless, there is a turning point in Gozzi’s scenario that marks a departure from previous works, both by the Sacchi company and by their “poet-benefactor” Gozzi. In the first scenes of act II, the prince and his squire start off on their adventurous journey. Readers who are well versed in Gozzi’s game of source recombination will easily recognize a picaresque-Cervantine influence in the duo’s mishaps, which are marked by a series of “improbabilities,” also drawn from parodied “reformed” drama. But it is strict adherence to fairy-tale morphology and its set schemes that distinguishes Three Oranges from previous experiments by Gozzi and by the Sacchi troupe more generally. In contrast with Gozzi’s later, fully scripted fiabe, here we are guided by diegetic trails and commentary within the Reflective Analysis. Describing the departure of Prince Tartaglia and Truffaldino, Gozzi reproduces what would be stage directions in a script while also giving a sense of the scene’s improvised acting: “The possessed Prince and Truffaldino entered. The Prince was

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annoyed because the iron shoes were delayed. Truffaldino made ridiculous requests. Tartaglia declared that he wanted to set off to obtain the three Oranges which, according to his Grandmother’s stories, were two thousand miles away” (54–55).26 Gozzi’s deployment of the magic fairy-tale genre is deliberate and explicit. The recourse to devices such as premeditato and lazzi, as well as to props and stage machinery (Gozzi’s “knights” who set off for their adventure weighed down with grotesque armor are especially clever), does not hinder the characters’ progression toward canonical fairy-tale events.27 Pushed forward by a sudden wind, the two protagonists fly far away.28 From there, they overcome the hazards of an enchanted castle, steal magic oranges with princesses imprisoned within their rinds, and surmount other fantastical challenges. The convergence of commedia dell’arte and magical fairy tale is accomplished, and the generic reference to the appeal of “fairy tales for children” substantiated. As Gozzi writes in the Reflective Analysis, “The audience was immensely delighted by those admirable and childish innovations, and I confess, I laughed at myself, realizing how, against my will, my soul humbled itself to delight in such childish images that brought me back to my childhood days” (60).29 Gozzi’s “confession” recognizes the power of theatre to take us back to our life’s earliest impressions, despite trying in vain to resist them. Gozzi deeply understood the dramaturgical potential of magical fairy tales, so much so that he unreservedly bet on the “spectacle effect” that this wise admixture of old tales and acting traditions could guarantee.

Metatheatre and Allegory As mentioned, in the days following the Three Oranges premiere, Gasparo Gozzi published a review in the Gazzetta Veneta. In it he wrote, “Whoever the writer may be, his intention was to hide under an allegorical veil some double sentiments and meanings. . . . It would be too laborious for me to disentangle every little meaning . . . but I will say a few things, so as to open the way for the audience to examine more on their own, after which they will be assured . . . that such trivial tales and worthless skirmishes encapsulate nontrivial teachings.”30 Gasparo offers a “learned” interpretation of Three Oranges while preserving ambiguity about the play’s paternity—something that Venetian reviewers commonly did, partly to advertise productions while respecting the actors’ autonomy. Gasparo proposes that the mysterious author’s source is a story from a “whimsical and rare book written in Neapolitan,” that is, Basile’s “The

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Three Citrons” (Le tre cetra) from The Tale of Tales. In fact, Three Oranges is not an adaptation of this story but a blend between Basile’s tale and similar northern Italian oral folk variations.31 Gasparo did, however, “dignify” the “incognito” writer’s undertaking by attributing a certain degree of literary authority to it and by highlighting the broader perspective of its “veiled” double-entendres. The Gozzi brothers’ intentions were not perfectly aligned. Carlo lived the life of the actors, worked alongside them, allied himself with them in faction wars—at times, even fomenting these wars himself—and refined his compositional techniques for a heated, polemical theatre. Above all, he experimented with stage forms for representing theatrical battles and with “theatrewithin-theatre” techniques, thus increasingly narrowing the target against Goldoni’s tabernariae (popular) plays, which Gozzi parodied via exaggerated and hyperrealistic nuances: “The people flocked to two fountains, one gushing oil and the other wine, to provision themselves: some very trivial and plebeian arguments ensued. . . . All these trivialities, typical of this trivial fairy tale, amused the Audience with their novelty as much as The House Servants, Il Campiello, a Venetian Comedy, The Chioggia Scuffles, and . . . all the other trivial works by Signor Goldoni” (53–54).32 Gasparo acknowledged the metatheatrical peculiarity of the experiment. He highlighted the playful passages that used paradox and exaggeration to critique contemporary drama’s failure to preserve the unities of place and time. Moreover, he proposed that the three oranges symbolized three theatrical genres: “tragedy,” “comedy of character,” and “light improvised comedy.” As the triumphant princess emerged from the latter, saved, significantly, by Truffaldino, the third genre was also the only “vital” one among the three. Gasparo goes even further by proposing—as if inviting his imaginative brother to implement this in the near future—that the relation of Three Oranges to the comic-allegorical genre be emphasized. Carlo was not opposed to Gasparo’s proposal; in fact, he was to take it into due account, especially in his polemical-theoretical writings on the dynamics of late eighteenth-century drama. Many years later, in The Longest Reply Letter That Has Ever Been Written (1802)—a reminiscence on and final accounting of his entire career in theatre—he attempted to revive his brother’s suggestion: “Considering the lack of popular, innocent, witty farces in the Italian improvised arts, and the need for our theatres, which are open to all, to feature dramatic genres that entertain educated and uneducated alike, I do not find it shameful to suggest a poetic, allegorical, reasoned, refined dramatic genre. . . . The ancient Greek comic poet Aristophanes left an example of allegorical dramatic poetry in the theatre of Athens.”33 In the years

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following the fiabe experiment, Gozzi worked toward creating a formula for an allegorical theatre. One example is his play Love Thins the Brain (Amore assottiglia il cervello, 1782). Despite relinquishing commedia characters and enchanted worlds—a choice Gozzi explains in this play’s preface—one can see a progression from parodical-satirical pieces predating the fiabe, such as The Theatre Competitions, to Love Thins the Brain or, even more explicitly, Bizarre Marfisa (Marfisa bizzarra), a comic-heroic poem in ottava rima (1761, published 1772).34 Looking at the full scope of Gozzi’s work reveals that the fiabe were part of a continuum built on his use of allegory. Gozzi verified the intrinsic power of the “fantastical” in Three Oranges and came to associate allegory with the “mysterious,” thus drawing attention to enigmatic, hidden themes: “In this kingdom of yours, you saw / high doctrines, allegories that once / were either highly praised or despised,” says the wise “blue monster” of Gozzi’s later fiaba.35 Gozzi’s intersections of meanings and double meanings are directed not so much toward the behavior critiques favored by Gasparo but toward the interpretation of a dimension separated from the real world, in which commedia masks live amid unpredictable, sometimes frightening events. Anticipating the claims that later appeared in Carlo’s Reflective Analysis, Gasparo wrote in the Osservatore Veneto (Venetian observer) on October 28, 1761, “Indeed, as you say, it is impossible for some things to happen; but Man . . . by nature . . . often believes in things that cannot naturally take place. I could give a thousand examples from which you would see that it is not only children who believe in the tales of ogres and old witches and other such nonsense.”36 In this excerpt from an address to an imaginary spectator of The Raven, Gasparo aimed to justify the childlike dimension of magical tales, which, in the case of fiabe, extended from a single spectator to the entire audience. Gasparo ascribed the fascination for scenic and narrative effects to the strangeness of human nature—“such a weakness in our human nature was well-known by poets,” he claimed—so much so that he later wrote about the control of human “passions.”37 In contrast, Carlo was concerned with exploiting the allegorical and radically oppositional function of a theatre in which the representation of human “passions” does not aim to be corrective but rather is food for audience thought. For Carlo Gozzi, one of the fundamental goals of theatre as a medium is the opportunity to regress to reminiscences and childhood emotions. To illustrate this insight, it is useful to consider a key convention deployed in several of Gozzi’s plays, including Three Oranges—the narrator’s voice, which reminds us of the oral dimension of fairy tales. In Three Oranges, characters act as if they are moved by a narrator (i.e., the playwright). In The King Stag,

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the fiaba most shaped by fairy-tale configurations, the Prologue is the narrator. At crucial moments in the plot, he intervenes with intradiegetic function. The stage directions tell us, “This character, who imitates public Venetian storytellers in clothing, speech, and gestures, takes his hat off, bows to the audience, and, donning his hat again, gives the following speech.”38 This refined, deliberate use of narrative and acting techniques is prompted by a metatheatrical conception of a theatre that frees itself from the constraints of satire and polemics and relies on the paradigmatic power of storytelling—a theatre that does not propose moral judgments but describes other worlds, as in Gozzi’s The Blue Monster or The Serpent Woman.39 In his critical writings, Gozzi defines the stage as an open space in which to play with the naïve. The simulated return to original innocence signifies, on one hand, a radical detachment from any need for mimesis and, on the other, the restoration of authentic human desires and passions through illusion. This all plays out within a calculated eighteenth-century system of judgment, both practical and theoretical. Out of it, the Romantic horizons of irony and melancholy were to develop.40 Then, for Three Oranges and other fiabe, a new story would begin.

Notes 1. Translator’s note: Carlo and Gasparo Gozzi, together with a handful of their “learned” friends, founded the Accademia dei Granelleschi (“testicle” academy) in 1747. The main purpose of this controversial group was to support Tuscan as the unified language of Italy. Carlo Goldoni, who wrote plays in Venetian dialect at this time, was one of the primary targets of the academy’s criticism. Starting from its name, the nature of the group was decidedly satirical. As far as we know, the academy was short-lived. Opposed by the University of Padua, which forbid its acts, it was officially disbanded in 1762; Bosisio, Carlo Gozzi e Goldoni. 2. Soldini, Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806. For the Fondo Gozzi finding aids, curated by Susy Marcon, Elisabetta Lugato, and Stefano Trovato, see pp. 113–90. 3. Scannapieco, Carlo Gozzi, 9–28. Translator’s note: Gozzi’s reluctance to publish his works was a studied tactic to avoid public association with theatrical professions, as these were believed to be inappropriate endeavors for noblemen at the time. 4. Gozzi’s three plays appear today in a volume that is appropriately titled Commedie in commedia, edited by Soldini and Vescovo. On Gozzi’s writing process for these plays, see pp. 51–72. 5. C. Gozzi, Versi, 85–87 and 333–36. 6. Tavazzi, Goldoni, 1–13. The forthcoming edition of Gozzi’s Opere by Marsilio, edited by Emanuela Chichiriccò, will include an analysis of Comic Theatre at the Pilgrim’s Tavern. 7. C. Gozzi, Commedie in commedia, 9–51. Translator’s note: A tartana (plural, tartane) was a small boat traditionally used for fishing in the Adriatic Sea, especially in the area near Chioggia (Venice). In Goldoni’s The Chioggia Scuffles (Le baruffe chiozzotte), the protagonist is Padron Toni, the owner of a tartana. The play gave currency to the figure of the Chioggia

The Love of Three Oranges, Venice 1761 | 83 fisherman in the eighteenth-century Italian popular imaginary. Tartane were substituted by so-called bragozzi, a cheaper type of fishing boat, and disappeared completely from the Adriatic Sea by the end of the nineteenth century. 8. Beniscelli, “Intervento,” 326–44. 9. The San Samuele Theatre was owned by the Grimaldi brothers when it burned down in 1747. Antonio Sacchi and his company began staging works by Goldoni and Chiari, who, in the middle of their theatrical battles found themselves competing in that space shortly after it was rebuilt the following year. Sacchi had already worked at the San Samuele in 1738 in the role of Truffaldino and returned to the same theatre after his tour to Portugal (1753–55). This was when his collaboration with Gozzi began. For more details on Antonio Sacchi and the San Samuele Theatre, see Pier Mario Vescovo’s entry “Sacco Antonio” in Dizionario biografico 89 (2017). 10. The expressions strano apparecchio and originale stravaganza appear in C. Gozzi, Memorie inutili, 403. The expressions “inetta favola” and “fanfaluca misteriosa” appear in The Love of Three Oranges, 20 and 37. This and all following citations from L’amore delle tre melarance are from C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, edited by Beniscelli. English translations are cited from Maria De Simone’s translation in this book (chap. 1). 11. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 10. Translation from 49, this book. Further citations from the fiaba translation are given in the text. 12. Gozzi, 10. 13. Cited in G. Gozzi, Scritti scelti, 411–13. Translator’s note: Lo cunto de li cunte, also known as Five Days (Pentamerone), is a collection of fairy tales written in the Neapolitan language between 1634 and 1636 by Giambattista Basile. Fifty fairy tales are placed in a frame that follows the model of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, for which ten storytellers tell five tales each over the course of five days. The framing story is that of a melancholy princess who, because of a curse, is unable to laugh, no matter what her father does to amuse her. Her father’s idea to set up a fountain gushing oil by their door, hoping that people would slip and thus make the princess laugh, is taken up by both Goldoni in The House Servants (Le massere, 1755) and Gozzi in The Love of Three Oranges. 14. Gasparo Patriarchi (1709–80) was a poet and lexicographer from Padua. He was a member of the Granelleschi Academy and a friend of Gasparo Gozzi. The long correspondence between Patriarchi and Gennari appears in Melchiori, Lettere e Letterati, 47. 15. C. Gozzi, Memorie inutili, 403. 16. On actors writing and translating for the stage, see Francesco Bartoli’s biographies in Notizie istoriche. 17. These prologues have now been published with valuable commentary and annotations. See Vezzoler’s introduction in C. Gozzi, Versi, 18–19. 18. Gozzi, 86. 19. Gozzi, 88. 20. Notatori 6 (January 25, 1761): 141. Notatori (Observations), which began publication in 1747, is a thirty-eight volume series that gathers accounts relating to previous centuries on a variety of subjects. It is housed in the Correr Museum in Venice. 21. C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 23. 22. C. Gozzi, 17. 23. In his preface to the Fajel (1772), Gozzi referred to the Sacchi company’s rich repertoire: “[Antonio Sacchi] keeps his Company trained in improvised Comedy, and well furnished with characters that are suited to such a genre; but also well equipped with very skillful actors able to play in any good Tragedy, Tragicomedy, or Comedy, written or translated, that may come to him from some elegant literary spirit” (“Egli tiene la sua Compagnia esercitata nella

84  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Commedia improvvisa, e ben proveduta de’ più atti personaggi ad una tale rappresentazione; ma ben fornita la tiene ancora di abilissimi personaggi a recitare qualunque buona Tragedia, Tragicommedia, o Commedia composta o tradotta, che gli venisse da qualche leggiadro spirito recata”). See C. Gozzi, Ragionamento Ingenuo, 179. 24. The King of Cups, possibly played by Gaetano Casali, is a character who was already present in Gozzi’s creative work, as earlier prologues suggest. 25. “We want to stage new comedies, yes, we do / great things never yet attained.” C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 8. 26. C. Gozzi, 19. 27. Premeditato is an acting technique that allows the actor to recall parts, patterns, or lines of the text from a previously memorized outline. Lazzi are improvised physical comic bits. 28. C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 24. 29. C. Gozzi, 27. 30. G. Gozzi, Scritti scelti, 412. Gasparo’s statement did, however, anticipate his brother’s second fiaba, The Raven (Il corvo), a close adaptation of the eponymous novella in The Tale of Tales. 31. Fabrizi, “Carlo Gozzi,” 336–45. 32. C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 17. 33. C. Gozzi, La più lunga lettera di risposta, 149–50. On Gozzi’s attention to theatre’s allegorical power, see Beniscelli, “Carlo Gozzi e le Forme,” 200–215. 34. Translator’s note: Ottava rima stanzas consist of eight rhyming hendecasyllables following the ABABABCC rhyming scheme. First use can be traced to Tuscan fourteenthcentury poetry. It was later used in fifteenth-century epic poetry by Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, and Luigi Pulci. Pulci’s Morgante, the source of the Three Oranges epigraph, is written in this meter. 35. Gozzi, Il mostro turchino, act V, scene 6; cited from Gozzi, Opere, 2:296. The Blue Monster premiered December 8, 1764, and was Gozzi’s eighth fiaba to be published in the Colombani edition of 1772. 36. G. Gozzi, Scritti scelti, 543–44. 37. G. Gozzi, 543–44. 38. C. Gozzi, Il re cervo; cited from C. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 45. This was Gozzi’s third fiaba. It premiered January 5, 1762. 39. C. Gozzi, Il mostro turchino; C. Gozzi, La donna serpente, last scene of act III. 40. Starobinski, “Ironie et Mélancolie,” 423–62.

Bibliography Bartoli, Francesco. Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno MDL, fino a’ giorni presenti: opera ricercata, raccolta, ed estesa. Vol. 2. Padua: Conzatti, 1782. Beniscelli, Alberto. “Carlo Gozzi e le Forme del Comico.” In La commedia italiana: tradizione e storia, edited by Maria Cristina Figorilli and Daniele Vianello. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2018, 200–15. ———. “Intervento Parodia, Farse, Tabernarie. Sugli Esordi Teatrali di Carlo Gozzi.” In Filologia, teatro, spettacolo: dai greci alla contemporaneità, edited by Francesco Cotticelli and Roberto Puggioni, 326–44. Milan: F. Angeli, 2018. Bosisio, Paolo. Carlo Gozzi e Goldoni: una polemica letteraria; con versi inediti e rari. Florence: Olschki, 1979.

The Love of Three Oranges, Venice 1761 | 85 Fabrizi, Angelo. “Carlo Gozzi e la tradizione popolare (a proposito de L’amore delle tre melarance).” Italianistica: Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 7 (1978): 336–45. Gozzi, Carlo. Commedie in commedia: Le gare teatrali, Le convulsioni, La cena mal apparecchiata, edited by Fabio Soldini. Venice: Marsilio, 2011. ———. Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli. 3rd ed. Milan: Garzanti, 2008. ———. La più lunga lettera di risposta che sia stata scritta. In Opere edite ed inedite. Vol. 14. Venice: Zanardi, 1801. ———. Memorie inutili, edited by Paolo Bosisio. Milan: LED, 2006. ———. Opere. Vol. 2. Venice: Colombani, 1772. ———. Opere, edited by Emanuela Chicchiricò. Venice: Marsilio (forthcoming). ———. Ragionamento ingenuo: dai “preamboli” all “Appendice.” Scritti di teoria teatrale, edited by Anna Scannapieco. Venice: Marsilio, 2013. ———. Versi per gli attori: introduzioni, prologhi e congedi, edited by Giulietta Bazoli and Franco Vazzoler. Venice: Marsilio, 2018. Gozzi, Gasparo. Scritti scelti, edited by Nicola Mangini. Torino: UTET, 1976. Gradenigo, Pietro. Notatori, Vol. 6 (manuscript), 1748-1774: 1761. Venice: Biblioteca Museo Correr. Melchiori, Luigi. Lettere e letterati a Venezia e a Padova a mezzo il secolo XVIII0, da un carteggio inedito. Padua: CEDAM, 1942. Scannapieco, Anna. Carlo Gozzi: la scena del libro. Venice: Marsilio, 2004. Soldini, Fabio. Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806: stravaganze sceniche, letterarie battaglie. Venice: Marsilio, 2006. Starobinski, Jean. “Ironie et Mélancolie: Gozzi, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard.” In Sensibilità e razionalità nel Settecento, edited by Vittore Branca. Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Tavazzi, Valeria G. A. Goldoni e i suoi sostenitori. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2018. Vescovo, Piermario. “Antonio Sacco (Sacchi).” In Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 89. Rome: Treccani, 2017. http: //www.Treccani.it//enciclopedia//Antonio-Sacco_(Dizionario -Biografico)//.

3 A Short Note on the First Sacchi Company Giulietta Bazoli Translated by Maria De Simone

A

ntonio Sacchi’s acting troupe, like most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian theatre companies, was composed primarily of close or acquired family members, with the addition of only a couple of “external” actors. Making a survey of the Sacchi company during the time when The Love of Three Oranges premiered may at first glance appear to be rela­ tively easy; however, the recent discovery of several original manuscripts about the actors in the Fondo Gozzi (Gozzi collection), a more in-depth analysis of “old” Gozzi manuscripts acquired by the Marciana National Library in Venice in the 1930s, and new archival research together present a more complex and dynamic overview of the company.1 One of the key secondary sources for reconstructing the company’s composition during the period when the fiabe premiered is Gozzi’s Dithyrambic Song in Honor of Sacchi Truffaldino (Canto ditirambico in onore di Sacchi Truffaldino, 1774), which mentions Antonio Sacchi, his wife Antonia Franchi, their two daughters Angela and Giovanna, Antonio’s sister Adriana Sacchi, Atanasio Zannoni (fig. 3.1), Giovanni Vi­ talba, Cesare Darbes, Agostino Fiorili, Gaetano Casali, Ignazio Casanova, and Giuseppe Simonetti and his daughter Chiara.2 In addition, Francesco Bartoli’s 1782 compilation of actor biographies in Historical News about Italian Actors (Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani) allows us to trace the careers of Giovanni Valentini, Rosa Lombardi, and Francesco Pozzi, who, along with Bartoli himself ten years later, also played in the company.3

Figure 3.1. Stage portrait of Atanasio Zannoni (Brighella) by L. Cittadella, lithograph by Zannoli (32×23cm), undated. FSR cart. 4/ 00520, Correr Museum, Venice. 2020 © Archivio Fotografico Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

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I begin by focusing on the head of the company. Born into a theatrical family, Antonio Sacchi (1708–88) was a multifaceted and exceptional actor. With his verbal and physical abilities, he was able to impress great writers such as Giacomo Casanova and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who mentioned him in their works, and Carlo Goldoni, who wrote the famous Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni, 1745) for him. But most significant was his extraordinary skill as the “entrepreneur” of his theatre company, a role that he carried out with incredible foresight because he understood theatre as a marketplace; one in which the relation between supply and demand is vital to its smooth operation. In contrast to the widespread cliché introduced by contemporaneous literature, which often presented actors as unsophisticated and illiterate commoners, Sacchi was highly educated and well versed in a range of theatrical genres. In fact, a varied repertoire was essential for his company’s survival. This was both because the audience, especially in Venice, was very unstable and because outside Venice—and this is a fundamental point in the most recent scholarship—the company could satisfy broader audiences that expected to see improvised and “bourgeois” comedies as well as tragedies. To demonstrate this point, I quote the preface to Fajel, a play that Gozzi wrote for the Sacchi company and published with his fiabe in the 1772 Colombani edition of Gozzi’s works: “Sacchi, the renowned Truffaldino, is the only one among the Actors of Italy today who understands the circumstances of his times and how to manage a theatrical troupe well. . . . He keeps his Company trained in improvised Comedy and well furnished with characters suited to such a genre, but also well equipped with very skillful actors able to play in any good Tragedy, Tragicomedy, or Comedy, written or translated, that may come to them from some elegant literary spirit.”4 Another important and original feature of the company was its internal mobility. In the 1760s, the female lead was Angela Sacchi, as Gozzi’s 1762 fiaba The Serpent Woman (La donna serpente) confirms. Nevertheless, as research in the Fondo Gozzi has unexpectedly underscored, the leading role could be assigned to more than one actress, something that spawned a series of rivalries. This is effectively highlighted in Gozzi’s The Convulsions (Le convulsioni, 1763), a metatheatrical play that surfaced when the Fondo Gozzi was acquired. In the play, Angela Sacchi, typically the undisputed female protagonist, watches her own father take the leading role away from her.5 Among the women, Antonio’s sister Adriana Sacchi stands out for her interpretations of the servant Smeraldina, a role she played her entire life. Her evolution within Gozzi’s playwriting production is striking because it reveals her versatility as an actress, from the naïve, treacherous Moorish servant

A Short Note on the First Sacchi Company  |  89

in The Love of Three Oranges to the faithful servetta who fights alongside Canzade in The Serpent Woman; from the warrior who serves the wicked queen in Zeim King of the Genies (Zeim re de’ geni) to the compassionate, misunderstood mother in The Green Bird (Augellino belverde), the sequel to Three Oranges.6 Adriana Sacchi’s second husband was Atanasio Zannoni. Zannoni’s fame was a product of his interpretations of Brighella, whose written parts he offered for publication in his old age.7 According to Francesco Bartoli, Zannoni gave the Mask a personal imprint: he was able to render it more acute and penetrating while maintaining its traditional “ridiculous” traits.8 Another extraordinary actor, one who was much appreciated by Venetian audiences, was Cesare Darbes, whose interpretation of Pantalone was one of the most memorable in the history of eighteenth-century theatre. Like Antonio Sacchi, Darbes also initially worked for Goldoni.9 At the time of the Three Oranges premiere, then, Gozzi was collaborating with a company of highly competent actors, all equipped with a “contemporary” outlook that was in tune with the changing political and cultural times. The theatre’s newly acquired accessibility in terms of ticket prices, which turned an unstable audience into the most powerful “judge,” is also worth taking into account; in fact, to win the audience’s approval and to “eat their supper,” theatre companies were forced to expand and vary their repertoires.10 It is essential to reevaluate the importance of The Love of Three Oranges. Often presented as a provocative—and, therefore, coincidental—response to Carlo Goldoni’s and Pietro Chiari’s plays, Three Oranges was not the result of Gozzi’s and the Sacchi company’s fortunate and fortuitous introduction to the Venetian theatre scene. Instead, as has also become clear from recently surfaced archival materials, it was the tip of an iceberg of ideas, proposals, and cultural discussions that Gozzi and Sacchi began several years before the first fiaba, with the aims of reviving improvised comedy—a typical Italian theatrical form already being exported abroad—and responding to the much criticized infranciosamento (Francization) of Italian theatre.11

Notes 1. For more on the Fondo Gozzi, see Soldini, Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806. In the past twelve years, several conferences have focused on this remarkable archival collection, and all issues of Carlo Gozzi’s National Edition by Marsilio Press have acknowledged these manuscripts, which had been believed lost after World War II. The manuscripts acquired by the Marciana National Library in Venice in the 1930s are the original manuscripts prepared by Gozzi for the first edition of his works. These interesting documents report the plays’ staging licenses and, in some

90  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges cases, actors’ names next to the parts they played. Since their purchase, the manuscripts have been only partly examined, mostly by Paolo Bosisio. See Bosisio, Gli autografi. 2. Gozzi, Canto ditirambico, 164–79. 3. Bartoli, Notizie istoriche. Annotated digital edition at http://www.irpmf.cnrs.fr/IMG /pdf/Bartoli_notizie.pdf. 4. Gozzi, Il Fajel, 20–21. 5. Gozzi, Le convulsioni. In Commedie in Commedia, 394. 6. Pieri, “Da Adriana Sacchi,” 35. 7. Zannoni, Raccolta. 8. Bartoli, Notizie istoriche, 2:283. 9. Darbes visited Goldoni during the latter’s legal apprenticeship in Pisa (1745–48) and asked the playwright to write “a comedy without masks” for him. Goldoni accepted and wrote The Deceiver (Il frappatore), the protagonist of which is a clumsy, ignorant Venetian man. The collaboration between the two continued: Goldoni highlighted Darbes’s acting skill in parts that did not require masks, e.g., The Prudent Man (L’uomo prudente) and The Two Venetian Twins (I due gemelli veneziani). In the latter, Darbes played both twins, with Goldoni himself asserting that the actor’s versatility allowed him to easily interpret “the different characters, the funny one and the foolish one.” See Goldoni, Memorie, 2:7–8. 10. Gozzi expressed the same idea: “What can I be blamed for if my stage capriccios / cause a revolution, and the audience likes them, / if they are requested, and restaged, / and if they buy Sacchi his dinner?” (Qual colpa ho se i mie capricci in scena / fanno rivolta, e al pubblico son grati, / se sono richiamati, e replicati, / e se mandano lieto il Sacchi a cena?). Gozzi, “La più lunga lettera,” 31. 11. See Bazoli, L’Orditura, 80–81. See also Gozzi, Versi per gli attori, 46–48. This latter publication is a collection of Gozzi’s compositions for the actors, intended as audience salutations and presentations. These were not meant to be printed but were written with specific occasions and actors in mind. From these compositions, the characteristic instability of the acting profession emerges, with actors always subjected to the audience’s judgment and forced to leave cities every six months in search of better fortune.

Bibliography Bartoli, Francesco. Notizie istoriche de’ Comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno MDC fino a’ giorni presenti. Vol. 2. Padua: Conzatti, 1781–82. Bazoli, Giulietta. L’orditura e la truppa. Le Fiabe di Carlo Gozzi tra scrittoio e palcoscenico. Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2012. Bosisio, Paolo. Gli autografi di Re Cervo: una fiaba scenica di Carlo Gozzi dal palcoscenico alla stampa con le varianti dedotte dagli autografi marciani. Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1983. Goldoni, Carlo. Memorie di Carlo Goldoni: per l’istoria della sua vita e del suo teatro. Vol. 2. Prato: Giacchetti, 1822. Gozzi, Carlo. Canto ditirambico de’ Partigiani del Sacchi Truffaldino. In Opere del Conte Carlo Gozzi. Vol. VIII. Venice: Colombani, 1772–74. ———. Commedie in commedia. Le gare teatrali, Le convulsioni, La cena mal apparecchiata, edited by Fabio Soldini and Piermario Vescovo. Venice: Marsilio, 2011. ———. Il Fajel tragedia del Sig. D’Arnaud tradotta in versi sciolti dal co. Carlo Gozzi. Venice: Colombani, 1772.

A Short Note on the First Sacchi Company  |  91 ———. “La più lunga lettera di risposta che sia stata scritta, inviata ad un poeta teatrale de’ nostri giorni. Giuntivi nel fine alcuni frammenti tratti dalle stampe pubblicate da parecchi Autori, e de’ comenti dallo stesso Gozzi fatti sopra i frammenti medesimi.” In Opere edite ed inedite del Conte Carlo Gozzi. Venice: Zanardi, 1801–3. ———. Versi per attori. Introduzioni, prologhi e congedi, edited by Giulietta Bazoli and Franco Vazzoler. Venice: Marsilio, 2018. Pieri, Marzia. “Da Adriana Sacchi a Teodora Ricci: Percorsi di Drammaturgia.” In Carlo Gozzi entre dramaturgie de l’auteur et dramaturgie de l’acteur: un carrefour artistique européen, edited by Andrea Fabiano. Ravenna: Longo, 2007. Soldini, Fabio. Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806. Stravaganze sceniche, letterarie battaglie. Catalogo della mostra (Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 20 luglio–10 settembre 2006). Venice: Marsilio, 2006. Zannoni, Atanasio. Raccolta di varj motti arguti allegorici e satirici ad uso del teatro di Atanasio Zannoni comico. Padua: Conzatti, 1789.

4 Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges A New Horizon of Expectations Domenico Pietropaolo

W

hen Carlo Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance premiered at the Teatro San Samuele in Venice in 1761, commedia dell’arte had long been in a state of decline. Occasionally, audiences could still be treated to excellent improvised plays, but these could be regarded as no more than isolated flashes of brilliance in a tired tradition. The dominant reaction to the decline was to advocate for fully scripted drama, with plots increasingly grounded in the aesthetics of verisimilitude and with characters explicitly designed to be different from traditional commedia masks. Gozzi’s reaction was to fashion a new dramatic form, with characters from commedia and plot material from fables of magic and wonder, articulated in a text that was partly scripted and partly improvised. In The Love of Three Oranges, Gozzi pursued his objective with a programmatic intent in collaboration with Antonio Sacchi’s troupe of improvisatory players, expanding the creative domain of commedia dell’arte and providing Venetian audiences with a new horizon of expectations— formal and aesthetic—for the commercial theatre. My purpose in this essay is to examine the principles and techniques Gozzi used to create his new form and to determine the extent of the actors’ contribution to its development. In 1761, the principal members of Sacchi’s troupe included Sacchi himself, an actor who had achieved great distinction in the role of Arlecchino under the name of Truffaldino; his wife, Antonia Franchi Sacchi, who, in Three Oranges, was probably cast as Clarice; his sister Adriana Sacchi Zannoni, a talented Smeraldina; the renowned Cesare Darbes as Pantalone; Agostino Fiorilli as Tartaglia; and Atanasio Zannoni as Brighella (fig. 4.1).1 Their widely recognized collective talent notwithstanding, Sacchi’s company was going through

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Figure 4.1. “Vice is corrected with laughter.” Welcome card to the San Samuele Theatre, Carnival of 1758. “Venezia-Teatro S.Samuele-Bollettino.” 42.E.7/A. Goldoni Museum Library, Venice.

a period of considerable difficulty, as was to be expected of actors who had remained anchored to the commedia dell’arte and were commonly regarded in the profession as champions of the dying art of comic improvisation. While Sacchi was trying to relaunch his troupe at the San Samuele (fig. 4.2), the companies of Girolamo Medebach at the San Giovanni Grisostomo and Giuseppe Lapy at the San Luca were riding the crest of success, having embraced new artistic mandates in collaboration with Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni, respectively. Both playwrights sought to displace commedia completely from

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Figure 4.2. Interior of the San Samuele Theatre, showing its “magnificent lighting system” made of mirrors and permanent oil lamps. Black and white etching by Antonio Codognato (37 × 52 cm), 1753. Correr 1081, Correr Museum, Venice. 2020 © Archivio Fotografico - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

the commercial stage, replacing it with new, fully scripted plays in the different styles for which they were becoming increasingly famous—commedie di carattere in Goldoni’s case and commedie lacrimose, or sentimental comedies, in Chiari’s case.2 Gozzi agreed to provide Sacchi, gratis, with plays that would help Sacchi’s company competitively reenter the theatre market, performing commedia dell’arte in a new key. This was not the first time that Gozzi collaborated with Sacchi, as recently explored sources in the Fondo Gozzi (Gozzi collection) of the Biblioteca Marciana have made clear; however, it was the first time that Gozzi saw Sacchi’s troupe as the creative partners he needed to launch his new poetics for the commercial theatre.3 Three Oranges was to be the first of a series of ten theatrical fables, and part of its task was to make sure that the new horizon of expectations would be embraced by the audience as their own. The players had a new and exciting artistic mission to work with and a greatly expanded horizon—for themselves and for their audiences—in which to display their talent. Gozzi would write for them plays melding fairy tales (fiabe), commedia dell’arte, and criticism, both social and aesthetic— plays designed to entertain and to reestablish the aesthetic dignity of stage improvisation.

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The production could not have been more successful on that score. The original scenario did not survive, but from the account of the performance that Gozzi published more than ten years later, under the title A Reflective Analysis of the Theatrical Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges,” we know that, according to Gozzi, it was a resounding success.4 Its most appealing aspect was the frequent fusion of magic and humor: “The Spectators had been informed by their nurses and grandmothers of all these marvels mixed with ridicule, and of the childish simplicity of these scenes since their earliest years. They were deeply immersed in the subject, and their souls were strongly captivated by the daring novelty of seeing such an accurate representation of it in the Theatre.”5 Magic had always been a prominent part of popular culture, but in the form and to the extent proposed in Three Oranges, it was entirely new. With this play, Gozzi was proposing the creation, onstage and among the audience, of an ethos of childhood, a pervasive sense of remembered fantasies and rediscovered pleasures of the imagination. The incidents woven into the plot provoke recollections and engage the audience by generating in them a feeling of innocent suspense. This feeling is an experience of uncertainty concerning the outcome of a scene, coupled with the anticipated gratification that accompanies the ability to confirm, at least in part, the logic of its outcome by comparing individual incidents with images of analogous ones retrieved from memory. The trick, Gozzi seems to suggest, is for actors to represent those incidents so vividly as to make the audience believe that their own recollections are being staged in the dramatic action. Endearing as it was, however, the ethos of this new artistic practice had at least two practical functions. The first was to expand the players’ and playwright’s control of the current entertainment culture; the second was to market, as aggressively as possible and in a commedia package, the audience’s recollection of childhood fantasies and the gratification of nostalgia that normally accompanies them. In both functions, it was meant to generate a desire, a market, for plays set in a fantasy world. In this sense, Gozzi’s plan does not appear to have been much different from marketing strategies familiar to us from recent history. “The infantilist ethos,” says Benjamin Barber with reference to the modern world, “generates a set of habits, preferences, and attitudes that encourage and legitimate childishness.”6 The same principle is valid for the intersection between theatre and the economy in eighteenth-century Venice, with an important caveat: the destabilization of the divide between childhood and adulthood in the theatre was also part of a genuine interest in the renewal of drama as an aesthetic domain. On this front, the childhood ethos of Three Oranges was not tainted by the cynicism that informs many infantilist strategies of consumer capitalism.

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We may hear a note of patronizing superiority in puerilità, the term with which Gozzi describes the simplicity of the incidents that so captivated the San Samuele audience. Still, the infantilism that Gozzi had in mind was a pretend return to childhood imaginings, much the same way that primitivism is a pretend return to a primitive way of life in the past, which in reality it purifies of its inconveniences and philosophically idealizes as a critique of the present. The fiabe that Gozzi wrote for Sacchi’s players had the appearance of innocent childhood stories but were, in reality, laughter-eliciting allegories of the present, laden with uncharitable criticism of rival playwrights and theatre makers. In Gozzi’s estimation, it was precisely this combination of humor and imagined childlikeness that, in the first production of Three Oranges, elicited the most favorable audience response, consolidating his quick ascendancy among the playwrights and Sacchi’s among the actor-managers of Venetian commercial theatre. When humor is recognizably directed at certain individuals or social groups, as it generally was in the commedia tradition, it is grounded in self-righteousness and tends to build solidarity, if not outright complicity, under an aesthetic cover of innocence. In an explicitly selfreflexive scene in Gozzi’s fiaba, Zannoni, as Brighella, recommends commedia dell’arte as an innocent form of theatrical entertainment against melancholycausing comedies in the style of Goldoni, represented by Leandro, or in the bombastic style of Chiari, championed by Clarice. As the actual effect of a perlocutionary speech-act, laughter is a means for both the playwright and performers to castigate their rivals, drawing their audience into their own horizon of expectations. In this horizon, concerns and ideas that inform the present can be dressed up as childhood fantasies and organized into a narrative of magical transformation and speaking objects. Childhood fables are used as a coding system for the theatrical representation of ideas that have nothing to do with fables. In Three Oranges, Gozzi is concerned with the theatrical poetics of Chiari and Goldoni, whom he satirizes with gusto in the vein of what he started to do a decade earlier in his recently discovered play The Theatrical Competitions (Le gare teatrali).7 But the ideas inspired by the Enlightenment, which the Venetian aristocracy had every interest in keeping outside the Republic, were also a target of Gozzi’s conservatism. In pretending to reject the new genre of comic fable, Gozzi speaks through Clarice and Leandro, indirectly manifesting his own haughtiness as one who knows he is in possession of the truth and has the power of aesthetic and philosophical discernment: “Clarice and Leandro were angry; they did not want such bumbling buffoonades and obscene rot in

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Figure 4.3. Cups (coppe) suit. Playing-cards for Tarocchino (tarot). Hand-coloured woodcut backs printed with an armorial cartouche, Pepoli impaling Colonna, and "al Mondo" 18th Century. Asset number 1599989001 © The Trustees of the British Museum.

an enlightened century” (56).8 Gozzi would later write an entire play, The Green Bird (L’Augellino belverde, 1765), as a defense of the Counter-Enlightenment he so strongly endorsed, but even here, his critical attitude toward the culture of the lumières is explicit. The Enlightenment called for reforms in all fields in which it thought necessary to debunk tradition because it had no discernible grounding in reality or reason, and such reforms, according to Gozzi, were bound to disrupt the logic of the social order. In Three Oranges, the top level of that order is coded as the highest male figures in a suit of playing cards: the sovereign of the fantasy world is Silvio, Re di Coppe (King of Cups), and his prime minister, Leandro, is the Cavallo di Coppe (Knight of Cups); both are costumed as their respective figures in a deck of playing cards (fig. 4.3).9 This invention makes clear, in the opening scene, the relationship of Three Oranges to Venetian gambling culture, the

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ludic concept of drama on which the fiaba is based, and the roles involved in its production, including that of the audience. The centrality of gambling in Venetian social life, and thus in audience life, was the product of an entertainment industry with a long history of government-sanctioned diversions. From 1638, when the senate approved the opening of the first mercantile casino (the ridotto), until 1774, when all ridotti were officially closed, gambling, especially card games, was a distinctive feature of Venetian culture. The history of the ridotti runs parallel with that of the commercial theatres, the first of which, the San Cassiano, was opened only a year before the ridotto. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many other playing clubs opened, generally in close proximity to the commercial theatres, and the traffic between the two institutions was such that the mores they cultivated easily overlapped.10 Goldoni and Chiari were deeply entrenched in this ludic culture, and this was surely one factor that motivated Gozzi to introduce playing cards as characters. Of immediate relevance to Gozzi’s satire is the fact that in 1761, the year of the Three Oranges premiere, Goldoni confessed—in the preface to a volume of the famous Pasquali edition of his plays—that he himself could hardly resist the temptation to play cards, even with less honest and more skilled gamblers ready to cheat him of his earnings.11 We know from Goldoni that card decks of the French and Italian suits were commonly used, although the Italian suits—cups, swords, coins, and clubs—were more familiar to contemporary audiences, as we can surmise from a card game dramatized by Chiari in The Lover of Two (L’innamorato di due, 1760), in which these suits are mentioned by name. As they see the King of Cups and the Knight of Cups cross the stage, the audience immediately recognizes the playing cards to which they correspond and realizes that, in addition to alluding to Chiari and Goldoni, the players are engaging them in an imaginary game. By impersonating card figures, the actors are literally playing cards for the spectators. In the course of the first act, we learn that Fata Morgana hates the King of Cups because she lost her wealth when her hand was trumped by his card, whereas she befriends the evil Leandro because his card, the Knight of Cups, brought her luck. But on another level of interpretation, the actors are playing with spectators who likely view their spectatorship in terms of memories they have of themselves as players in a card game.12 In Gozzi’s dramaturgical use of a card game, the Knight and the King are deployed in inimical strategies, despite the fact that they belong to the same suit. The Knight wants the crown Prince to die so that he may marry Clarice, who is next in line for the throne. At the very start of the play, then, the playwright leverages the audience’s ludic imagination and

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familiarity with Venetian gambling culture to activate the dramatic action and to establish a playful and convivial atmosphere. At the most elementary level, the transformation of the two-dimensional playing-card figures into three-dimensional costumes illustrates literally the principle that, onstage, the audience sees only signs of signs, which it interprets by relating them to their appropriate codes in the theatre culture of the period.13 Thus, first of all, the King of Cups is a card whose function is to signal to the audience that they are about to enter into a fantasy world of serious amusement, reminiscent of gambling in the ridotto. The card then begins to speak and gesture as the King of an imaginary realm in which it is indeed possible for a card to be King and for another to be his disloyal minister, and the function of these signs is to raise the expectation that whatever occurs onstage is not governed by the logic of the real world. The imaginary world into which the audience crosses is one in which all sorts of magic occurrences can take place. If playing cards can signify living characters, surely other inanimate objects can do the same thing. Thus, a baker’s wife, instead of expressing herself in the plebeian idiom of her class, suddenly begins to wax eloquent in Martellian verse, as do a rope, a dog and a gate hinge, effortlessly crossing the boundary that separates reality from imagination. Tartaglia and Truffaldino are astonished by what they witness, confined as they have been to a world in which such boundary crossings were considered absurdities. Like children unaware of the magician’s trick, they are dumbfounded to discover that such amazing things are indeed possible. Once their imagination has been liberated, their eyes are opened, and their horizon of perception is infinitely expanded. And they thank those Martellian speakers for having so enriched their field of awareness: now they know that the ordinariness of a baker’s wife, a rope, a rusty hinge, and a dog can suddenly morph into the eloquence of poets. The audience, Gozzi is pleased to inform us, was delighted to see the dramatization of such wonderment, but not, we can be sure, any partisans of either Chiari or Goldoni, for whom stage magic served only the satirical purpose of denigrating the Martellian poetry of their plays by making it indistinguishable from the silliness of a rope trick, the vulgarity of a coarse vernacular, the barking of a dog, and the creaking of a hinge. Metamorphosis can be regarded as a consequence of the fact that a sign in one code can suddenly transform into a sign of another code. In Three Oranges, there are two types of signs. Those of the first type retain their original materiality in the transformation (e.g., the speaking rope, hinges, and dog), with the consequence that the signifying activity of the second sign is incongruous with the materiality of the first, generating the humor of magic tricks.

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Those of the second type shed their initial materiality to acquire a new one (e.g., oranges become beautiful maidens), and their function is to send the audience’s imagination into a childlike mode. Transformations presuppose the possibility of transcending the finitude of the categories of existence to which we belong, moving with ease from one realm into another. Such movement could not be achieved in reality but is the ordinary stuff of the imagination, particularly for children, whose imagination has not yet been subdued by the severity of reason. Thereby enchanted like children, Gozzi must have argued, the audience would find it easier to receive his biting criticism of literary and dramatic forms that are inimical to the apparently moribund, but in reality still vibrant, commedia dell’arte tradition. On the opening night of Three Oranges, it was clear to San Samuele patrons that, despite the success enjoyed by Chiari and Goldoni, the commedia tradi­ tion represented by the Sacchi company and Gozzi was very much alive and was entering a new and exciting phase of development. The basic elements of form were mostly the same as those of traditional commedia: masked alongside unmasked characters, dramatic action shaped as a quest, and a scenario for improvisation. But as is already clear from the card-like characters, there were significant innovations. Until then, in Venice, the traditional masked characters included Arlecchino and Brighella in the role of young servants and Pantalone and Dottore in the role of old men, the Vecchi. In place of Dottore, the pompous academic from Bologna, Gozzi’s plays include Tartaglia, a dainty and colorful stutterer whose speech disorder—multiple repetition of consonants, conspicuous prolongation of vowels, splattering uncontrollably in pronouncing plosives—is the source of a type of verbal humor located at the opposite end of that associated with Dottore’s loquaciousness. Gozzi’s reason for replacing the Dottore with Tartaglia in his dramatic action was entirely practical: after the death of Roderigo Lombardi in 1749, Sacchi lacked an actor trained as a Dottore, but when the talented Neapolitan actor Agostino Fiorilli joined the troupe, Tartaglia automatically became one of the masked characters. The troupe, in other words, was largely traditional but different enough to raise significant expectations of novelty in comic actions that could be staged. The skeletal dramatic structure of Three Oranges is much like that of most other commedia plays in the old repertoire: a pursuit motivated by love; hindered and aided by blocking characters and helpers, respectively; and a happy union designed to reestablish harmony and social stability. Moreover, the action exhibits the same fundamental aesthetic principle of traditional commedia: total disregard for the pseudo-Aristotelian unities of action, time,

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and place. In particular, Gozzi flouts the unity of place, about which there was much discussion in the contemporary world. Goldoni had maintained, for example, that as long as the action took place “in the same city and all the more so if it takes place in the same house,” the rule was observed.14 In this interpretation, rather than in the narrower one of unity of place as unity of setting, he believed that it should be part of the poetics of comedy.15 Chiari extended unity of place to include distant cities, which is why, for narrative convenience, he could allow a character in the Ezelino, as Gozzi recalls mockingly, to ride about thirty miles between scenes in order to continue having a meaningful role in the plot.16 Gozzi had no use either for Goldoni’s effort at a liberal interpretation of the rule or for Chiari’s clear violation of it. Given the speed of ordinary modes of transportation, the disregard for unity of place might also imply disregard for the unity of time, which is to say rejection of two of the three principles with which to evaluate aesthetic merit. In Three Oranges, artistic merit has nothing to do with pseudo-Aristotelian rules. In the second act, Tartaglia and Truffaldino travel thousands of miles between scenes by an extraordinary means of locomotion: part of their journey is staged for the audience to see a devil blowing them forward with a bellows and then vanishing.17 However one conceives the dramatic action, the idea of unity of place refers to the reasonableness of locomotion within the fictional world, but only when the fictional world is constructed in analogy with the real one. A world in which magic is the major shaping force of life cannot be limited by the principles of logic. It calls on the audience to suspend disbelief by conceding the possibility of magic in all situations and at all points in time. Gozzi argued that when such worlds are skillfully built, audiences will readily enter them and remain there gladly for the duration of the play, as if they were children, for whom magic and fantastic wonderment are neither foolish nor incredible. In pursuing this goal, his strategy was to tap into the audience’s collective memory for images and narratives that could be brought back to consciousness with delight and to intermingle them with explicit allusions to contemporary reality. This required him to find a narrative into which they could be woven as a scenario for Sacchi’s players. We do not know what the scenario of Three Oranges looked like, but from the author’s Reflective Analysis, we can surmise that it was a hybrid construct, with some parts given as stage directions for improvisation and other parts in full script. Because the Reflective Analysis was written long after the first performance, Gozzi likely revised some details, but there is no reason to doubt his sincerity as far as improvisation was concerned. The members of the cast were, after all, the acknowledged standard-bearers of the art of impromptu

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performance. Consequently, we may believe that in his first scene as the hypochondriac Prince, Agostino Fiorilli was given a summary (argomento) of the action and was required to improvise, both gesturally and verbally, an appropriate performance for the melancholy Tartaglia, which he did, according to Gozzi—raising a continuous roar of laughter.18 Gozzi reports that in the improvised scene, Tartaglia lamented the seriousness of his malady in a monologue that was both “buffonesco e naturale”— farcical yet spontaneous. Fiorilli thus prepared the audience for Antonio Sacchi’s entrance as Truffald­ ino, the merrymaker summoned to make Tartaglia laugh. The improvised dia­logue that ensued, with Sacchi in the lead, included a dynamic exchange about the patient’s illness and a medical examination by Truffaldino. Mimicking a physician, Truffaldino proceeds to the auscultation of Tartaglia’s cough and performs a quality analysis of his breath and a test of his sputum— all actions that could be quickly varied by Sacchi in several iterations without tiring the audience. Truffaldino discerns in the Prince’s expectorations the cause of his mawkish disposition: malodorous bits of Martellian verse, fragments of the droning meter adopted by both his rivals, Chiari and Goldoni—a fact later reflected by the verse duel in Three Oranges.19 The extempore scene ended with Truffaldino carrying by force an uncooperative Tartaglia to a balustrade on the edge of the stage, where he might see what fantastic merriment had been organized as therapy for his terrible malady. Gozzi reports that extempore scenes of this caliber, which require not only individual skill but precise teamwork—a sense elegantly and precisely captured by the word duet, with which John Addington Symonds, who translated Gozzi’s fiaba into English in 1890, rendered the Italian “scena” in this case—could not be anything but hilarious.20 When Gozzi wrote Three Oranges, the idea of a scenario consisting of scripted dialogue for recitation from memory interlocked with scenes for improvisation was not very common, although it had been in existence for about fifty years.21 Of greater relevance, however, is that Goldoni himself had made use of the hybrid form as early as 1738 in Momolo the Courtier (Momolo cortesan), thereafter increasing the proportion of scripted to unscripted, until the performer-centered scenario form that he inherited from commedia finally morphed into the playwright-centered form of his later comedies. On this point, Gozzi imitated Goldoni, for essentially the same reasons. They both wanted to exercise control over the performance text. Significantly, Gozzi prepared a script for scenes with noncommedia characters in the so-called “serious” roles, scenes that set the theme and propelled the narrative. But scenes involving only commedia characters, such as that with Tartaglia and

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Truffaldino, and meant chiefly to provoke audience laughter were left to the improvisatory skill of the performers, especially when they were as talented as Sacchi and Fiorilli. Because such extempore scenes could be quite long—­ Truffaldino’s twenty-minute medical examination corresponds by itself to about a third of an act—skill in improvisation should not be understood only as a technical mastery of the art of performing lazzi without a script but also as a compositional and plot-advancement ability within the narrative outline of the scenario. The ratio of scripted to unscripted scenes in the scenario may be interpreted as a ratio of authorship to coauthorship and as an indication of the trust that the author placed in the actors for their collaborative creation of the performance text. In a metapoetic comment in the third act, Gozzi explicitly acknowledges the authorial value of the actor’s contribution to the performance text and claims that, in some cases, it is superior to that of the playwright himself. Speaking about the creativity Fiorilli displayed when Tartaglia stops Truffaldino from cutting up the last of the three oranges, Gozzi states, “In such situations, the comical masks of improvised Comedy make exaggerated physical and facial expressions and lazzi that are so amusing that no ink can express or Poet surpass them” (62).22 This is very high praise indeed, not only for the members of Sacchi’s troupe but for the art of commedia-style acting itself. The art of script writing has its limitations; in scenes that require a dynamic fusion of speech, gesture, and movement to generate a positive aesthetic experience, it is not as creative as the art of improvisatory acting, which is also an art of impromptu composition. Here Gozzi echoes a principle of impromptu performance that was basic to the commedia dell’arte, a principle that had been formulated in exceptionally clear terms by one of Sacchi’s illustrious predecessors, Evaristo Gherardi, who played Arlecchino for many years at the Comédie Italienne in Paris. Gherardi comments that the action of a play in the commedia style cannot be written out in full simply because it is partly composed during the act of performance. A skilled performer “acts more from imagination than from memory” and actually composes directly onstage everything that he says and does, giving the impression that it has all been premeditated for him, although he creates it on the spot.23 The playwright of partly scripted scenarios like Three Oranges needs to envision a dramatic form in which scripted dialogue melds with improvised speech and dialogue. The fact that improvised scenes in which the performers showcase virtuosic skill in gesture and lazzi are most frequently used to generate laughter and that the actors at times achieve their end by misusing grammar and exaggerating their characters’ poverty of speech should not

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blind us to the authorial significance of the players’ creativity. As far as Sacchi is concerned, we know from Goldoni that he was endowed with quick understanding and a lively imagination that served him well in unscripted performance—that is, in composing text onstage within the thematic restrictions of the playwright’s scenario. In training himself for the task, Sacchi had become acquainted with the performance conventions of various European theatres and intimately familiar with much dramatic literature. He was conversant with the great classics of the humanist tradition to the point that in his extemporizations, one could hear clear echoes of Cicero, Seneca, and Montaigne. His gestures and language were zany, sharp, and full of unexpected quips and jests, but never plebeian, imbued as they were with the refinement of high culture. Sacchi was able to assimilate the elegance of that culture and to display it, even when he made use of it in comic distortions, moving the audience to laughter while satisfying their expectations with an air of freshness.24 In Three Oranges, Gozzi makes the same point with respect to Adriana Sacchi Zannoni in the role of Smeraldina. After speaking only a hybrid of Turkish and Italian for some time, she suddenly begins to express herself with literary elegance, under the dramaturgical pretext that Fata Morgana put a Tuscan devil “into her tongue (63).” Fully conscious of her ability, she defies all poets (i.e., all playwrights) to speak (i.e., to compose) with greater literary correctness than she is doing impromptu, directly onstage.25 Virtuosic improvisatory performers practice their art with at least as much aesthetic elegance as playwrights. In the type of play that Gozzi proposed for the commercial theatre on the model of Three Oranges, scenes scripted by the playwright and scenes “scripted” extemporaneously by performers flow seamlessly into each other as they give body to a uniform aesthetic product. The hybrid scenario form makes such collaboration possible without reducing the actors to mere instruments of the author’s ideas; however, it presents us with a difficulty concerning the ontological nature of the text as an aesthetic object. This difficulty cannot be removed by more disciplined thinking or textual research because it involves an aesthetic object that does not fit either of the two categories of textuality recognized by conventional theories of drama. But historical awareness can easily unburden us of the problem by showing us that in the commedia dell’arte tradition, in which actors routinely collaborate with playwrights in an authorial capacity in their extempore performances, hybrid textuality is an entirely legitimate and logical aesthetic concept. Unscripted commedia dell’arte exists only as performance textuality, created directly onstage by actors under the audience’s gaze. Plays

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scripted by an author, however, can exist as both literature and performance and thus are endowed with the potential to generate two types of aesthetic experience—one in reading the author’s words, and the other in viewing and hearing the performers. The hybrid textuality of Three Oranges fits into neither category and destabilizes both with its existence. Gozzi strategically pursued the ontological ambivalence of mixed textuality by collaborating closely with Sacchi’s troupe of improvisatory players. Together, they expanded the commercial theatre’s horizon of expectations in eighteenth-century Venice, marrying commedia dell’arte with fantasies from children’s fables that they manipulated to generate a complex aesthetic and cognitive experience while delivering scathing criticism in an endearing form.

Notes 1. For a detailed account of Antonio Sacchi’s company, see Bazoli, L’Orditura, 197–268. See also Taviani and Schino, Il segreto, 112–14; according to these latter scholars, when Sacchi perished at sea in 1788, commedia dell’arte, as the art of improvised drama in commercial theatre, is said to have died with him. 2. On the three theatres, see Mancini, Muraro, and Povoledo, I Teatri, 1:209–93 (San Luca); 1:379–421 (San Samuele); and 2:63–127 (San Giovanni Grisostomo). See also Brusatin, Venezia, 24–52. 3. See Vazzoler, “Introduzione,” 18–20. 4. Analisi riflessiva della fiaba teatrale L’Amore delle tre melarance was first published in the first edition of Gozzi’s collected works (1772). All citations from the text align with Giuseppe Petronio’s edition of L’Amore delle tre melarance in Gozzi, Opere, 47–84. 5. Gozzi, Opere, 78–79. Translation from 63, this book. Further citations from the fiaba translation are given in the text. 6. Barber, Consumed, 81. 7. Editor’s note: For more information on this early, unperformed play, see Beniscelli’s essay in this book (chap. 2). 8. Gozzi, Opere, 67. 9. In Italian playing cards, the four suits are coppe (cups), denari (coins), spade (swords), and bastoni (clubs). 10. A good analysis may be found in Neveu, “Space,” 151–52. 11. Goldoni, Delle commedie, 9:12. 12. No specific game is alluded to, but the most common games were the cala carte, which could be played by two people; the bassetta and its variation faraone, which could have a varying number of players, each pitted against the ridotto banker; and the zecchinetta, in which players could take turns as banker. 13. Fischer-Lichte, Semiotics of Theater, 7ff. 14. Goldoni, Comic Theatre, 37. 15. Goldoni, 37. 16. Gozzi, “Reflective Analysis,” 129. 17. Gozzi, Opere, 69.

106  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 18. Gozzi uses the word argomento in the sense that the Latin term argumentum had acquired in dramatic theory. By the sixteenth century it designated the plot, understood as the combination of events in the play, which is close to our current sense of the word scenario. Cf. Herrick, Comic Theory, 91–94. 19. Martellian verse, named after the Arcadian poet Pier Jacopo Martelli who invented the form, consists of two seven-syllable hemistichs separated by a medial caesura. Each hemistich is marked by two stresses: a fixed stress on the sixth syllable and a movable stress on any of the first four syllables. Martellian verses are arranged in rhyming couplets. 20. Gozzi, “Reflective Analysis,” 120. 21. An early example is the anonymous Rivalità senza premio, nelle nozze di Eudosia e Genserico re dei Vandali (Venice, 1709), discussed by Bartoli, Scenari inediti. 22. Gozzi, Opere, 77. 23. Gherardi, “On the Art,” 58. 24. Goldoni, Memoirs, 207. On the formal structure of this type of improvisation, see Pietropaolo, Semiotics, 55–74. 25. “Sfidava tutti i Poeti nel ragionare correttamente” (Gozzi, Opere, 78).

Bibliography Barber, Benjamin. Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantalize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. New York: Norton, 2007. Bartoli, Adolfo. Scenari inediti della commedia dell’arte: Contributo alla storia del teatro italiano. Bologna: Forni, 1979. Originally published 1880. Bazoli, Giulietta. L’Orditura e la truppa: Le Fiabe di Carlo Gozzi tra scrittoio e palcoscenico. Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2012. Brusatin, Manlio. Venezia nel Settecento: Stato, architettura, territorio. Torino: Einaudi, 1980. Chiari, Pietro. L’Innamorato di due. Bologna: Stamperia San Tommaso d’Aquino, 1760. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Semiotics of Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Gherardi, Evaristo. “On the Art of Italian Comedians” (1700). In Actors on Acting, edited by Helen Kritch Chinoy and Toby Cole, 57–59. New York: Crown, 1970. Goldoni, Carlo. Delle commedie di Carlo Goldoni avvocato Veneto. Vol. 12. Venice: Giambattista Pasquali, 1761 ———. The Comic Theatre, translated by John W. Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969 ———. Memoirs, tr. J. Black, ed. W.D.Howells. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877. Gozzi, Carlo. Carlo Gozzi: 1720–1806: Stravaganze sceniche, letterarie battaglie. Venice: Marsilio, 2006. ———. Opere, edited by Giuseppe Petronio. Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. ———. “A Reflective Analysis of the Fable Entitled The Love of the Three Oranges.” In The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, translated by John Addington Symonds, 112–46. London: Scribner & Welford, 1890. Herrick, Marvin T. Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Mancini, Franco, Maria Teresa Muraro, and Elena Povoledo. I Teatri del Veneto. Tomo 1, Vol. 1-2. Venezia: Teatri effimeri e nobili imprenditori. Venice: Regione del Veneto, 1995. Neveu, J. Marc. “The Space of the Mask: From Stage to Ridotto.” In Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe, edited by Martin, Meredith, 149–60. London: Routledge, 2016.

Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges | 107 Pietropaolo, Domenico. Semiotics and Pragmatics of Stage Improvisation. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino. Il segreto della commedia dell’arte: La memoria della compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XLVIII secolo. Florence: Usher, 1982. Vazzoler, Franco. “Introduzione: Per meritar la vostra cortesia.” In Carlo Gozzi, Versi per gli attori, ed. Giulietta Bazoli and Franco Vazzoler, 9–30. Venice: Marsilio, 2018.

5 Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination Ted Emery

W

hen Vsevolod Meyerhold and his circle founded Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto in 1914, taking the first half of their title from Gozzi’s first fiaba and proposing him as a model for their innovations in theatrical form, they did not do so without eliciting criticism. When Meyerhold, Konstantin Vogak, and Vladimir Soloviev published their adaptation of Three Oranges in the journal’s first issue, Aleksei Gvozdev, a young Italianist at the University of Saint Petersburg, objected that they had eliminated the fiaba’s most fundamental element: the playwright’s parody of his theatrical contemporaries. Worse, argued Gvozdev, they had adopted the German Romantics’ ahistorical view of Gozzi and had ignored his Useless Memoirs (Memorie inutili), which Gvozdev called the “cynical confession of an antirevolutionary.”1 In Gvozdev’s view, Gozzi’s hostility to Goldoni had been based on the fear that his plays represented a threat to Venice’s aristocratic order, whereas his support for the commedia dell’arte had less to do with aesthetic considerations than with his belief that the improvised theatre had remained uncontaminated by socially corrosive Enlightenment thought. Meyerhold, Vogak, and Soloviev responded with an “Open Letter” in which they justified their view of Gozzi as a theatrical innovator and insisted that his compositional techniques were more important than his “transient” polemic.2 In an additional playful response by the journal’s editorial staff, “The True but Not Very Plausible Story of a Mysterious Visit by a Certain Nobleman to the Editorial Office of a Little-Known Journal Located on Kazan Cathedral Square” (1915), Gozzi himself appears to sarcastically condemn “certain scholarly pedants” for seeing him as a defender of aristocratic privilege,

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claiming instead that he was, above all, a man of the theatre.3 The following year, Russian formalist Viktor Zhirmunsky contextualized the Romantics’ understanding of Gozzi in an article on Tieck4 and then, in the final number of the journal, responded to Gvozdev in the essay, “Carlo Gozzi: Politician or Artist?” arguing that although it was valid to note Gozzi’s conservatism, his quarrel with Goldoni was based on his opposition to the latter’s naturalistic view of the theatre—a view that justified the Meyerholdians’ adoption of Gozzi as a model for their own experiments.5 The crux of this exchange is a disagreement about what constitutes a legitimate interpretation. Gvozdev favored a scholarly, historical reading that reconstructed the meanings that Gozzi intended his plays to transmit, whereas Meyerhold and his circle chose to read Gozzi selectively, using aspects of his work that supported their intentions in their own artistic and social context. They were not unaware of Gozzi’s reactionary views—indeed, their open letter to Gvozdev appears in the same journal issue as the first installment of Vogak’s translation of the Ingenuous Disquisition and Sincere History of the Origin of My Ten Theatrical Fairy Tales (Ragionamento ingenuo), in which Gozzi explicitly characterizes the theatre as an ideological instrument. In contrast to Gvozdev’s historical reading, Meyerhold and his collaborators espoused a “creative misreading” that allowed them to draw inspiration from the past and use elements of an author’s work synthetically in their quest for the theatre of the future. Naturally, such a choice is valid as a creative act. Nevertheless, if an aesthetic program is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes, then a full understanding of Gozzi’s importance to Meyerhold and his colleagues is possible only when we take into account both what they admired and what they chose to omit: the conservative social ideology that shapes and informs Gozzi’s imaginary fairy-tale worlds.

Writing the Reader in the Reflective Analysis of “The Love of Three Oranges” Meyerhold was strongly influenced by the German Romantic view of Gozzi as a forerunner of their experiments with theatrical irony, which Chris Baldick defines as the “self-consciousness with which an author signals his or her freedom from the limits of a given work by puncturing its fictional illusion and exposing its process of composition as a matter of authorial whim.”6 Among the techniques Gozzi employs to foreground the constructed nature of his theatrical illusions, Meyerhold admired his practice of destabilizing the normal boundaries of reality by staging magical transformations of humans into

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monsters, animals, or statues or by attributing human qualities to inanimate objects.7 Zhirmunsky praised Gozzi’s use of masks to destroy scenic illusion by commenting on the actions of serious characters.8 Gozzi also often breaks the illusion of his fairy-tale plots by referring to contemporary Venetian reality or by introducing recognizable Venetian characters or landmarks into ostensibly fantastical worlds. For Meyerhold, such compositional techniques provided a model of how to free audiences to generate imaginative meaning in conjunction with the improvising actor. Yet while Meyerhold and his circle gleaned such techniques from Three Oranges and other fiabe, Gozzi’s Reflective Analysis of his scenario seems intended to do the reverse: to narrow the scope of the reader’s reception by inscribing into his text a limited series of modes of reading. Rather than re-creating the scenario as it was staged, the Reflective Analysis stages an authorized reading of it. First produced in 1761, Three Oranges was not published until 1772, in the first edition of Gozzi’s works (Colombani, 1772–74). In the intervening years, Goldoni and Chiari had left Venice, and their place among theatrical “progressives” had been taken by Domenico Caminer and his daughter Elisabetta, supporters of Goldoni who introduced Venetian audiences to sentimental dramas by French authors such as Beaumarchais, Mercier, Saurin, and de Falbaire. In promoting these works as a model for the Italian theatre, the Caminers roundly criticized both commedia and Gozzi’s fiabe. It was in this context of renewed polemic, then, that Gozzi published the Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” (Analisi riflessiva della fiaba teatrale L’Amore delle tre melarance) to guide the reader’s reception of his first theatrical tale. As an allegorical parody, the staged version of Three Oranges implied two kinds of active spectator. The first is a “naive” viewer who is unaware of the author’s polemic with Goldoni and Chiari but who has excellent knowledge of the play’s source—a familiar fairy tale in the Venetian oral tradition.9 The pleasure of this minimally active spectator consists in comparing the plot of the well-known story to the onstage version and of marveling at how magical events are made believable in the process of their theatricalization. As Gozzi described, “The Spectators had been informed by their nurses and grandmothers of all these marvels mixed with ridicule, and of the childish simplicity of these scenes since their earliest years. They were deeply immersed in the subject, and their souls were strongly captivated by the daring novelty of seeing such an accurate representation of it in the Theatre.”10 The second viewer shares the knowledge of the tale but is also aware of Gozzi’s polemic and so has the added pleasure of being able to decode the play’s allegory. Both

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of these interpretive positions are reproduced in the Reflective Analysis but in a way that deprives the reader of the activity exercised by the viewing public of 1761. In the Reflective Analysis, Gozzi summarizes his play within an interpretive frame, commenting on both plot and audience reception. In the most common type of gloss, Gozzi provides the key to the scenario’s allegorical parody. He explicitly informs the reader that the character of Fata Morgana represents Chiari and that the magician Celio is a parody of Goldoni. When Fata Morgana laces Tartaglia’s soup with Martellian verses that plunge him into depression, Gozzi explains that he intended to mock the monotony of this verse form, often used by Goldoni and Chiari (act I). When the King begs his son not to undertake the quest for the oranges, Tartaglia makes “brutal threats” toward his father—a shocking lack of filial piety that the King blames on the bad example set by “the new comedies” and that Gozzi, in his own voice, likens to a scene in a Chiari play (act II). Commenting on the “bizarre” nature of the warrior-princess Clarice, Gozzi tells us that she is a parody of a character in Chiari’s Attila, and when he invents a character intended to mock the theatrical convention of the neo-Aristotelian unity of place (a devil who uses a bellows to blow Tartaglia and Truffaldino over impossible distances), he indicates that this is a parody of Chiari’s Ezelino, Tyrant of Padua (Ezzelino, il tiranno di Padova), in which a character justifies an impossible journey by praising the quality of his horse (act II). The longest of these glosses is the Martellian verse duel in act III, in which Gozzi is supremely self-satisfied with his ability to parody his rivals’ style. Gozzi was well aware that his play could be read simply for its fairy-tale plot, without reference to its parody. Indeed, in its preface, he notes that in the years following the original production, “circumstances having changed,” Sacchi’s troupe had cut the parodic content and presented the work purely as a fairy tale. By foregrounding parodic content in these and many similar glosses, Gozzi attempts to ensure that there will be no “naive” readers in 1772 and beyond and that his play will be understood primarily through the lens of his polemic with Goldoni and Chiari. At the same time, Gozzi comments on his faithfulness to his fairy-tale source, repeatedly assuring the reader that the plot is developed “just as in the text of the children’s fairy tale,” describing characters as “guardians” of the story and their words as “ever faithful to the text” of the tale (59).11 Less fre­quently, but significantly, Gozzi comments on his source to underscore its trivial­ ity and childishness—a position that overlaps with his criticism of Goldoni, whose plays portrayed lower-class characters in a sympathetic light: “All these trivialities, typical of this trivial fairy tale, amused the Audience with their

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novelty as much as The House Servants, Il Campiello, a Venetian Comedy, The Chioggia Scuffles, and all the other trivial works by Signor Goldoni” (53–54).12 By characterizing the plot of Three Oranges as trivial, Gozzi offers his readers of 1772 a position superior to the naive spectator of 1761, implicitly inviting them to join with him in belittling his fairy-tale source and privileging the play’s polemical content. A third variety of gloss praises the skill of the commedia actors and delineates the reactions of the audience. Sometimes these comments merely claim that the play was well received, citing the “continuous burst of universal laughter in the Auditorium” (52).13 Elsewhere, however, the author describes the audience’s perfect understanding of his allegory. An argument among Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella restages Gozzi’s polemic within his fairy-tale plot without mentioning his rivals by name. The Reflective Analysis then explicitly identifies the characters’ positions. Clarice maintains that the plays produced at court should be tragedies with wildly exaggerated characters (like those of Chiari, Gozzi tells the reader), Leandro prefers “Comedies of character” (like Goldoni’s plays, notes Gozzi’s gloss), and Brighella supports improvised comedies and implicitly praises Sacchi’s troupe. The reader of 1772 is guided to a correct understanding of the scene by the author’s interpretive frame, but the more sophisticated members of his original audience had had no need for such help: “[Brighella] exited [the stage] with the applause of the Audience, who thoroughly understood the true meaning of his speech” (56).14 The audience of 1761 is here recruited as a character in a parallel plot—the story of the play’s reception—and its perfect understanding, without Gozzi’s prompting, confirms the correctness of the interpretation that the playwright, through his glosses, offers to his readers of 1772. To the ideal first audience, with whom readers may be expected to identify, Gozzi contrasts an anti-spectator: the partisans of Goldoni and Chiari, present at the performance, who are inscribed into the Reflective Analysis only to be defeated. Introducing the poetic duel between Fata Morgana and Celio, Gozzi tells us that “the two claques supporting Signor Chiari and Signor Goldoni, which were present in the Theatre, sensing the biting elements of the parody, tried by any means to stir up the indignation of the audience, yet all their efforts were vain” (64).15 Finally, and most strikingly, Gozzi inscribes himself into the text of the Reflective Analysis as a spectator who is swept up in the theatrical representation of the fairy-tale material: “I confess, I laughed at myself, realizing how, against my will, my soul humbled itself to delight in such childish images that brought me back to my childhood days” (60).16 In this crucial moment, Gozzi tells us, he became aware of the theatre’s power not to free audiences to generate

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meaning but rather to immerse them in the fantastic material of his source, made believable by the artifice of the theatre. This proliferation of interpretive glosses, and of the reading positions they produce, establishes a relationship with the reader that is entirely different from that between the original performance of the play and the audience of 1761. If the first spectators were active, to the extent that they could decode Gozzi’s allegory or admire his theatricalization of an oral tale, the reader of the Reflective Analysis is confronted with a variety of preestablished reading positions. This was not a casual choice on Gozzi’s part. After all, he could have chosen to publish the original scenario or to rewrite it, substituting his dialogue for the actors’ improvisations. Instead, he chose a form that would maximize control over his readers’ interpretation. This same concern with authorial control is equally evident in one of Gozzi’s most detailed theoretical comments on the theatre, the Ingenuous Disquisition, published as the introduction to the Colombani edition.

A Question of Control: Empathy and Interpellation Meyerhold and his circle understood Gozzi’s querelle with Goldoni as a battle over the aesthetic nature of theatre, a forerunner of their own opposition to the naturalism of the Moscow Art Theatre and its recently founded First Studio. Gozzi indeed criticized Goldoni for merely transcribing reality “in the most trivial way, without imitating it from nature, and without the elegance necessary to a writer.”17 His objections, however, were often motivated by social rather than aesthetic concerns: “In [Goldoni’s comedies], lust and vice contend with modesty and virtue, and very often the latter are defeated by the former. In many of his plays he made true noblemen into examples of iniquity and silliness, and plebeian characters, by contrast, into serious examples of virtue. I suspect (perhaps too maliciously) that he did so to win the favor of the common people, always resentful of the necessary yoke of subordination.”18 In the Ingenuous Disquisition, Gozzi extends this ideological objection to the sentimental dramas that the Caminers had recently introduced to Venice. In 1771, Francesco Milizia had published On the Theatre (Del teatro), condemning the commedia dell’arte for trying to provoke the laughter of the lower classes in every possible way, without regard to good taste or the rules of theatrical composition. In a review published in the journal L’Europa letteraria, of which he was director, Domenico Caminer praised Milizia’s assertion that theatre must instruct as well as delight, endorsed his claim that

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using theatre to keep the lower classes in ignorance was an act of tyranny, and faulted the improvised comedy and its supporters whose “inhuman” aim is to foster “the prejudices, stupidity, and tendency toward base actions of the common people.”19 In the Ingenuous Disquisition, Gozzi replies that the real tyrant is one who uses theatre to stir up discontent among the common people, exposing them to the terrible punishments of the governing authorities.20 The true education of the lower classes, Gozzi tells us, is “in religion, in exercising their trades with diligence and without fraud, in lowering their heads and accepting the beautiful order of subordination among social ranks.”21 Rather than a school for the lower classes, as Caminer would have it, the theatre is a “pure place of entertainment” and its works should be “an innocent diversion allowed to the common people by a wise government” (where “innocent” clearly means “lacking any challenge to the established order”).22 The view of the theatre that Gozzi articulates here is similar to Louis Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses, cultural institutions that function parallel to a government’s repressive state apparatuses (courts, police, armed forces) and serve to perpetuate the dominance of a ruling class by nonviolent means.23 In this context, the idea of theatre as “pure” play is ideologically loaded from the outset. Gozzi doesn’t stop there, however. In his analysis of the French comédies larmoyantes (sentimental dramas) promoted by the Caminers, he identifies a social danger not just in the plays’ content but also in the relationship they establish with the audience.24 The Caminers had praised the “sublimity” of these plays—that is, the highly melodramatic plots in which virtue was threatened, only to triumph in the end. For Gozzi, the plays’ virtues are actually vices: They preach a law of nature opposed to a divinely sanctioned aristocratic order; they portray figures of authority as foolish, ineffective, or tyrannical; and they suggest that social resources are unfairly divided, attack paternal authority, undermine established religion, and foment lower-class resentment against the social subordination enshrined in a wise legal code.25 Worse, these sentimental dramas transmit socially corrosive ideas through a mechanism that subjugates their audiences. The “emotional commotion” these plays create in their viewers is the gateway for an “insidious sublimity.”26 By identifying with the falsely virtuous characters and vicariously experiencing their travails, audiences are ideologically interpellated (to use Althusser’s term): they (mis)recognize themselves in the fiction and unthinkingly assume its values. Commenting on Mercier’s Jenneval, Gozzi brands its heroine Rosalie as “nothing more than a prostitute” and claims that, through “emotional commotion,” audiences assume her point of view as their own:

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“The ‘emotionally moved spirits’ of the audience are all directed toward Rosalie. Rosalie the whore is in the pulpit; the applause is all for Rosalie. . . . Filthy lust, wickedness, and seduction . . . skillfully presented, fill the spiritual part of the spectators and become the principal perception therein.”27 So, too, in Falbaire's L’Honnête criminel, ou L’Amour filial, an anti-Christian message is supported by the “irresistible spell” of the story’s romantic subplot, leaving in an “audience of disciples” a “feeling of loathing toward the austere principles of the Catholic faith.”28 The same is true of Mercier’s Le Déserteur, where the “insidious science” of the sentimental play leaves the audience “overcome with horror and compassion, filled with a pernicious abhorrence against princes and wise lawgivers.”29 Gozzi objects not only to the plays’ content but also to the mechanism of emotional identification and ideological interpellation by which spectators are forced to assume a set of social values antithetical to Gozzi’s own. However, he does not counter this realistic and didactic model of the theatre with a theory of the theatre as pure play. Instead, he does just the opposite, claiming that his theatrical fairy tales adopt the same mechanism while transmitting a socially healthy moral lesson.30 Gozzi’s surprising proposal of a fundamental similarity between his own plays and the sentimental dramas he excoriates can be understood only in light of the development of the theatrical fairy tale genre after 1761. Unlike Three Oranges, written as a scene sketch on the basis of which the actors extemporized dialogue, the fiabe that followed increasingly restricted their scope for improvisation. Beginning with The Raven (1761), only Truffaldino and Brighella were consistently allowed to improvise. Other comic parts were written out in full, in Venetian or Italian prose depending on the role, and for the serious characters (the princes and princesses of the tales), Gozzi provided text in Italian verse. This mix of comic and serious characters was also new—Three Oranges had comic parts only—and, as Petronio has noted, it constitutes both an aesthetic and a social hierarchy in which differences of language and style demarcate the class and value systems of the characters.31 Within this system, the serious characters have a decidedly privileged position. As heroes of the tales, these noble figures undertake impossible quests for unselfish motives (e.g., to save a brother’s life in The Raven or to remove an enchantment from a beloved wife in The Serpent Woman, in both cases restoring order). Pantalone, a step lower in the social scale of the fiabe, expresses affection for his noble patrons but also is often bewildered by their behavior and unable to understand their heroic values. At the bottom of the social scale are the servants Truffaldino and Brighella, who are often unable even to perceive, much less understand, the heroism of the serious characters

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and whose greed and gluttony provide a stark contrast to the values of their social betters. Meyerhold’s colleague Zhirmunsky presented Gozzi’s clash of comic and serious material through the lens of the German Romantics, who noted of Gozzi’s commedia characters, “With their commentary on the action, their direct addresses from the stage to the parterre . . . they reveal the illusoriness of everything happening on stage.”32 Although comic characters indeed often comment on the plays’ heroic actions, their incomprehension of the serious characters tends to foreground those characters’ values. In his preface to The King Stag, Gozzi asserts, “The vigorous, tragic circumstances [that the play] contains drew tears from my audiences. The broad comedy of the masks, which I had sworn to continue in my plays, was intertwined with the serious material. It took nothing away from the fantastic solemnity of the impossible events, or from the tale’s allegorical moral lesson.”33 Moreover, the importance that Gozzi gives to this serious material is evident in the subtitles of his fiabe, almost all of which are described as tragicomic tales.34 The playwright explicitly equates this tragicomic element with the tone of French melodramas, saying that their authors had introduced “a style that they call new, and that I do not; that they call dramas, and that I would name tragicomedies, not minding an old-fashioned term now despised by those who write about literature.”35 In the sentimental dramas, the emotional trauma of the “virtuous” characters provokes the audience’s empathy and identification. In Gozzi’s tragicomedies, it is the noble, serious characters whose ordeals are said to move the audience. In the prefaces to his fiabe, Gozzi indicates the importance of these emotionally charged situations. He claims that he wrote The Raven to prove that “a silly, unrealistic, puerile plot, if developed with skill and artistry, could have an effect on the emotions of an audience, commanding their attention and even moving them to tears.”36 Similarly, in the Ingenuous Disquisition, he insists that his plays were not only equal to the sentimental dramas in their ability to move the spectators’ emotions but that they did so while communicating positive moral values: “If the effect [of the sentimental dramas] is to make an audience laugh and cry, and to hold its attention, it cannot be denied that I did the same in my Raven, my Serpent Woman, my Blue Monster, my Lady Elvira, and others, and that I did so with good morals. I reserve the right to prove that I had the courage to go further in educating my audiences than the tearful dramas had done.”37 Meyerhold and his collaborators were well aware of this tragicomic element in Gozzi. Zhirmunsky notes, again articulating the German Romantic perspective, that “the characters in [Gozzi’s] comedies . . . live with beautiful feelings, noble words, and

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generous fantasies, in the face of which spectators feel themselves transported to a world . . . that is more sublime, joyful, and light than this world that surrounds us.”38 Zhirmunsky suggests that the German Romantics interpreted Gozzi’s “sublime” as a purely poetic, ideology-free zone; however, as Alberto Beniscelli points out, the otherworld of the fairy tale allowed Gozzi not only to experiment with devices meant to reveal the illusory nature of theatre but also to construct, in this fantastic space, a conservative system of values.39 That value system is embodied in the tragicomic plots of the parti serie and communicated to the audience via the same mechanism of identification and interpellation that Gozzi had identified in the French sentimental dramas. The sublime, for Gozzi, was far from poetic. It was, to use his own term, an ideologically “insidious” art.

The Reactionary World of the Fairy Tales for the Theatre In his Useless Memoirs, Gozzi outlines a view of society in which an “indispensable order of subordination,” articulated in terms of class and gender, is under threat from the pernicious philosophy of the Enlightenment. The autobiographer’s explicit expressions of this creed act as a gloss on the narration of his life experiences, organized into a series of “societies” that illustrate the validity of the narrator’s philosophy—a procedure similar to his use of an interpretive frame in Three Oranges.40 While not in themselves overtly ideological, these autobiographical narratives “stage” Gozzi’s world view and thus are a model for understanding how that same view can be literally staged in the fiabe. All of these autobiographical episodes share similar characteristics, but the story of Gozzi’s feud with his family is especially important for understanding his fairy-tale worlds. Returning from military service, Gozzi finds his elderly father paralyzed and unable to speak. In his weak state, he has allowed his wife and daughter-in-law to assume responsibility for the family finances, which they have disastrously mismanaged. Gozzi begs his older brother Gasparo to take his father’s place and assert his paternal authority, but Gasparo lacks the “masculine constancy” to do so. The women’s insistence on maintaining an appearance of prosperity out of proportion to their means sows discord and foments an acrimonious break between Carlo and his family. The family, Gozzi tells us, is “a little Republic” whose ills are a metaphor for those of civil society; indeed, this pattern of weak masculine authority subverted by women is repeated in the autobiographer’s descriptions of the social order of his city, particularly in the story of his quarrel with

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Pierantonio Gratarol and of the scandal that ensued.41 The same pattern is reflected in the fairy-tale world of his fiabe. Gozzi’s ideology is found in his plays at several different levels. In plays that lack the interpretive frame of the Reflective Analysis, the playwright often puts his views in the mouths of characters who act as textual stand-ins. This is the function of the magician Durandarte in The King Stag, whose envoi mocks the science of the Enlightenment; or of the philosopher-statue Calmon in The Green Bird, who throughout the play is the bearer of Gozzi’s critique of Enlightenment philosophy; or of the slave-girl Dugmé in Zeim, King of the Genies, who calls it a “heavenly sight to see all the people, rank by rank down to the humblest peasants, subordinated to their betters.”42 However, explicit pronouncements like these have little connection to the development of the fairy-tale plot or to the mechanism of empathy and interpellation. A second level of ideological content is found in the evil characters who subvert the proper subordination of the fairy-tale society and who are punished when order is restored at play’s end—for example, Gulindì in The Blue Monster, a former slave who has seduced and married the aged ruler of Nanking, usurped his realm, and embarked on a career of licentiousness that calls down a curse on the city; or Tartaglia in The King Stag, a commoner who uses magic to appropriate King Deramo’s body and seize his kingdom but whose physical and social metamorphosis is unsustainable.43 Figures of this kind function as examples of a threat to the subordination of the fairy-tale society, but again they are not characters with whom audiences identify. It is in the serious, noble characters that we find the world view Gozzi wishes his audiences to take as their own. Two fiabe may serve as examples of a process that can be traced in the rest of Gozzi’s Tales: The Serpent Woman and Turandot. In The Serpent Woman, Farruscad, King of Tiflis, has abandoned his realm to become the husband of Cherestanì, an immortal half-fairy and queen of a hidden kingdom. His wife is supremely powerful, capable of superhuman feats of magic. In contrast, Farruscad seems totally emasculated. He has lived for eight years in his wife’s magical palace, forbidden to ask her name and country. He is described as a “timid waverer . . . more like a weak woman than a man” whose lack of masculine constancy recalls that of Gasparo in the Useless Memoirs. Husband is subordinated to wife and subject to her law in a reversal of the sexual subordination Gozzi prizes. Unlike Gulindì, however, Cherestanì is a tragicomic character with whom the audience may empathize. She wants nothing more than to give up her magical powers and become a mortal woman, but Demogorgone, the King of the Fairies, will allow her to do so only if Farruscad

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can acquire the masculine constancy he lacks. In love with her husband but compelled by Demogorgone to mistreat him, to the point where she must feign killing their two children as Farruscad looks on, Cherestanì’s emotional quandary (expressed in highly melodramatic language) allows the audience to experience her pain vicariously and empathize with her struggle to give up her unwanted power. Farruscad also suffers emotional trauma with which the audience can empathize. The magical law of the fairy kingdom requires him to bear his wife’s torments without ever cursing her—if he succeeds, she will become mortal, but if he fails, she will be transformed into a snake. At first, he bears his wife’s mistreatment, although far from stoically—like his wife, Farruscad expresses his confusion and pain in highly charged language—but when she seems to murder their children, he fails his test and curses her. It is only with the help of the magician Geonca, a stand-in for the author, that Farruscad is able to accomplish the heroic tasks that will free his wife from enchantment and restore the order of the fairy-tale society, first by defeating magical creatures in combat and then by embracing a monstrous serpent (Cherestanì in animal form). As in the sentimental dramas, the play ends with tears of joy and with social order restored as Farruscad acquires the strength he lacked and Cherestanì successfully gives up her unwanted power. Audiences who empathize with Farruscad and Cherestanì experience Gozzi’s ideology not at the level of an overt statement but rather as a matter of a vicariously lived experience through which (at least for the duration of the play) they assume the same world view that Gozzi elsewhere expresses explicitly. Something similar occurs in Turandot. The Emperor Altoum has weakly agreed to allow his daughter to avoid marriage by challenging suitors to solve her riddles and executing them when they fail. Although her powers are not magical, Turandot is no less a threat to social order than Cherestanì, for men are helpless before her beauty and overcome by her ability to manipulate language. Turandot avoids subjection to male domination by accentuating the distance between words and meaning, creating a subversion that is not overcome until Calaf, by answering her riddles, reincorporates her into both linguistic and social order. At first, she is not very different from Gulindì, Gozzi’s example of a bad woman in The Blue Monster; however, Turandot becomes a sympathetic figure after her defeat in the riddle contest. Caught between a desire to be free of male domination and a burgeoning love for Calaf, Turandot expresses a charged emotional conflict with which audiences can empathize. Cherestanì’s assumption of male power was involuntary, and she gives it up triumphantly at the play’s end. Turandot, who appears to have preserved her power by discovering Calaf’s name, refuses to exercise it and accepts her place

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in the social order by agreeing to marry him. Audiences who empathize with these characters are not asked to condemn them. Instead, they are offered the opportunity to experience the “problem” of excessive female authority and its solution from the inside, as participants in the characters’ willing assumption of a “necessary order of subordination.”

An Ideological Choice Gozzi’s fiabe are imaginary representations of what were for him real social ills, and they incorporate a mechanism by which the author hoped to exert ideological influence over his audiences. When Meyerhold and his circle privileged the techniques with which Gozzi reveals the illusoriness of the theatrical experience, they elided the ideological element that shaped his fiabe in equal measure. This was a legitimate creative strategy, but there is an irony here, and not a Romantic one. Meyerhold’s project of creating a purely theatrical theatre, with this Gozzi character as its model and inspiration, was necessarily an ideological act and one that, like Gozzi’s work, must be examined in the context of his time and society. Part 2 of this book will attempt that task in greater detail. One thing, I think, is clear. Meyerhold’s eventual fate in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where his resistance to socialist realist form fueled the director’s arrest and execution, should suggest that an aesthetic of self-conscious, playful theatricality, whether in eighteenth-century Venice or in twentieth-century Russia, may not—and perhaps cannot—be ideologically neutral.

Notes 1. Cited in Raskina, Mejerhol’d, 166. 2. Vogak, Meierkhol’d, and Solov’ev, “Otkrytoe pis’mo,” 208–10. 3. “Pravdivaia, no maloveroiatnaia istoriia.” 166–70. 4. Zhirmunskii, “Komediia chistoi radosti,” 210–14. 5. Zhirmunskii, “Carlo Gotstsi,” 119–31. For a fuller discussion of the polemic between Gvozdev and Meyerhold’s circle, see Raskina, Mejerchol’d, 165–73, and her chapter in this book (chap. 8). 6. Chris Baldick, “Romantic Irony,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Oxford Reference Online, http://www.oxfordreference.com /view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-1002, accessed May 7, 2015. Cited in Posner, “Baring the Frame,” 385. 7. Posner, “Baring the Frame,” 368. 8. Zhirmunskii, “Komediia,” 211.

Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination  |  121 9. On Gozzi’s source for Three Oranges, often erroneously thought to be a version of the tale found in Giambattista Basile’s Cunto de li cunti, see Fabrizi, “Carlo Gozzi.” 10. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 135. Translation from 63, this book. Further citations from the fiaba translation are given in the text. 11. Gozzi, 131. 12. Gozzi, 124. 13. Gozzi, 123. 14. Gozzi, 135. 15. Gozzi, 135–36. 16. Gozzi, 131. 17. Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 79. Translations from Italian sources other than Three Oranges are my own. 18. Gozzi¸ 80. 19. Cited in Beniscelli, “Introduzione,” 20. 20. Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 62. 21. Gozzi, 63. 22. The reference to theatres as “pure places of entertainment” is from Gozzi’s “Appendix to the Ingenuous Disquisition,” published as the introduction to vol. 4 of the Colombani edition. See Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 101. The quotation that follows is from Ragionamento ingenuo, 63. 23. Althusser, “Ideology,” 142–48. 24. Comédie larmoyante (literally, “tearful comedy”) was a genre of French sentimental drama that blurred tragedy and comedy. They were comedies only in the sense that they usually ended with the unexpected resolution of an imminent tragedy, as characters who had been in conflict were reconciled in a profusion of happy tears. Such plays often aimed to raise social consciousness by presenting “normal” characters (rather than exemplary heroes) caught in a conflict created by a social problem or injustice, all within a framework of moralizing sensibility. Practitioners of the genre included Nivelle de la Chausée, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Beaumarchais, Diderot, and Sedaine, among others. 25. Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 62–63. 26. Gozzi, 62. 27. Gozzi, 69–70. The reference to the “emotionally moved spirits” (animi commossi) of the spectators is a quotation from Elisabetta Caminer’s preface to Composizioni teatrali moderne (1772), in which she praises the French plays’ power to “instruct an audience perfectly persuaded by the verisimilitude of [a play’s] events and disposed to receive impressions of virtue through the power of commotion.” Caminer Turra, Selected Writings, 127. 28. Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 67. 29. Gozzi, 65. 30. For a more detailed consideration of Gozzi’s views on the comédie larmoyante, see the excellent analysis in Cederna,“Specchi pericolosi.” 31. Petronio, “Introduzione,” 33. 32. Zhirmunskii, “Komediia,” 211. 33. Gozzi, Five Tales, 73. 34. Il Corvo, Il re cervo, La donna serpente, Turandot, I pitocchi fortunati, and Il mostro turchino are all called “Fiaba tragicomica,” whereas Zobeide is a “Tragedia fiabesca.” Only two plays depart from this pattern: L’Augellin belverde (“Fiaba filosofica”) and Zeim, re de’ geni (“Fiaba serio-faceta”). 35. Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 51.

122  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 36. Gozzi, Five Tales, 21. This volume includes translations of five prefaces from the Colombani edition. 37. Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo, 75. 38. Zhirmunskii, “Komediia,” 210–11. 39. Beniscelli, “Introduzione,” 40–41. 40. Emery, “Autobiographer,” 35–49. 41. Pierantonio Gratarol (1738–85) was a member of Venice’s class of “original citizens”—a group similar to the French noblesse de robe from whom the Republic drew its civil servants. To bolster his career, he courted Caterina Dolfin Tron, wife of Andrea Tron, one of the most powerful men in the Venetian government. Outside of his administrative duties, Gratarol was known as a ladies’ man, and among his conquests was Teodora Ricci, leading lady of Sacchi’s troupe, with whom Gozzi had a long-standing romantic relationship. This conquest earned him both Gozzi’s enmity and the hostility of Dolfin Tron. When Gratarol was parodied in the figure of Don Adone, a minor character in Gozzi’s The Drugs of Love (Le droghe d’amore), a scandal ensued. Gozzi’s memoirs claim that the parody was not his, that Sacchi, hoping to attract Dolfin Tron’s favor and realizing that a scandal would increase the play’s draw, instructed the actor playing Don Adone to imitate Gratarol’s appearance and mannerisms. Gratarol reacted with very public outrage, adding fuel to the scandal. Gozzi claims that he petitioned the Venetian authorities to close down the play, but that Dolfin Tron exercised her influence to ensure that the run continued. Humiliated and infuriated, Gratarol went into exile and from abroad penned his Apologetic Narration (Narrazione apologetica), a bitter attack on Gozzi, Tron, and other patricians whom he accused of deliberately sabotaging his career. In the Useless Memoirs, Gozzi underscores the two women’s role in creating and furthering the scandal, faulting Gratarol for his “effeminate” credulity and bemoaning the weak response of the censors to the play and later to the Narrazione apologetica. See Gozzi, Memorie inutili, vol. 1: 344–385, and vol. 2: 3–149. See also Dal Borgo. 42. Gozzi quotes this speech in the Ingenuous Disquisition as an example of his “general maxims”; Ragionamento ingenuo, 58–59. 43. For more on The King Stag, in which Gozzi’s conflation of a physical transformation with a violation of class boundaries reveals the political unconscious of his text, see Emery, “Reactionary Imagination.”

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 127–86. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Beniscelli, Alberto. “Introduzione.” In Carlo Gozzi, Il ragionamento ingenuo, edited by Alberto Beniscelli, 13–41. Genova: Costa e Nolan, 1983. Caminer Turra, Elisabetta. Selected Writings of an Eighteenth-Century Woman of Letters, edited and translated by Catherine M. Sama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Cederna, Camilla M. “Specchi pericolosi. Carlo Gozzi critico del dramma flebile francese.” Problemi di critica goldoniana, no. 13 (2006); 223–42. Dal Borgo, Michela. “Gratarol, Pierantonio.” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 2002, https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pierantonio -gratarol_(Dizionario-Biografico), accessed December 28, 2020.

Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination  |  123 Emery, Ted A. “Autobiographer as Critic: The Structure and ‘Utility’ of Gozzi’s Useless Memoirs.” Italian Quarterly 94 (Fall 1983): 35–49. ———. “The Reactionary Imagination: Ideology and the Form of the Fairy Tale in Gozzi’s Il re cervo [The King Stag].” In Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France, edited by Nancy Canepa, 247–77. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Fabrizi, Angelo. “Carlo Gozzi e la tradizione popolare: a proposito de L’amore delle tre melarance.” Italianistica: Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 7 (1978): 336–45. Gozzi, Carlo. Fiabe teatrali, edited by Paolo Bosisio. Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. ———. Five Tales for the Theatre, edited and translated by Albert Bermel and Ted Emery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. ———. Memorie inutili, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini. 2 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1910. ———. Il ragionamento ingenuo, edited by Alberto Beniscelli. Genoa: Costa e Nolan, 1983. ———. Useless Memoirs, translated by John Addington Symonds, edited and abridged by Philip Horne. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Petronio, Giuseppe. “Introduzione.” In Carlo Gozzi, Opere. Teatro e polemiche teatrali, edited by Giuseppe Petronio, 9–46. Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Posner, Dassia N. “Baring the Frame: Meyerhold’s Refraction of Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges.” Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (September 2015): 362–88. “Pravdivaia, no maloveroiatnaia istoriia o tainstvennom poseshchenii odnoi osoboi znatnogo roda redaktsii maloizvestnogo zhurnala.” LTA, no. 4–7 (1915), 166–70. Raskina, Raissa. Mejerchol’d e il Dottor Dappertutto. Lo “Studio” e la rivista “L’Amore delle tre melarance.” Rome: Bulzoni, 2010. Vogak, Konstantin, Vsevolod Meierkhol’d, and Vladimir Solov’ev. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam. Divertissement. Dvenadtsat’ stsen, prolog, epilog, i tri intermedia.” LTA 1 (1914): 18–47. ———. “Otkrytoe pis’mo avtorov divertissmenta ‘Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam’ A. A. Gvozdevu” [LTA, no. 4–5 (1914): 86–88], translated by Dassia N. Posner. In Dassia N. Posner, The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, 208–10. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Zhirmunskii, Viktor. “Carlo Gotstsi—Politik ili khudozhnik?” LTA, no. 2–3 (1916); 119–31. ———. “Komediia chistoi radosti” [LTA no. 1 (1916), 85–91], translated by Dassia N. Posner. In Dassia N. Posner, The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, 210–14. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

6 A Cultural Pastiche of Fantasy, Satire, and Citrus Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges in Its German Afterlife Natalya Baldyga

The plants of my immaturity, my imaginary fabled roots, of ancient romance and sturdy origins, were weeds that only needed to be grafted onto [new] shoots in order to produce the fruit of various spices and flavors, so that all the rules found a concentrated juice of their own. —Carlo Gozzi, “La piu lunga lettera di risposta”1

I

n the mid–eighteenth century, Count Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), selfappointed guardian of the Italian language and its literature, found himself irritated by new trends in Venetian playwriting. The primary targets of his ire were the middle-class Francophile Carlo Goldoni (1707–93) and his less talented counterpart, the abbé Pietro Chiari (1711–85). To battle these “foes of commedia” (and the encroaching Enlightenment), Gozzi adapted for the Venetian stage ten fiabe (fairy tales). The first of these, The Love of Three Oranges, has been preserved only in the form of a “reflective analysis,” published eleven years after the fiaba’s premiere. In the Analisi Riflessiva della fiaba L’amore delle tre melarance, Gozzi provides a highly specific description of the plot, comic business, and audience reactions; occasional dialogue; and a running commentary detailing instances in which characters, dialogue, plot twists, and even props serve as an allegorical attack on his enemies. Both the

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fiaba and its commentary allow Gozzi to simultaneously defend commedia dell’arte, savage Chiari and Goldoni, and uphold conservative aesthetic and sociopolitical values.2 The play’s long-term success, however, was grounded not in its topical and polemical savagery but in its appealing combination of the familiar and the fantastical. Concocting a potent mélange of source material from different genres and cultural origins, Gozzi exploited both the well-established fascination for folktales in eighteenth-century Venice and the fashionable orientalist craze sparked by The Thousand and One Nights (1704–17). The ingredients of Gozzi’s pastiche—satire, fantasy, and cultural exoticism— contributed to the fiaba’s success in its own day and would inflect the curious appearances of Three Oranges in its German afterlife.3 As repurposed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), and E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), Three Oranges appears, to a greater or lesser extent, obliquely. Sometimes there are oranges, sometimes there are not, but in each case, these German reimaginings allow their authors to comingle fantastical flights of imagination with a greater theatrical, literary, or social critique. The traditional commedia masks that Gozzi employs in Three Oranges already evoke the multicultural nature of the Italian performance form, but Gozzi moves well beyond mixing regional stereotypes and dialects. Gozzi’s ten fiabe are truly transnational, their flavors drawn from a range of cultural influences; Gozzi explains in the final volume of his collected works that he built on the foundations of Neapolitan fairy tale collections in combination with French compilations of oriental and pseudo-oriental folktales.4 He also cites “Arab, Persian, and Chinese novels” and the “extremely irregular Spanish theatre” as additional sources for his subjects and structure.5 Gozzi is less specific when it comes to Three Oranges itself, which he repeatedly refers to in the play’s prefatory material and elsewhere as a story that grandmothers tell their grandchildren from a “trivial fairy tale” (favola triviale).6 Traditionally, the origin of Three Oranges has been traced to a Neapolitan source: “The Three Citrons” (“Le tre cetra”), the penultimate story of fifty in Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, also known as the Pentamerone.7 This attribution, first made by Gozzi’s brother Gasparo in his production review of January 27, 1761, has been challenged by scholars who argue that Gozzi’s plot more closely resembles central and northern Italian oral versions of the tale.8 Although “Le tre cetra” features a questing prince who encounters maiden-harboring citrus fruits, numerous other iterations of the story do as well.9 Italo Calvino cites “forty other Italian versions” that employ a surprisingly wide range of fruit, including “watermelons, lemons, oranges, apples,

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pomegranates, or melangole (which means in some places ‘oranges,’ in others ‘bitter oranges’).”10 Basile’s particular account may not be the source material for Three Oranges, but because other details of Gozzi’s outline echo the Pentamerone’s framing story, it is difficult to discount Basile entirely.11 If Gozzi did draw from Basile to construct his fiaba, his cross-genre adaptation would have entailed a significant linguistic and cultural transformation, given the fundamentally Neapolitan identity of the Pentamerone.12 Although the origins (the ur-citrus) of Three Oranges are up for debate, Gozzi peppered his fiaba with specific allusions to multiple popular, literary, and theatrical traditions, creating a pasticcio of diverse appeal and multiple functions. Three Oranges employs, first and foremost, traditional commedia characters, each of which carries regional associations; familiar names include not only Tartaglia, Pantalone, Truffaldino, Smeraldina, and Brighella, but also Leandro and Clarice, names customarily assigned to unmasked innamorati (lovers). Other characters are drawn from Tuscan literature. The evil fairy, Fata Morgana (who stands in for Chiari), derives from the epic poem Orlando in Love (Orlando Innamorato, 1495) by Matteo Maria Boi­ ardo (1440/41–94).13 Creonta, the sorceress-giant, arrives by way of the serioburlesque epic poem Morgante (1483), by Luigi Pulci (1432–84).14 Farfarello and Draghinazzo, two devils who make cameo appearances, are denizens of Dante’s Inferno.15 Other references are specifically Venetian. The wizard Celio not only stands in for Goldoni but also provides an additional dig at the playwright—Celio is the imaginary invalid in Goldoni’s The Bizarre Old Man (Il Vecchio bizzarro, 1754), which was an embarrassing theatrical failure.16 The royal family members in Three Oranges are dressed as playing cards, possibly a reference to the tarot deck developed by Boiardo.17 A vaguely exotic note comes from Ninetta, the imprisoned princess, and her sisters, who are the daughters of Concul, “King of the Antipodes.”18 Gozzi also invokes exoticism through Smeraldina, whom he describes as “a Moorish girl” who speaks “Italianized” Turkish.19 Smeraldina is in fact both exotic and familiar: her manner of speech evokes a Levantine lingua franca (used for a range of exotic others) that audiences would have seen caricatured onstage.20 The long-term success of Gozzi’s cultural pastiche stems from its stylistic novelty and the mélange of characters that gives the piece its flavor and allows it to be enjoyed on multiple levels. The familiarity of the commedia masks and children’s tales, the fashionable exoticism of fantastic realms, and the literary allusions from heroic romances provided both comfort and surprise for Venetian audiences.21 Gozzi’s tragicomic fiaba was Venetian in its theatrical critique and employment of well-known actors, Italian in its use of a fairy

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tale that was popular throughout the peninsula, and European in its trendy fascination with foreign characters and settings. Gozzi performed similar maneuvers with his other fiabe, and it was precisely this quality of pastiche, combining fantasy, parody, satire, and grotesquerie, that led to Gozzi’s popularity in Germany. The German afterlife of Three Oranges is part of a larger story of enthusiasm for Gozzi’s works that began in the late eighteenth century and extended well into the nineteenth. Prominent authors such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) expressed admiration for Gozzi, but it was the well-received fivevolume prose translation by Friedrich August Clemens Werthes (1748–1817), published between 1777 and 1779, that made Gozzi’s fiabe generally available to the reading public.22 These translations almost immediately caught the attention of German theatre producers, notably that of the great actor, playwright, and theatre manager Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816), who was attracted by the potential of Turandot and The Raven (Il corvo).23 Schröder and playwright Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (1746–97) began writing and ­staging adaptations of Gozzi’s fiabe and other more traditional plays; these reworkings soon proliferated, and by the end of the century, numerous adaptations— many of them of musical—had been performed throughout Germany, as well as in Austria and Sweden. The German history of Three Oranges itself is delightfully peculiar. Rather than adapting the story directly, as they did with Gozzi’s other fiabe, German authors used Three Oranges as an inspiration, infusing their own satirical critiques with a Gozzian flavor that might not be immediately apparent to the casual viewer or reader. Gozzi’s fiabe provided an important resource for the emerging genre of the literary fairy tale (Kunstmärchen) and, when taken into the realm of German Sturm und Drang and Romanticism, also provided a means of critiquing, on the one hand, Enlightenment rationality and bourgeois theatrical tastes and, on the other, false sentimentality and a desire for empty spectacle. The presentational style of commedia, combined with Gozzi’s satirical edge and humor, also appealed to authors interested in a Schlegelian concept of Romantic irony, in which “ironic works of art are informed by an awareness that their own expressive or representational means are necessarily incommensurate with the transcendental Idea they strive to comprehend.”24 Gozzian form allows German authors to comment selfmockingly on the impossibility of achieving the theatrical sublime, even as they savage quotidian dramatic forms that would deny its existence. Romantic irony delights in the deliberate subversion of established literary structures, embracing duality, paradox, and the doppelgänger. In Germany, therefore,

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the Gozzi-infused writing of Goethe, Tieck, and Hoffmann is self-referential and satirical, commingling multiple realities in a manner that ranges from the simple to the kaleidoscopic. This mixture of styles and genres, and of the serious with the comically grotesque, similarly combines cultural influences; adaptations of Gozzi’s already hybridized fiaba accrete characters, forms, and concerns not only from the German theatre but also from the English and Spanish theatres, resulting in a cultural pastiche all their own.

Goethe’s “Dramatic Whim” Goethe had a large and lasting impact on Gozzi’s fate in the German lands and beyond.25 In Weimar, in 1802, Goethe staged an adaptation of Turandot by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), but his interest in Gozzi predated this vital moment. During his early years at Weimar, Goethe not only produced (and acted in) short improvised sketches inspired by Gozzi but also drew on Three Oranges to create a short six-act comic Singspiel titled The Triumph of Sensibility (Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit).26 Performed twice in 1778 and published in 1787 with the subtitle “a dramatic whim” (eine dramatische Grille), Goethe’s fairy tale recounts the trials of King Andrason (played onstage by Goethe), whose wife, Mandandane, has become infatuated with the melancholic Prince Oronaro.27 The influence of Three Oranges can be felt in Goethe’s fairy-tale characters and the conceit of a literature-induced illness, as well as in the play’s self-referential humor and moments when Goethe invites the actors to improvise. In The Triumph of Sensibility, the emotionally overindulgent Prince Oronaro has become so sensitive that he is unable to enjoy the beauties of nature that he worships; he therefore travels with a collection of special boxes that contain mechanical reproductions of nature—forest, rocks, moonlight, and birdsong. One of these boxes contains a life-sized replica of Queen Mandandane, to which Oronaro declaims his love. While Oronaro is away consulting an oracle, King Andrason and his sister’s ladies-in-waiting discover that the Mandandane doll is stuffed with sensibility-heightening novels— Martin Miller’s Siegwart (1776), Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1706), and Goethe’s own best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774) (fig. 6.1). Confronted with her replica, Mandandane recognizes the fraudulence of Oronaro’s sensibility and love for her. The marriage of the king and queen is given new life, while the prince remains unable—or unwilling—to relinquish his illusory reality.

Figure 6.1. The discovery of Prince Oronaro’s doll, The Triumph of Sensibility (Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit). Daniel Chodowiecki, illustration from the first printing, 1787. Author’s collection.

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What gives the piece its Gozzian flavor is not only the structural and the­matic similarity to Three Oranges (although there is no citrus to be found here), but also some very funny moments of theatrically self-referential humor.28 In both plays, a melancholy prince has been infected by literature and a magical figure seeks to intervene (the magician Celio for Tartaglia and a mystical oracle for Oronaro).29 Both Gozzi and Goethe satirically employ a theatricalized fairy tale as a means of social critique and to lampoon literary forms that they perceive as pernicious. Where Gozzi savages Chiari’s and Goldoni’s theatrical experimentation, Goethe gently mocks those with a taste for sentimental literature. Part of the fun of The Triumph of Sensibility is the manner of Goethe’s teasing, which evokes commedia’s awareness of its own theatricality. In act V, an embarrassed Andrason confesses to the audience that the play is nowhere near a conclusion; Sora, a lady-in-waiting, suggests a sixth act and shrugs off Andrason’s discomfort—after all, one sees everything in the German theatre these days. Andrason calls on the gods to give the audience patience and the play goes on.30 In addition to such self-referential moments, The Triumph of Sensibility provides space for commedia-inspired improvisation, as in act I, when ladies-in-waiting examine an oracular scroll and Goethe’s stage directions instruct the actresses to extemporize as they read and comment on it.31 The Triumph of Sensibility may borrow from Gozzi, but it is nonetheless a very German Kunstmärchen that both celebrates and laughs at Romantic sensibility. Goethe’s fairy tale prince wallows in his Waldeinsamkeit, overstimulated by Wertherian feeling, but this feeling is false; Oronaro is a posturer who refuses to let go of the pose that he has adopted, preferring his own representation of nature to the real thing.32 Yet Oronaro’s stultifying speeches about nature and love are followed by a play-within-a-play, a monodrama titled Proserpina, touchingly performed by Queen Mandandane.33 Sensibility is clarified, rather than banished, through Goethe’s musical satire, as demonstrated by the fact that Goethe published and staged Proserpina as an independent and serious work.34 The titular triumph occurs in the reunification of Andrason and Mandandane, both capable of feeling while remaining grounded in reality. In Goethe’s “dramatic whim,” inspired and infused by Gozzi’s sense of play, the author laughs at his younger self—and at those infected by the Sturm and Drang he helped to create—without completely relinquishing the sublime possibility suggested by the heightened emotions of Proserpina. Goethe’s laughter would be passed on to another of Gozzi’s admirers, who would use Three Oranges, filtered through The Triumph of Sensibility, to flavor his own (much longer) six-act play—one that draws not only on both playwrights but also on a wealth of other sources, to dizzying effect.

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Tieck’s Super-Pastiche Playwright, translator, novelist, and dramaturg Ludwig Tieck was, like Goethe, critical to the development of literary folktales and fairy tales in Germany and shared Goethe’s affinity for Gozzi. “Without wishing to imitate Gozzi,” Tieck wrote, “pure pleasure in his fiabe caused me to adapt in a different manner and in German fashion a fantastic fairy tale for the German stage.”35 Without a doubt, Gozzi’s satirical fairy tale structure and spirit inform Tieck’s plays Puss in Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater, 1797), Prince Zerbino (1798), The Monster and the Enchanted Forest (Das Ungeheuer und der verzauberte Wald, 1798), and The Topsy-Turvy World (Die verkehrte Welt, 1798).36 These highly metatheatrical works combine a vast array of cultural ingredients, as Tieck challenges both Enlightenment rationalism and moralizing, illusionist art. In addition to a Gozzian spirit, Tieck occasionally utilizes specific content from Gozzi’s fiabe: the talking bust in The King Stag (Il re cervo, 1762), for example, which laughs when women lie, becomes, in Bluebeard (Ritter Blaubart, 1797), a leaden head that dispenses advice about women. Although glimpses of Three Oranges appear in a number of Tieck’s works, the fiaba most strongly flavors Prince Zerbino, or the Quest for Good Taste (Prinz Zerbino, oder, Die Reise nach dem guten Geschmack).37 One cannot do justice to Prince Zerbino in a brief plot summary, in part because there are at least three separate plots that converge and diverge throughout the course of six acts. Characters include, but are by no means limited to, fairy-tale and pastoral figures, personifications of nature and household furniture, Hanswurst (the German Harlequin), a magician, a cat, a dog-in-disguise, Satan, and the ghost of Shakespeare; cameo appearances “in the Garden of Poetry” are provided by Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, Cervantes, and Hans Sachs—and none other than Gozzi himself (fig. 6.2).38 A hunter, who serves as prologue and chorus, warns us that we may be led on a merry chase and exhorts us to shake off laziness and comfort and not to fear—we will find our way back if we stay alert.39 Like Gozzi and Goethe, Tieck features a prince whose mind has been disordered by the literature of the day—various cures are tried or suggested (science, philosophy, “light literature,” principles of criticism). Saved from death by Polykomikus, a magician, Prince Zerbino is sent off with his servant Nestor to find “good taste.” In act VI, having failed to find (or to recognize) good taste, Zerbino throws a fit, and, ranting that he no longer wishes to be in the play, begins to push the narrative backward. As the scenery rewinds and startled characters from previous scenes pop into view, Zerbino’s nihilistic efforts are stopped by the

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intervention of the author, readers, typesetters, and critics. Cast into prison, Zerbino comes to (or pretends that he has come to) his senses, renounces poetry as folly, and is rehabilitated. If Three Oranges is infused into The Triumph of Sensibility, it is diffused into Prince Zerbino by way of Goethe. Common to all three plays is the melancholic prince whose literature-induced illness requires magical intervention; as with Goethe’s prince, Zerbino’s condition is contagious, only more so—all those who try to cure him become infected themselves. Echoing Three Oranges, magical meddling requires that the prince, accompanied by his faithful servant, set off on a quest filled with obstacles. Where Tartaglia succeeds, Zerbino does not; his “cure,” which takes the form of submission to quotidian reality, lends a tragic note to the comic grotesquery. As in Goethe’s “dramatic whim,” Tieck’s characters voice theatrically self-referential complaints about the length and quality of the play. Prince Zerbino is in fact vertiginous in its metatheatricality and recycling of source materials, recalling Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of Romantic poetry as “an endless series of mirrors.”40 Prince Zerbino constitutes a form of cultural superpastiche, if such a thing could be said to exist. Each of the authors encountered by Nestor (Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, Cervantes, Hans Sachs, and Gozzi) and Zerbino (Shakespeare) leaves his mark on the play, as do others. Zerbino, for example, is a Scottish knight in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and is also the son of Gottlieb, the human protagonist of Tieck’s Puss in Boots.41 Zerbino’s imprisonment, which forces him to accept a societally approved reality, recalls that of Prince Segismundo in Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream (La vida es Sueña, 1635) (fig. 6.3). The fictional Gozzi suggests, in his one line in the play, that Nestor would make a good commedia dell’arte character.42 Cervantes quixotically ghosts the play, as multiple characters tilt at windmills, caught in a fantasy of their own making. Shakespeare’s shade attempts, unsuccessfully, to lead Prince Zerbino to a more fantastic truth. And although Tieck challenges the bourgeois illusionism of his day, other German theatre has its place in this phantasmagoria, not only through the wholesome Hans Sachs but also in the figure of Hanswurst, the scatological German Harlequin who was banished from the Enlightenment stage. Through all this “transcendental buffoonery,” Tieck rejects the very concept of “good taste,” along with the sentimental philosophizing that he finds in the work of his contemporaries August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and August von Kotzebue (1761–1819).43 Prince Zerbino derives from the same urge that spawned Puss in Boots, in which the “ludicrous, dull, and tasteless was presented as such, with all its contradictions and ridiculous pretensions . . . made

Figure 6.2. Zerbino’s servant Nestor in the Garden of Poetry. Copper engraving by Auguste Hüssener (1789–1877) after a drawing by Joseph Führich (1800–1876). Novellenkranz. An Almanac for the Year 1835, 4th jg, Berlin (Reimer) 1835. Author’s collection.

Figure 6.3. Nestor and Zerbino released from prison by the canine Stablemaster, the feline Hinz von Hinzenfeld, and Leander, whose “Grundsätze der Kritik” (Principles of Criticism) were meant to cure the prince. Copper engraving by Auguste Hüssener (1789–1877) after a drawing by Joseph Führich (1800–1876). From: Novellenkranz. An Almanac for the Year 1835, 4th jg, Berlin (Reimer) 1835. Author’s collection.

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visible by means of an equally ludicrous but entertaining fairy tale.”44 Gozzi’s burlesque meets that of Tieck’s, to which the latter adds an ironic rejection of the utilitarian impulses of the Bildungsroman and Enlightenment rationalism.45 This genealogy continues, as both Gozzi and Tieck were to have an impact on another German author who saw Gozzi’s fiabe as a potential means of employing Romantic irony through the theatrical liberation of fantastic realms.

Hoffmann’s Dialogic Theatrical Analysis In addition to working as a composer, music director, artist, and bureaucrat, E. T. A. Hoffmann was the author of more than fifty fantastic and supernatural tales, many of which have had an extensive afterlife of their own.46 A Gozzi enthusiast, Hoffmann saw in the Venetian playwright an “ingenious, truly romantic” writer, whose fairy-dramas constituted a reiche Fundgrube (rich treasure trove) for the opera and beyond.47 Hoffmann draws on Gozzi extensively, using a Gozzian manner, commedia characters, and references to fiabe in his fairy-tale novella Princess Brambilla (Prinzessin Brambilla, 1821) and his incomplete fairy-tale play, Princess Blandina (Prinzessin Blandina, 1814), as well as numerous other works.48 Hoffmann, whose hands-on theatre experience included work as a set designer, regarded Gozzi as a potential antidote to many theatre ills. In his dialogue Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager (Seltsame Leiden eines Theaterdirektors, 1818), Hoffmann outlines those ills and presents Three Oranges as a cure. Hoffmann’s slightly Germanized retelling of Gozzi’s tale, bookended and interrupted by dramatic theory, constitutes its own entertaining and satirical “reflective analysis.”49 Strange Sorrows also reflects Hoffmann’s fondness for writing dialogues and creating alter egos for himself (fig. 6.4).50 In this dialogue, a man in gray and a man in brown, managers of a local theatre and a traveling troupe, respectively, meet by chance at an inn. Discovering that they are both members of the German theatrical community, they begin to lament the state of the profession. Near the end of the dialogue-cum-treatise, Brown praises Gozzi’s theatrical genius and outlines for a skeptical Gray the version of Three Oranges that he is preparing to stage. Hoffmann’s telling of the tale, through the figure of Brown, takes many specifics from the fiaba, following Gozzi’s plot much more closely than either Goethe or Tieck, but Hoffmann also introduces new cultural notes that graft Gozzian commedia onto German comedy. In Brown’s rendition, Tartaglia’s melancholy has been caused by his having ingested not Italian verses but rather “tragedies of fate” in powdered form, with which the fairy Morgana has laced his chocolate—giving both the

Figure 6.4. E. T. A. Hoffmann, double-portrait: Hoffmann as Vergil in Dante’s Divine Comedy (ca. 1809-13). Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Germany.

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poisonous literary genre and the prince’s treat a distinctly German flavor.51 As in Three Oranges, the fairy’s spell will be broken if the prince laughs, but efforts to amuse him are unsuccessful. As Bartholomew’s Day approaches, Pantalone, the king’s prime minister, speculates that the prince’s illness was brought on by a childhood spanking and introduces an edict prohibiting all fathers and educators in the palace from beating children on that day, lest the sounds worsen Tartaglia’s condition. Festivities are staged, but the prince resists. Following Gozzi’s outline, the prince’s melancholic spell is finally broken when the fairy Morgana loses her balance and falls, after which she curses him with a mad desire for three oranges.52 The instigator of this incident is no longer Truffaldino but has become Kasper, the German clown (famous for his puppet-theatre afterlife).53 The introduction of Kasper, like that of Hanswurst by Tieck, allows Hoffmann to connect Gozzi’s fiaba to the German folk tradition and, simultaneously, invokes a critique of bourgeois respectability by incorporating an irreverent figure that the German Enlightenment tried hard— and failed—to banish.54 After Morgana’s curse, Hoffmann replicates details of Gozzi’s plot: Celio aids Tartaglia and Kasper in obtaining the oranges from the giantess Creonta’s castle, and a princess (now named Ginetta) is freed from her orange, transformed into a dove, and eventually disenchanted in the castle kitchen.55 Hoffmann provides his own distinct touch for the ending, in which the prince, half-fainting from joy, exclaims, “This was a Bartholomew’s Day!” thus expelling the last remnant of Morgana’s powder. Beet compotes and mice are the promised wedding feast—a slight variation on the fantastical banquet of turnips, mice, and cats in Three Oranges. As Brown recounts his story, Gray becomes increasingly agitated, drumming his fingers on the table, covering his face and ears, and rapidly consuming multiple glasses of wine. Near the end of the tale, he can bear no more and bursts out with, “Has the Sacchi troupe risen from the grave?”56 Surely, without the talents of the virtuosic commedia performers of Gozzi’s day, no German theatre—least of all a traveling troupe lacking the splendid decorations, wardrobe, and machinery of a permanent theatre such as Gray’s—could stage such a thing. Brown explains that in the present age, there are two options for staging Gozzi’s fiabe—either as opera (recalling early German adaptations of Gozzi and presciently hearkening to the Russian future of Three Oranges) or in the form of a Romantic drama. The latter, Brown explains, could be performed only by a company of actors as excellent as his. Brown then takes Gray to his room to meet those actors—who are revealed to be marionettes.57 Although Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager lacks the fantastical structure of Hoffmann’s stories and novels, it nevertheless insists that Gozzi’s

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fairy tales have a greatness, a “deep and active life,” that cannot be found in the theatrical models dissected by Gray and Brown in the course of their discussion. Gray begins with the travails of producing “the opera of all operas,” Gusmann the Lion; the title character, it seems, can only be portrayed effectively by “a well-behaved mastiff” wearing a lion wig (“Heavens! Another dog!” Brown exclaims).58 The dog turns out to have been the least of Gray’s troubles, as the beleaguered manager details issues with costumers, hairdressers, and egotistical singers. Gray and Brown discuss problems with their audiences (who are prone to cheap applause) and the lack of serious Lessingstyle dramaturgical work (now replaced by shallow criticism); they also spend considerable time analyzing the role of the actor and theatrical performance. Brown complains about the emphasis on spectacle that drives the contemporary theatre and reminds Gray of Shakespeare’s stage, in which the audience’s imagination was paramount. Gray, in turn, shudders about the deluge of manuscripts that he receives almost daily from young playwrights—­tragedies, dramas, comedies, vaudevilles, operas—all shallow imitations of former masterpieces. Gozzi, Shakespeare, and Calderón are praised by Gray and Brown but seen as unstageable—at least by human actors. The Love of Three Oranges remains an unrealized possibility—a Romantic theatre of irony, humor, and ­imagination—with a touch of Weltschmerz. Strange Sorrows, with its climactic rendering of Three Oranges, makes more direct use of the fiaba’s plot—oranges are central to the action. Hoffmann’s dialogue, however, is structurally and culturally less of a pastiche than Goethe’s or Tieck’s Gozzi-infused plays, although certain details and characters have been Germanized: the discussion is transplanted to the realities of the German theatre, Truffaldino has become Kasper, and references to Tieck abound.59 Yet, despite references to the everyday reality of German theatre and the comic familiarity of Gray and Brown, Gozzi remains an anchor to Hoffmann’s “cult of the wonderful and the fantastic,” with its “surreal and grotesque ignitions of the imagination.”60 Hoffmann’s fantasy-laden storytelling, together with his invocation of Gozzi’s fairy tales, would provide the bridge that allowed Three Oranges to be taken up and used in new recipes, combining Italian, German, and Russian ingredients. Prince Tartaglia, originally an allegory for the Venetian public, becomes German, Russian—­ whomsoever his adaptor wishes to awaken—meaning that Tartaglia, in the end, could be us. The long life of Three Oranges suggests that, when used cleverly, a little touch of Gozzian citrus—sweet in its fantasy and acidic in its satire—is always good for what ails us, allowing us to imagine into being not only new theatrical and social possibilities but individual ones as well.

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Notes 1. Gozzi, “La piu lunga lettera di risposta,” 26. Translation by Kyna Hamill. 2. Gozzi’s dismissal of his creations as “childish nonsense” is a rhetorical strategy in his theatre wars. For more about Gozzi’s defense of the commedia dell’arte, the aristocracy, and antiEnlightenment values, see Emery’s chapter in this book (chap. 5) and Korneeva, “Entertainment.” 3. Pastiche is an appropriate term for a work about oranges, given the word’s culinary origins (a pasta potpie of mixed ingredients). According to Rosalma Borello, pasticcio first appears in the Baroque period as a description of paintings that recreate the manner of a renowned master by employing a “collage of details” from multiple paintings rather than a single work; Borello, L’amore, 9. 4. Gozzi, “La piu lunga lettera di risposta,” 24. Gozzi specifically references The Tale of Tales (Lo Cunto de li Cunti, 1634–36) by Giovan Battista Basile and A Ramble in Posillipo (Posilecheata, 1684) by Pompeo Sarnelli (Marsilio Reppone), as well as The Library of Genies and Fairies (La bibliothèque des génies et des fées, 1764–65) by Joseph de La Porte and The Cabinet of Fairies (Le Cabinet des fées, 1717) by Estienne Roger. 5. Gozzi, “La piu lunga,” 24–25. Gozzi’s sources also included, among others, the Parisian fairground theatre and novels of Alain-René Lesage, as well as The Thousand and One Nights (Les mille et une nuits, 1704–17) by Antoine Galland; The Thousand and One Quarter-Hours, Tales of the Tatars (Les Milles et un quart d’heure, contes tartares, 1715) by Thomas-Simon Gueullette; and The Thousand and One Days, Persian Tales (Les mille et un jours, contes Persans, 1714) by Pétis de la Croix. 6. Gozzi, Analisi riflessiva, 17. 7. The Pentamerone echoes Boccaccio’s Decameron, with a framing story that launches multiple tales. 8. See, esp., Fabrizi, “Carlo Gozzi”; Goldberg, Tale. Gozzi, who usually notes the sources for specific fiabe, never says that Basile was his source for The Love of Three Oranges in its prologue, his memoires, or other writings. Gasparo Gozzi (1713–86), a playwright, editor, author, and founder of several periodicals reviewed the premiere of The Love of Three Oranges in his periodical La gazzetta veneta. 9. See Mazzoni, “Fruit of Love,” for an excellent summary of “The Three Citrons” (229–30). 10. The Pentamerone begins with a desperate king whose melancholic child is cured through laughter, then cursed by an upended old woman. As in Three Oranges, a princess is replaced by an exotic imposter, supernatural characters help the protagonist, and, at story’s end, the princess’s replacement meets a gruesome end. Calvino, Italian Folktales, 738; quoted in Mazzoni, “Fruit of Love,” 228. 11. In the Pentamerone, the melancholy child, Zoza, is a princess; her curse is to fill a pitcher with tears in order to marry a prince, and her supernatural assistants are fairies. 12. The Pentamerone is written in the Neapolitan dialect and “draws heavily on Neapolitan folklore and customs, including proverbs, songs, games, and food”; Mazzoni, “Fruit of Love,” 229. In addition, the titular citrus of “Le tre cetra” are culturally specific; Mazzoni explains that citrons, which are “among the least known in the citrus family,” function as “literary signifiers of Neapolitan and, more generally, Campanian geography” (229). 13. Fata Morgana is the Italian incarnation of the fairy Morgan le Fay (Morgan le Fey). 14. Pulci’s Creonta, like Gozzi’s, is also an inept castle guardian who dies comically via lighting strike. See Gozzi, Fiabi teatrali, 28. Gozzi includes an excerpt from Morgante in his front matter.

140  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 15. Cantos XXI and XXII. Farfarello also shows up in canto XXV of Pulci’s Morgante. 16. Beniscelli’s note; see Gozzi, Fiabi, 14. 17. Their playing card suit, coppe (cups), is translated variably into English as “diamonds” or “spades.” 18. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the “antipodes” signified a land on the opposite end of the earth. 19. Gozzi, Analisi riflessiva, 32. A duplicitous “black slave” appears in both the framing story of Lo cunto de li cunti and in “Le tre cetra,” but the geographic origins of the women are not specified. Basile’s stories, which contain disparaging descriptions of people of color, are more disturbingly racist than Gozzi’s vague exoticism. 20. See Jaffe-Berg, “After the Laughter”; Henke, “Border-Crossing.” 21. Beniscelli argues that Gozzi’s fiabe function on two levels—appealing to a popular audience while providing a second set of literary references for educated spectators (“Tra narrazione,” 70–71). See also Emery’s essay in this book (chap. 5). 22. For a thorough overview of Gozzi’s impact in Germany, see Rusack, Gozzi in Germany, and Lukoschik, Der erste deutsche Gozzi. 23. Rusack, Gozzi in Germany, 30. 24. Christie, “Romantic Irony.” 25. May 29, 1797. See Schwaderer, “Die (Wieder-) Entdeckung,” 333. 26. Originally staged as The Sentimentalists (Die Empfindsamen). 27. Infected by the prince’s Romantic sensibility, the queen has taken to “walking in the moonlight, slumbering by waterfalls, and holding extensive conversations with nightingales”; Goethe, Triumph, 345. Translations from German are my own. 28. A pomegranate does appear in a play within a play. 29. Andrason describes the stuffing as a sort of talisman with magical powers; Goethe, Triumph, 382. 30. Goethe, 385. Perhaps the funniest moment in the piece occurs when Oronaro puts himself to sleep while declaiming his love for Mandandane: “The prince sits down a grassy bank and falls asleep. A number of times, he is given his note as a cue to continue, but he does not stir and there is embarrassment in the orchestra”; eventually, the first violin finishes the prince’s phrase, the orchestra joins in, and the play continues (360–61). 31. Goethe, 344. 32. Waldeinsamkeit encompasses all the feelings of the German Romantic wanderer alone in nature—melancholy, peace, loneliness, transcendence, etc. 33. Monodrama, also referred to as melodrama, was a “musico-dramatic genre featuring intensely declaimed monologues in which text is typically delivered via underscored speech rather than singing” (Randall, “Music in Weimar,” 106). Oronaro’s resemblance to Pygmalion likely stems from the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “lyrical scene” Pygmalion (1762, 1770); see Randall, “Music in Weimar,” 106. Goethe saw Pygmalion in 1773 and staged it in 1774. 34. In 1778, and 1779, respectively. For a musicological analysis and historical contextualization of Proserpina, see Randall, “Music in Weimar.” 35. Quoted in Rusack, Gozzi in Germany, 119. Rusack locates Gozzian influence in Tieck’s earliest published folk tales, his Volksmärchen (1797); see Rusack, 117–19. 36. Posner describes Tieck’s use of Gozzi as a “refraction” of his form; see “Baring the Frame,” 369. 37. Rusack sees similarities in between the kitchen scenes in Puss in Boots and The Love of Three Oranges; Gozzi in Germany, 124–25.

A Cultural Pastiche of Fantasy, Satire, and Citrus  |  141 38. Hans Sachs (1494–1576) was a German Renaissance cobbler, playwright, and composer known for his Fastnachtsspiele (Shrovetide plays). 39. Tieck, Prinz Zerbino, 306. 40. “Einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen”; Schlegel, Athenäum-Fragmente. See Schmeling, “Theater,” for the tension between Schlegel’s critique of Tieck and his later Romantic theory. 41. Hinze the cat, the titular nonhuman hero of Puss in Boots, also appears in Prince Zerbino. 42. “Dieser wäre eine ziemlich gute Maske”; Tieck, Prinz Zerbino, 455. 43. “Transzendentale Buffonerie”; the term is Schlegel’s (see Kritische Fragmente, 152). 44. Quoted from Schmeling, “Theater,” 44. 45. For more on the play’s contradictory impulses of self-determination and self-abnegation, see Schmeling, “Theater,” 46–47. 46. Born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, Hoffmann reinvented himself by substituting “Amadeus” (after Mozart) for Wilhelm. 47. Hoffmann, “Der Dichter,” 106. 48. See Corda, E. T. A. Hoffmann; Rusack, Gozzi in Germany, 144–72. 49. Seltsame Leiden eines Theaterdirektors was a revised and expanded version of Hoffmann’s satirical review of contemporary operatic staging and theatrical issues, titled “Die Kunstverwandten” (The ones related though art; 1817). 50. See Posner, Director’s Prism, 8–9. 51. Schicksalstragödien or Schicksalsdramen (tragedies of fate) were Romantic revengeinflected tragedies most commonly associated with Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) and (Friedrich Ludwig) Zacharias Werner (1768–1823). 52. Specifically, pomeranzen (bitter oranges), a mandarin-grapefruit hybrid. 53. The German puppet theatre tradition, the Kasper Theater, derives its name from Kasper/ Kasperle, the Punch-like clown type popularized in the eighteenth century. 54. Hoffmann’s use of Kasper also recalls the influence of the commedia dell’arte on German comic types, beginning with arrival of Italian touring companies in the sixteenth century. 55. Hoffmann omits any mention of “Moorish” slaves. He does include other Gozzian elements such as the specific obstacles faced at Creonta’s castle, Tartaglia’s insistence on iron shoes, and the bellows used by Farfarello to propel Tartaglia and his helper thousands of miles in a matter of minutes. 56. Hoffmann, Seltsame, 586. 57. Hoffmann staged domestic shadow puppet plays; see Posner, Director’s Prism, 19–21. Marionettes also make an appearance in Tieck’s Prince Zerbino, and Goethe’s Oronaro’s doll also serves as an uncanny, puppetlike double. 58. Hoffmann, Seltsame, 478. 59. Both Prince Zerbino and Puss in Boots are invoked. 60. Borello, L’amore, 7.

Bibliography Basile, Giambattista (Giovan Battista). “I tre cedri.” In Il racconto dei racconti, translated by Benedetto Croce, edited by Milva Maria Cappellini, 193–205. Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2006. ———. “Le tre cetra.” In Lo cunto de li cunti, edited by Michele Rak, 466–79. Milan: Letteratura Italiana Einaudi, 1995. Accessed September 13, 2014. http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net /pdf/Volume_6/t133.pdf.

142  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges ———. “The Three Citrons.” In The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones, translated by Nancy L. Canepa, 433–42. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Beniscelli, Alberto. “Tra narrazione e teatro: Il riuso di alcune fonti ‘romanzesche’ nelle fiabe gozziane.” In Carlo Goldoni y Carlo Gozzi: Evoluzione e involuzion della drammaturgia italiana settecentesca da Venezia all’Europa, edited by Jesús G. Maestro, Javier Gutiérrez Carou, and Sonia Míguez Soto. Potevedra, Spain: Mirabel, 2006. Borello, Rosalma Salina. L’amore delle tre meralance e i suoi travestimenti teatrali: Da Gozzi a Sanguineti. In La letteratura degli italiani 4. I letterati e la scena. Rome: Adi, 2014. Christie, William. “Romantic Irony.” An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Accessed May 1, 2019. http://www.oxfordreference.com /view/10.1093/acref/9780199245437.001.0001/acref-9780199245437. Corda, Tiziana. E. T. A. Hoffmann und Carlo Gozzi: Der Einfluss der Commedia dell’Arte und der “Fiabe Teatrali” in Hoffmanns Werk. Würzburg: Königshausen et Neumann, 2013. Fabrizi, Angelo. “Carlo Gozzi e la tradizione popolare: A proposito de l’amore delle tre melarance.” Italianistica: Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 7 (1978): 336–45. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit. 1778. In Berliner Ausgabe: Poetische Werke. Vol. 5, 340–92. Berlin: Aufbau, 1960. Goldberg, Christine. The Tale of the Three Oranges. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1997. Gozzi, Carlo. Analisi Riflessiva della fiaba L’amore delle tre melanrance (Reflective analysis of the fairy tale “The Love of Three Oranges,” 1772). In Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli, 3–38. Milan: Garzanti, 1994. ———. Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli. Milan: Garzanti, 1994. ———. “La piu lunga lettera di risposta che sia statta scritta, inviata da Carlo Gozzi ad un Poeta teatrale italiano de’ nostril giorni. Giuntivi nel fine alcuni frammenti tratti dale stampe pubblicate da parecchi Autori, e de’ comenti dallo stesso Gozzi fatti sopra I frammenti medesimi” (1801). In Opere edite ed inedite del Conte Carlo Gozzi. Vol. 14, 3–30. Venice: Giacomo Zanardi, 1802. Henke, Robert. “Border-Crossing in the Commedia dell’Arte.” In Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, edited by Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, 19–34. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Der Dichter und der Komponist.” In Poetische Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 3, 97–126. Berlin: Aufbau, 1963. ———. Seltsame Leiden eines Theaterdirektors. 1818. In E.T.A. Hoffmann: Poetische Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 1, 469–591. Berlin: Aufbau, 1963. Jaffe-Berg, Erith. “After the Laughter Dies Down; Middle Eastern ‘Foreigners’ in the Commedia dell’ Arte.” Scripta Mediterranea 29 (2008): 37–50. Korneeva, Tatiana. “Entertainment for Melancholics: The Public and the Public Stage in Carlo Gozzi’s L’Amore delle tre melarance.” In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s), edited by Tatiana Korneeva, Katja Gvozdeva, and Kirill Ospovat, 140–71. Boston: Brill, 2017. Lukoschik, Rita. Der erste deutsche Gozzi: Untersuchungen zu der Rezeption Carlo Gozzis in der deutschen Spätaufklärung. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1993. Mazzoni, Cristina. “The Fruit of Love in Giambattista Basile’s ‘The Three Citrons.’” Marvels & Tales 29, no. 2 (2015): 228–44. Porterfield, Allen W. “Goethe and Tieck: A Study in Dramatic Parallels.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 36, no. 1 (1937): 66–82

A Cultural Pastiche of Fantasy, Satire, and Citrus  |  143 Posner, Dassia. “Baring the Frame: Meyerhold’s Refraction of Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges.” Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (2015): 362–88. ———. The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Randall, Annie Janeiro. “Music in Weimar circa 1780: Decentering Text, Decentering Goethe.” In Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, edited by Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord, and Simon Richter, 97–146. Rochester, NY: Camden House: 2000. Rusack, Hedwig Hoffmann. Gozzi in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Schlegel, Friedrich. Athenäum-Fragmente. 1798. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Vol. 2, 165–256. München: Schönigh, 1967. ———. Kritische Fragmente [Lyceums-Fragmente]. 1797. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Vol. 2, 147–164. München: Schönigh, 1967. Schmeling, Manfred. “‘Theater in the Theater’ and ‘World Theater’: Play Thematics and the Breakthrough of Romantic Drama,” translated by Simon Sreberny, with Gerald Gillespie. In Romantic Drama, edited by Gerald Gillespie, 35–57. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994. Schwaderer, Richard. “Die (Wieder-) Entdeckung der Phantasie: Zur frühen Rezeption der Fiabe teatrali Carlo Gozzis in den deutschsprachingen Ländern im Rahmen eines sich wandelnden Italienbilds.” In “Italien in Germanien,” Deutsche Italien-Rezeption von 1750– 1850, 333–51. Symposium Proceedings of the Weimar Classicism Foundation, Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Schiller-Museum, March 24–26, 1994. Tieck, Ludwig. Prinz Zerbino, oder Die Reise nach dem guten Geschmack. In Ludwig Tieck: Werke in einem Band, 306–510. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1967.

Part II The Divertissement Brown: I tell you with absolute seriousness that I will stage this exquisite fairy tale about three oranges in my theatre, and as my troupe plays such things wonderfully, I am sure that the public will reward me with a warm ovation. Gray: You mystify me . . . You speak in riddles. Have you really raised Sacchi’s troupe from the dead, are you really its director, will you truly play at fairgrounds in Italy? E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager

7 Love for Three Oranges A Divertissement in Twelve Scenes, a Prologue, an Epilogue, and Three Interludes by Konstantin Vogak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Soloviev Translated, introduced, and annotated by Dassia N. Posner

An Invitation to Improvise Vsevolod Meyerhold is most widely known today for his pioneering political theatre productions and for biomechanics, his movement training system for actors. Unlike Bertolt Brecht, to whom Meyerholdian innovations—self-referentiality, fragmentation, overt theatricality—are sometimes credited, Meyerhold wrote few plays in the sense of dramatic works intended for production by others. Yet he did write plays, almost none of them published, typically in the form of radically altered, audience-centric adaptations of source texts that he developed as part of their staging process. Meyerhold’s plays document a system of theatrical thinking that can seem elusive if one is familiar only with his written theory or with descriptions of completed productions. The reasons for this are complex, including our own tendency to be more adept readers of literary content than theatrical form, as well as the residual echoes of the violence enacted on the director and his legacy after he was accused of “formalism,” arrested and tortured, and deemed a nonperson for fifteen years following his 1940 execution. Yet, Meyerhold’s plays—many of which exist only as promptbooks—are an essential part of a rich archival record that, along with his rehearsal notes, remains an underutilized resource for understanding his directorial practice.1

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If the primary purpose of Meyerhold’s biomechanics was to bring the actor into skilled alignment with a new theatre that demanded physical precision, instant responsiveness, and acute audience awareness, the purpose of Meyerhold’s dramatic writing was closely aligned. He aimed to replace literature-centric, narrative-driven structures with a new approach to form that emphasized playful and self-aware wielding of character. Other devices included fragmented, flexible scenes that allowed for unexpected shifts; attention to rhythm and music; the division of the stage space into multiple fictional planes; and the erasure of the divide between stage and audience. One of Meyerhold’s few dramatic works to be published was Love for Three Oranges: A Divertissement in Twelve Scenes, a Prologue, an Epilogue, and Three Interludes (hereafter Three Oranges).2 Coauthored with Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev, Meyerhold’s colleagues from the Borodin­ skaia Street Studio (1913–17), this work was the director’s first successful attempt at creating an actor training studio that doubled as an experimental theatre laboratory (fig. 7.1).3 Three Oranges provides valuable documentation of Meyerhold’s thinking as a director-teacher, especially with regard to actor virtuosity, audience engagement, and scenic architecture. It is saturated with specific devices aimed at reinventing Russian theatre—devices inspired by fairground entertainment, by Carlo Gozzi’s version of commedia dell’arte, and by German Romantic reinsertions of the artist into the work. To understand the piece’s Meyerholdian approach to form is to understand the larger theatrical philosophy that was to ignite much of the Soviet 1920s political and avant-garde theatre and, through Prokofiev’s operatic adaptation, to significantly shape Russian musical Modernism. Meyerhold regularly surrounded himself with collaborators who had both scholarly expertise and practical interest in the historical forms he used as fodder. His commedia experiments, which focused on developing structures for contemporary actor improvisation, were a case in point. Vladimir Soloviev (1888–1941) and Meyerhold were already close collaborators before they began working on Three Oranges. Soloviev had launched his commedia research with an investigation of troupes that visited Empress Anna’s court before expanding into the research on masks, gestures, lazzi, and scenarios that he later taught at Meyerhold’s studio. Meyerhold had recently directed Soloviev’s pantomime Harlequin the Marriage Broker (Arlekin, khodatai svadeb), a piece that revealed Soloviev’s already strong interest in using stage space to support actor improvisation.4 In winter 1912, Soloviev and Meyerhold drafted a jointly authored play about Gozzi called The Gamblers of Venice (Igroki Venetsii).5 According to Soloviev, the process for this never-completed play “provided the foundation” for Meyerhold’s 1912 essay, “The Fairground

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Figure 7.1. Information flyer for Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio, 1914. Vladimir Soloviev collection, GIK 11287/78 ORU 10411, l. 4/6. St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

Booth” (balagan).6 Meyerhold soon recruited a third collaborator, Konstantin Vogak (1887–1938), whose excellent Italian made deeper engagement with Gozzi’s fiabe newly possible.7 The trio began adapting Gozzi’s Three Oranges in spring 1912, a year and a half before Meyerhold’s studio opened.8 An undated early draft reveals that Vogak translated the full fiaba, after which the trio adapted it, in Soloviev’s

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Figure 7.2. Konstantin Vogak’s copy of typescript for the Love for Three Oranges divertissement. Courtesy of Anna Vagin.

words, into “a divertissement in the manner of the grand opera-theatre tradition of the eighteenth [century].”9 Given the final version’s close alignment with core elements of Meyerhold’s theatrical philosophy, Meyerhold likely took the most active role in the adaptation process, assisted by Soloviev, whose expertise in commedia probably influenced the stage configuration and three new interludes (fig. 7.2).

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The storyline of the divertissement and fiaba are similar enough that it is not surprising that the fiaba has often been mistaken as Prokofiev’s opera source. Most plot details, especially absurd ones, remain unaltered, although a few are streamlined. Both pieces alternate between description and polemic, although the divertissement develops Gozzi’s specific references into general self-referential interruptions. Scattered eighteenth-century Venetian refer­ ences remain, such as the King of Cups and Knight of Cups, Martellian verse, and a single mention of Goldoni. Both are in scenario form with little dialogue. Even a cursory glance at the divertissement’s structure makes it immediately apparent, however, that Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s changes to Gozzi are substantial. The Russian authors cut most of Gozzi’s polemical commentary, fragmented the fiaba’s acts into scenes, and added a significant quantity of material that reveals a radically new approach to form. This material falls into several categories: practical elements, new scenes, framing characters, metatheatrical commentary, stage directions that allow characters to physicalize action that otherwise would be spoken, and action performed on “an expansive forestage” (161). The Three Oranges divertissement appeared in the inaugural issue of Meyerhold’s journal Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto (1914–16), a playfully polemical periodical (hereafter LTA) that used both Gozzi and German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann as banners in the battle they waged on behalf of the new theatre. In early twentieth-century Russian theatre, as in Gozzi’s Venice, artistic debates were public affairs. Meyerhold’s 1912 book On Theatre (O teatre) had already laid out many of the director’s theatrical aims. LTA was different in the sense that the journal itself was a reflective analysis of the experiments of Meyerhold and his collaborators. It documented the training of the new actor, a modern-day Sacchi, while commenting ironically on contemporaries with whom they disagreed. Meyerhold’s ideal actor was imaginative, agile, skilled at sudden shifts, had an acute sense of rhythm, maintained constant audience awareness, was responsive to the stage environment, and, above all, had a virtuosic ability to improvise.10 Training tools were to come from popular theatre traditions rather than from the dominant trend that Meyerhold opposed: literary, psychological, mundane depictions of everyday life. It is in this context that Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s Three Oranges should be understood: as a playable scenario for actor improvisations, framed by a form that gave structure to the actors’ playful interactions with character, story, stage environment, and audience. The divertissement’s new practical elements included a cast of characters, scene divisions, intermissions, and stage

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and design directions. In addition, Gozzi’s past-tense descriptions appear in the present, Gozzi’s verse appears in prose, and Gozzi’s general descriptions are converted into concrete physical action.11 Additional formal elements comprise the larger, more significant innovations of Three Oranges: framed space and framing characters, the forestage and the “parade,” and interludes and improvisation. The next section analyzes the structure and purpose of these elements, each of which Prokofiev was to adopt in his opera.12

Framed Space and Framing Characters Meyerhold and his collaborators were fascinated by Gozzi’s juxtapositions of plot and commentary. They were even more interested in German Romantic interpretations of Gozzi, especially by Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, who wrote stories and plays filled with perspective shifts, authorial interruptions, and plays within plays. The divertissement featured similar devices. Gozzi’s fiaba lacks design descriptions, aside from mentions of general locations. Meyerhold, Vogak, and Soloviev reimagined the stage space as a series of theatres within theatres. The main stage represents “a theatre interior being prepared for a grand show.” Towers on either side of the forestage allow framing characters to view and comment on the action. Numerous other spaces effectively become tiny additional stages—visible onstage alcoves for props, rows of doors, onstage staircases, a balustraded terrace that recalls a trestle stage, and a “second stage” upstage (161). The divertissement also features five categories of framing characters not present in Gozzi: three Eccentrics (chudaki), who represent the piece’s three authors;13 Fools in the two towers; Extras who replace the Fools when the latter tumble out; Extra-Tragic Tragedians and Commonplace Comedians, battling groups who promote contrasting play genres; a Boy-Herald who delivers the prologue and announces new interludes; and forestage servants. Forestage servants, in Meyerhold’s definition, are liminal characters who tend to the fictional world in full view of the audience, thus playing with the audience’s perception of the real and the fictional.14 Although the divertissement mentions them only twice (in the dramatis personae and in the first interlude), their function is to draw the audience’s attention to the overt construction of the action played by main characters.

The Forestage and the Parade The divertissement’s most frequent place of action was the forestage. In a 1934 lecture, Meyerhold defined the forestage (prostsenium, sometimes translated

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as “proscenium”), as “a stage that is sharply extended forward . . . where part of the audience intrudes upon the stage, as it were, and the actor who stands on the forestage is surrounded on three sides by the audience.”15 The Three Oranges authors replaced the imaginary fourth wall of realism and the footlights of the nineteenth century—both of which separated actors from audiences—with this forestage, which lay between the fictional world of the stage and the real world of the audience.16 The divertissement calls for characters to use the forestage nearly a dozen times. Parades provide a structure for this forestage use. For Meyerhold, a “parade” was not a procession but a brief sketch that draws in the audience, as in fairground performance.17 In actress Valentina Verigina’s recollection, a parade was a physical way for the actor, like a circus performer, to say, “Here am I!”18 At his studio, Meyerhold taught lessons on “the parade as an essential and autonomous part of theatrical performance,” and Soloviev taught lazzi that opened with forestage parades.19 The divertissement itself begins with a parade in which two choruses of warring theatrical genres battle with quills. Three Eccentrics force them apart and introduce a third group of actors, who raise a playful ruckus backstage and encourage a boy to deliver his prologue to the audience, thus beginning the performance. Three Oranges features a variety of additional, briefer parades, ranging from characters who traverse the forestage before joining the action to Truffaldino’s march across the forestage with “clownish props” (165). This kind of “establishing shot” became essential to the visual vocabulary of many of Meyerhold’s productions.

Interludes and Improvisation Although Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev cut most of Gozzi’s reflective comments, in some cases they expanded them into “interludes” that interrupt the action. The three interludes in Three Oranges, which I discuss below in order of significance rather than chronologically, were not only clever asides to the divertissement’s fairy-tale action but also self-contained pieces that trained specific skills for the new theatre. The first interlude, placed after the divertissement’s first scene, is a development of Gozzi’s comment that Fata Morgana is “the enemy of the King of Cups, as she lost much of her treasure on the King’s playing card” and that she supports Leandro, Knight of Cups, because she “won back some of her treasure on his card” (51). In the divertissement, this becomes a full scene in which Fata Morgana and Celio the Wizard gamble with the Knight and King of Cups. Forestage servants set the stage with giant cards,20 and dwarves

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carry bags of gold to the winner. The scene opens with “brilliant fireworks” and ends with the wizard and fairy sinking into the stage (164). The forestage servants, dwarves, and parade entrance of the magical duelers together shift focus to the overt presentation of action. The interlude’s similarly audiencecentric special effects—fireworks and stage machinery—are the divertissement’s most direct nod to the visual elements of the eighteenth-century divertissement tradition that inspired Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s work. The third interlude, positioned just before the divertissement’s last scene, is the simplest of the three. Gozzi’s short note that “Truffaldino . . . was appointed to the office of Royal Chef” (64) becomes a scene in which his appointment is celebrated: kitchen servants dance a “monferrina” and cooks dance a “bergamasca” before they ceremonially dress Truffaldino in his new attire. Most significant to actor training are the dances, with which studio actors amplified their range of physical expression. As Meyerhold wrote in “The Fairground Booth,” his ideal actor “knows how to dance both a graceful monferrina and a rough English jig.”21 In this case, he contrasted the “graceful” monferrina with the bergamasca, a “lusty sixteenth-century dance depicting the reputedly awkward manners of the inhabitants of Bergamo,” from which Truffaldino traditionally hails.22 The second interlude, the longest and most complex of the three, provides the most directly practical material for actor improvisation. The fiaba briefly notes a comical debate about theatrical repertoire, in which Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella argue for the primacy of Chiari, Goldoni, and Sacchi’s company, respectively. In the related interlude, which appears between scenes 5 and 6 in the divertissement, Extra-Tragic Tragedians and Commonplace Comedians from the opening parade act out the improbable plots for which Clarice and Leandro advocate; the “extra-tragic” scene involves characters hurling themselves from tower tops, whereas the “commonplace comedy” involves a family bewailing a cheerfully “knavish” son’s drinking and whoring (171). The former provided an exciting challenge to invent physical stunts and the latter an opportunity to play with heightened, contrasting emotions. Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev found such instances of “exaggerated parody” to be Gozzi’s most valuable innovation.23 In Gozzi’s fiaba, Brighella then counters Clarice and Leandro’s suggestions with a rousing speech about the excellence of Sacchi’s troupe. Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev replace Brighella’s speech with a lazzo from a commedia book they used in their research.24 In it, Brighella plays a scene in which Harlequin debates with himself about whether to live or die after learning that his beloved has married a farmer. This appears mostly in two-person

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dialogue (Harlequin and himself) with only a handful of stage directions, meaning that the solo actor playing the lazzo would improvise physical bits, the comedy of which centers on Harlequin splitting himself into two selves that are so opposed that one beats the other with a slapstick. In both portions of this interlude—the genre chorus’s heightened exaggerations and the doubling of Harlequin—virtuosic actors perform rather than embody character. The actor’s creation of a role was, for Meyerhold, an act of authorship. By framing the process of this authorship, the actor also creates a pleasurable double awareness for the audience, an imaginative mental dance between the real and the fictional.25 * * * Strangely, Three Oranges has never been performed in full in any language. The three “Eccentrics” held a reading at Meyerhold’s apartment in spring 1913 and tried unsuccessfully to find a theatre to produce it that summer, but the closest thing it has ever had to a full production is the 1921 premiere of Prokofiev’s opera in Chicago, designed by Boris Anisfeld, which was saturated with the formal devices that the divertissement had laid out so invitingly (fig. 7.3). Yet Three Oranges has been performed many times if we understand it as a model for actor and audience-centric theatre. Shortly after the studio opened, Soloviev’s students staged the second interlude in class. Meyerhold and Soloviev wrote similarly structured pantomimes and harlequinades for Borodin­ skaia students to use as training material (fig. 7.4).26 Advanced studio students wrote and performed interludes of their own and, later, created some of the most exciting work of the 1920s theatrical avant-garde.27 For the 1949 production of Prokofiev’s Three Oranges in New York, both director Theodore Komisarjevsky and designer Mstislav Dobuzhinsky knew Meyerhold’s work extremely well; when they rewrote the opera’s Eccentrics as “proscenium [forestage] servants,” they were likely paying silent tribute to Meyerhold’s Soviet erasure (fig. 7.5). Most subsequent artists borrowed or re-reinvented Meyerhold’s formal devices more frequently than they did his productions. The best example of how far Meyerhold’s artistic revolution had spread leading up to his 1939 arrest is also the most alarming. The 1936 characterization in Pravda of Dmitry Shostakovich’s music as “muddle” is a famous but not unique example of Stalin’s regime tightening control over individual experimentation by condemning it as “formalism.”28 Meyerhold was forced to defend himself against “Meyerholditis” in the campaign against formalism that burgeoned soon after. His critics weaponized this term to hold him broadly accountable for any

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Figure 7.3. Photo of the palace courtyard, act II, scene 2, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre (premiere: December 30, 1921). Historic Scenic Collection, Series IV, Box 3, Folder 17. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University.

politically out-of-favor work that refused to draw a divide between form and content, in some instances, or for derivative work by those who “plagiariz[ed] and indiscriminate[ly] appli[ed] . . . his formal devices with no comprehension of their logic . . .” in others.29 The director defended himself in a famous 1936 speech, “Meyerhold against Meyerholditis,” in which he criticized “charlatans” and “epigones” in the latter category. In relation to the former, how­ ever, he insisted that “there is an inextricable link between form and content . . . deriving from the fact that the human being is the basis of all art—both in the sense that a person is the creator, and in the sense that it is for a person that works of art are created; they breathe because of the presence of that person in the work itself.”30 Over his career, Meyerhold’s devices evolved along with his actors and audiences. But he believed firmly at his life’s end that theatre is an overt celebration of human creation, just as he had a quarter of a century before, when he and two fellow Eccentrics discovered Gozzi, that joyful innovator who similarly held that content and form, story and reflection are pairings as necessary to theatre and life as breathing in and out.

Figure 7.4. Alexander Rykov, costume design for “Harlequin, Dealer of Slapstick Blows,” by Doctor Dapertutto [Meyerhold] and Volmar Liustsinius [Soloviev]. Borodinskaia Street Studio (premiere: February 12, 1915). Paper on cardboard, gouache, 29.9 × 23 cm. КP 180169/1536. Copyright © A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

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Figure 7.5. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, costume design for “proscenium” [forestage] servants, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky, New York City Opera Company, 1949. Love for Three Oranges (1949) Costume Designs, T-Vim 2010-082. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

Translation Note My translation of Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s Three Oranges is based on the 1914 version published in the inaugural issue of LTA. As Maria De Simone and I developed our translations of Gozzi’s fiaba and the Russian divertissement, respectively, we closely compared our versions with both source texts and with each other’s work. The reader will note, therefore, that phrases across our fiaba and divertissement translations vary from being identical to

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roughly similar—sometimes underscoring the literalness of Vogak’s translation, sometimes capturing inevitable variations that come with translating ideas across multiple languages. These variations are most apparent in the verse sections, given the differing constrains of translating into rhyming verse (in the fiaba) and prose (in the divertissement). Additional small differences are due to changes by the Russian authors or, occasionally, to Vogak’s minor mistranslations.31 We also closely compared our work with Kevin Bartig’s opera libretto translation to ensure that we captured phrases that Prokofiev reproduced verbatim from the divertissement. While I avoided colloquialisms in my translation, I have aimed at contemp­ orary readability. In several instances, however, Vogak retained a palpable sense of translatedness; some of his phrases read awkwardly, even in Russian. The Russian authors embraced such moments as opportunities to emphasize Gozzi’s “caricatural parody.” I have aimed to make such phrases clear without eliminating this distinctive quality. All text that is original to the divertissement appears in bold font. Supplementary notes identify places where the divertissement retains Gozzi’s reflective commentary, additional differences from the fiaba, and explanations of creative choices that relate di­ rectly to Meyerhold’s studio, journal, and practice.

Love for Three Oranges A Divertissement in Twelve Scenes, a Prologue, an Epilogue, and Three Interludes Composed by K. A. Vogak, Vs. E. Meyerhold, and Vl. N. Soloviev after the scenario by Count Carlo Gozzi, A Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale “The Love of Three Oranges” Translated by Dassia N. Posner

Dramatis Personae Three Eccentrics32 Fools in the towers:33 •  First •  Second Extras in the towers34 Commonplace Comedians35 Extra-tragic Tragedians36 Boy-Herald37 Silvio, King of Cups Prince Tartaglia, his son Princess Clarice, the king’s niece Leandro, Knight of Cups, First Minister Pantalone Truffaldino Brighella Celio the Wizard38

Devil Farfarello Devil with a bellows Fata Morgana Smeraldina39 Daughters of Concul, King of the Antipodes: •  First •  Second •  Ninetta Creonta, a giantess-sorceress Masks: •  Dog •  Rope •  Gate Baker-woman Messenger

Guards, medics, courtiers, masks, and commoners at the festivities, cooks, kitchen servants, soldiers, dwarves, musicians, forestage servants.40

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The stage is set up as a theatre interior being prepared for a grand show. Tall towers (with external spiral staircases, little balconies, and ballustrades) are set up for the Fools at either side of an expansive forestage. At the bases of these towers are built-in alcoves from which actors, as they are performing, take out props—at one point the king’s crown, etc.41 From the towers to the upstage areas along the wings stretches a semicircular, opulent, two-tiered palace wall with a great quantity of doors covered by curtains. In the center of the palace wall is a large gate, very wide, also covered with a curtain that parts in the middle, behind which lies a second stage. The second level consists of a balustraded terrace. Visible beyond the terrace is a series of doors leading to it.42 From both sides of the terrace, near the towers, staircases descend to the stage. PARADE Trumpets and drums play loudly backstage. With shouts and noise, actors enter from both sides of the stage, battling each other with quills.43 The Commonplace Comedians advance upon the Extra-tragic Tragedians, who, desperately defending themselves, gradually fall back to center stage, where a collective scuffle ensues. Suddenly, the Three Eccentrics enter at a run through the center curtain and separate those fighting. One drives the Commonplace Comedians left and shouts at them: We’re sick and tired of works by despicable play hacks: four- and five-act comedies with absolutely no content, but a pistol shot at the end every time!

The second drives the Extra-tragic Tragedians right and shouts: We’re tired of plays overflowing with philosophical problems and boredom, with too little life-giving laughter and genuine theatrical art!

The third (running up to the audience): Look, over there, those actors will perform something real!

Meanwhile, there is a commotion behind the curtain; backs and heads intermittently appear outlined in the curtain; the whole thing sways; and arms and legs flash out here and there from behind it. Simultaneously, the same music from the beginning plays backstage, but mixed with squeals and loud laughter. Suddenly, one of the curtain corners is lifted slightly, and several hands push a little boy out onto the stage. Timid and embarrassed, he crosses to the forestage. The actors wave him on, encouraging him. The Three Eccentrics vanish when they see the boy. He delivers the prologue:

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PROLOGUE Your servants, the commedia players of yore, are bewildered and full of shame. They stand there backstage with their ears a’droop and all-too-sad faces, since they have heard many say, They are all dried up: they feed the audience with lies, with comedies that stink of mold. This is insulting, ridiculous, a swindle. We no longer know how to please our audiences onstage. What is lauded one year flops the next. The wheel of good taste is moved by gusts of wind that blow any which way. (аside, quietly) We only know that when crowds are bigger, we are no longer thirsty and our bellies are full. We want only new comedies onstage, great things never before shown. But don’t ask me when, how, or where we found these new works: just as when it rains after a long stretch of fair weather, you call it new rain, but though the rain may seem new to you, the rain has always been water and the water rain. Not all things are eternal—what was once the head becomes the tail. And we may swear that it is this way or that, but these comedies you have never seen. You’ll see startling things tonight, great wonders, miracles about which you may have heard but have not seen our troupes perform. You’ll hear beasts, gates, and birds speak in verse and deserve laurels. And perhaps the poetry will be in Martellian verse, which you will gladly applaud.44 Your servants are ready to come out, but first let me tell you the plot . . . but I’m ashamed, I tremble and I’m afraid: you will throw me out with boos and whistles. It is . . . love for three oranges. . . . Come what may . . . I’ve said it, and I don’t regret it. Imagine it now, my lives, my pillars, to be by the fire with your grandmothers. (He runs off.)

The Fools enter at a run, and, with exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, climb into their towers. SCENE 1 The Palace of the King of Cups. Silvio, King of Cups. Pantalone. Medics. Guards. Later: Truffaldino, Leandro. Silvio, the King of Cups, monarch of an imaginary kingdom, whose clothing is an exact imitation of the playing-card king, bemoans the misfortune of his only son, Tartaglia, the crown prince, who contracted an incurable illness ten years ago. The medics diagnosed it as a hopeless hypochondriacal condition and gave up on him. The king, filled with despair, weeps. After conferring among themselves, the medics decisively refuse to treat the prince and exit,

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taking their medical instruments with them. The king continues to weep. Pantalone enters. They bewail the prince together. Pantalone, satirizing the medics, suggests the wondrous secrets of a few charlatans of the day. Pantalone dresses up as a charlatan and mimics the medics. The king objects that everything has already been tried to no avail and rejects Pantalone’s suggestion. He explains that his son’s illness is, simply, an incurable hypochondriacal condition; that the medics predicted that if the prince does not laugh, he will soon be in his grave; and that only laughter will be the unmistakable sign of his recovery. An impossible thing! He adds that it saddens him to see himself a doddering old man already, with his only son nearly dead, and with his niece Princess Clarice—a bizarre, strange, cruel girl—the inevitable heir to his kingdom. He feels sorry for his subjects, weeps with great sobs, forgetting all his majesty. Pantalone consoles him. The king bewails himself and his son and rails at Clarice. He bewails his subjects, too. Pantalone consoles him. In response to Pantalone’s consolation, the king recounts the medics’ advice about laughter. First Fool in the towers: The hypochondriac prince . . . Second: . . . Tartaglia, who is ill . . . First: . . . will be cured . . . Second: . . . if he laughs.

The king laughs approvingly. Pantalone reflects that if Prince Tartaglia’s recovery depends on him laughing, the court should not be kept in mourning. They should declare festivities, games, masquerades, performances. Pantalone dashes about, and suddenly, hitting himself on the forehead, runs backstage and drags out Truffaldino. Truffaldino should be allowed to associate freely with the prince, as he is a person distinguished in the art of laughter, the best medicine for a hypochondriacal condition. He has noticed that the prince is rather inclined to trust Truffaldino. It could be that the prince will laugh and recover. The king is persuaded and prepares to give the appropriate orders. The king summons a guard and orders him to fetch Leandro. After a short time, Leandro, Knight of Cups, the First Minister, enters. This character is also dressed just like his playing-card likeness. Pantalone expresses, aside, his suspicion that Leandro is treacherous. The king orders Leandro to plan festivities, games, and bacchanalias. Fools in the towers—to each other: – What’s going on? – The kindest of kings is ordering Leandro to plan festivities, games, and bacchanalias.

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The king says that whoever can make the prince laugh will receive a great reward. Leandro tries to talk the king out of such resolutions, judging them harmful as hell.45 Pantalone insists on his advice. The king reaffirms his orders and exits. Pantalone rejoices, but says, aside, that he has noticed in Leandro a desire to destroy the prince. He follows the king off. THE FIRST INTERLUDE follows. The Herald enters and announces: “Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana play cards.” Forestage servants bring onto the stage some face cards from a card deck, including Silvio, King of Cups, and Leandro, Knight of Cups. The ­forestage servants place them about the stage and leave. Accompanied by thunder and lightning, sparklers, and the brilliant fireworks of a spectacular show, Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana rise up out of the ground and present themselves to the audience to musical accompaniment. Celio the Wizard: I am Celio the Wizard. Fata Morgana: I am Fata Morgana.

Dwarfs bring out bags of gold. Celio the Wizard bets on Silvio, King of Cups. The bags of gold are moved to Silvio and cover him up almost entirely; only his head is visible. Fata Morgana bets on Leandro, Knight of Cups. She wins. Little by little, the dwarves drag the bags of gold from Silvio to Leandro. Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana begin fighting, to thunder and lightning. They sink down into the ground—Celio the Wizard clutching Silvio, and Fata Morgana clutching Leandro. Fata Morgana and Celio the Wizard hurl curses and abuse at each other. SCENE 2 Place of action: the same. Leandro. Pantalone (exiting). Later: Clarice. Brighella. Truffaldino. Celio the Wizard. Fata Morgana. Pantalone dances in celebration. He expresses his suspicions about Leandro and exits. Leandro is stunned. He says that he sees some obstacles to his desire but does not know their origins. Princess Clarice, the king’s niece, enters. Never has a princess of such strange, bizarre, and decisive character

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as Clarice ever been seen on the stage. Clarice, who has made a deal with Leandro to marry him and raise him to the throne, should she become heir to the throne when her cousin Tartaglia dies, scolds Leandro for his phlegm, for waiting for her cousin to die from an illness as slow as hypochondria. Leandro cautiously defends himself, saying that he has put a few paper scraps in Martellian verse in Tartaglia’s bread, which should force him to die slowly from their hypochondriacal effects.46 While Leandro speaks about the paper scraps in Martellian verse, he rushes backstage, grabs the paper scraps out of the hands of the Extra-tragic Tragedians standing there, and runs back onstage. The Tragedians rush after him and run about on the forestage.47 The Fools in the towers shout: First: He’s feeding them to the prince. Second: But that’s poison! Third: It certainly is: Martellian verses from extra-tragic tragedy.

Clarice flies into a rage upon seeing the slow method being used to kill Tartaglia. Leandro chimes in with doubts about the efficacy of the scraps of Martellian verse. Meanwhile, Truffaldino crosses upstage toward the curtain carrying clownish props. Behind him, accoutrements for the festivities and masquerade are carried out, a whole procession. Leandro and Clarice are horrified. They see Truffaldino, a comical character, being shown into court, sent by who knows whom: if Tartaglia laughs, he will recover from his illness. Clarice is very worried: she has seen this Truffaldino. It was impossible not to laugh at the mere sight of him. She says that Martellian verse scraps, crude by nature, will be useless. Leandro beckons to Brighella. Brighella enters and relates in secret that Truffaldino was sent to court by a certain Celio the Wizard, Fata Morgana’s enemy and beloved by the King of Cups for the reasons indicated in the interlude. At this, Celio the Wizard crosses the forestage. Brighella’s news about the mystery of Truffaldino throws Clarice and Leandro into great confusion. They discuss using various occult death methods to kill Truffaldino, who, simultaneously, crosses the stage on his way back from the palace. Clarice suggests arsenic or a gunshot. Leandro suggests putting Martellian verse scraps or real opium into his bread. First Fool in the tower: He just can’t let go of his Martellian verse!

Clarice says that Martellian verse and opium are similar things, and that Truffaldino seems to her like someone with a stomach strong enough to digest such narcotics. Brighella adds that Fata Morgana, who knows about the performances ordered to amuse the prince and make him laugh, has promised to

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come and counter his healing laughter with a curse that should kill him. At this, Fata Morgana crosses the forestage. Clarice exits to allow the commanded performances to be prepared. Leandro and Brighella exit to arrange them. SCENE 3 The hypochondriac prince’s room. Tartaglia. Later: Truffaldino. The curtain parts, and the scene opens in the hypochondriac prince’s room. The comical Prince Tartaglia is dressed in most amusing invalid clothing. He sits in a large armchair. Next to him is a table, on which he rests his elbows; it is covered with vials, ointments, spittoons, and other paraphernalia appropriate to his condition. He bemoans his unfortunate fate and recounts the treatments he has endured in vain. He explains the strange symptoms of his incurable illness, and because he is alone onstage, neither his costumes nor his gestures can be overcaricaturized.48 The most comical Truffaldino enters to make the invalid laugh. The prince looks on Truffaldino favorably, but however many times he tries, he cannot laugh. He wants to talk about his illness, to hear Truffaldino’s opinion. Truffaldino constructs satirical disquisitions about the reasons for the illness, the most convoluted and loveliest ever heard. Truffaldino sniffs the prince’s breath and smells undigested Martellian verse belches. Second Fool in the towers: He smells Leandro’s poison!

The prince coughs, wants to spit. First Fool in the towers: The Martellian verse is stuck in his windpipe!

Truffaldino gives him a cup. He takes the spit, examines it, and finds rotten and stinky rhymes. Second Fool in the towers: There it is, the Martellian verse!

Musical instruments play, announcing the merry performances taking place in the palace’s great courtyard. Truffaldino wants to bring the prince to the covered terrace to watch them. The prince protests that it is impossible. They perform an amusing argument. In his rage, Truffaldino flings the vials, cups, and everything used for Tartaglia’s illness out the window; the prince wails and weeps as if he has returned to infancy.49 Finally, Truffaldino forcibly carries the prince off on his shoulders to enjoy the performances; the prince howls as if he is being disemboweled.

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SCENE 4 The great courtyard of the palace. Palace wall with covered terrace. Gates. Leandro. Later: Fata Morgana (as an old lady). King of Cups. Prince Tartaglia. Clarice. Pantalone. Guards. Masks. Commoners. The scene opens on the palace’s great courtyard. Leandro indicates that he has carried out the orders for the performances and that the sad commoners, hungry to laugh, have all donned masks and are coming to the courtyard for the festivities. He says he has taken care to put many people in gloomy masks to make the prince-spectator more melancholy. He cautiously pulls these gloomy masks out from backstage, shows them, and puts them back again. He says the time has come to order the gates to be opened so the people can enter. Fata Morgana enters, transformed into a caricatural little old lady. Leandro is surprised that this subject has entered through closed gates. Fata Morgana reveals herself and says that she has come in this guise to finish off the prince once she sees the festivities are about to begin. Leandro thanks her and calls her the Queen of Hypochondria. Fata Morgana withdraws. — The courtyard gates are opened wide. The king, the hypochondriac prince bundled up in a fur coat, Clarice, Pantalone, the guards, and, later, Leandro appear on the covered terrace in the palace facade. The Masks pour through the gates and fill the entire space up to the front edge of the forestage. Leandro’s gloomy masks enter from one side and mix with the crowd. The entertainments begin. There is a joust on horseback. At its head is Truffaldino, who instructs the clashing cavaliers to make funny gestures. After each gesture, he turns to the terrace, asking His Majesty if the prince is laughing. The prince weeps, complaining that the noise makes him deaf in the head and the air bothers him, and he entreats His Fatherly Majesty to give the order for him to be carried away to his very warm bed. Two fountains begin to flow, one with a stream of oil, the other with wine. The Fools in the towers shout to the people: First: Hey people, fill up! Second: The fountains are flowing with wine and oil!

The people rush over to provision themselves. The most trivial, plebian arguments ensue. Not one is able to make the prince laugh. Fata Morgana enters disguised as a little old lady with a vessel to fill with oil from the fountain. Truffaldino abuses this little old lady in various ways. She falls down, legs up in the air. At last, when the little old lady falls, the prince bursts into

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prolonged, resonant laughter. He recovers instantly from all his ailments. Truffaldino receives the reward, and upon hearing this comical prince’s laughter, the spectators laugh heartily, delivered from the oppression caused by the ill health of this unfortunate one.50 The whole court rejoices at this turn of events. Leandro and Clarice are sad. Fata Morgana rises from the ground in a rage, emphatically rebukes the prince, and hurls at him the following, obviously charmed, curse: Open thine ears, barbarian: my voice shall assail thy heart: neither wall nor mountain can stay the sound of my wrath. As cursed lightning splits open the earth, so my words shall pierce thy breast. As a towline pulls a boat by the bow, so shall your nose be pulled by this curse, this terrible curse. To hear it is to die, like a quadruped in the sea, like a fish in fields and flowers. I pray to dark Pluto and flying Pindar that you may fall in love with three oranges. Threats, pleas, and tears—may they be empty specters and senseless babble. Run to the terrible acquisition of the three oranges!

The noise and laughter gradually fade. At Fata Morgana’s words about the three oranges, a deathly silence falls. Fata Morgana vanishes. When Fata Morgana utters her words, the Fools practically tumble out of the towers, and the Extras replace them in the towers. Tartaglia is seized by а violent frenzy of love for the three oranges and rushes headlong onto the forestage, where he is caught and led from the forestage, across the entire stage, and into the palace. INTERMISSION follows. SCENE 5 Pantalone. Truffaldino. Tartaglia. King. Guard with iron shoes. Clarice. Leandro. Brighella. Guards. The prince is beside himself with despair. He throws off his shoes, hops around barefoot, and shouts that he wants his father to give him a pair of iron shoes so he can travel the world until he finds the fateful oranges, the source of his love. He calls Pantalone and orders him to ask the king for these shoes under penalty of disfavor. Pantalone exits to run to the king. Truffaldino enters. The prince is impatient that the iron shoes are delayed. Truffaldino makes amusing requests. Tartaglia declares that he wants to set off to acquire the three oranges, which, in the story his grandmother told him, are far away, over two thousand miles, in the custody of the sorceressgiantess Creonta.

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The Fools in the towers shout: First: It’s not so easy to get the oranges! Second: Creonta has them! First: The sorceress! Second: Over two thousand miles away!

The prince calls for his armor and orders Truffaldino to arm himself, as he wants him as his arms bearer. A clownish scene between these everamusing characters ensues. By order of Truffaldino, weapons are brought in. They arm themselves with breastplates and helmets and choose long, large swords—all with exaggerated caricature. The king, Pantalone, and the guards enter. One guard has a pair of iron shoes on a pole. These four characters play this scene with such seriousness that the situation becomes twice as funny.51 With tragic and dramatic majesty, the father tries to dissuade his son from his perilous undertaking. He begs, threatens, falls into histrionics. The possessed prince insists. He will succumb to hypochondria again if they do not let him go. He goes so far as to make violent threats against his father. The king is sorrowfully surprised. He reflects that his son’s lack of respect is due to the example set by the new comedies. The fools in the towers shout: First: The son has raised his hand against his father! Second: Just like in extra-tragic tragedy!

The prince will not calm down. Truffaldino puts the iron shoes on the Prince. The scene ends with a dramatic quartet of whimperings, farewells, and sighs. The characters step forward to deliver this quartet: King: Oh, my beloved son, whither goest thou? Pantalone: Thou dost leave your father and me behind in deepest grief . . . Prince: I know not whither I go. I go to acquire the three oranges. My heart burns with love. Truffaldino: And my legs quake with fear! All: Farewell! Farewell!

The prince and Truffaldino set off. The king swoons and falls into a chair. Pantalone calls for vinegar to help. Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella rush in; they scold Pantalone for the clamor he is raising. Pantalone tells them about

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the swooning king, and about the prince who has gone to his death on the difficult oranges quest. Reviving, the king makes tragic exaggerations. He bewails his son as if he were dead. He orders the whole court to wear mourning, and he exits to shut himself in his study and finish out his days under the weight of sorrow. Pantalone, not wishing to add his weeping to that of the king, to mix mutual tears in a single handkerchief, follows the monarch off.52 Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella are merry and praise Fata Morgana. The bizarre Clarice wants the right to distribute court appointments any which way. Brighella requests, based on his service, the position of Master of the King’s Revels. THE SECOND INTERLUDE follows. The Herald enters and announces: “Dispute over the choice of theatrical repertoire.” Brighella crosses to the forestage. Brighella: The last thing Signora Clarice and Signor Leandro want is for me, Brighella from Bergamo, fourth mask of the commedia dell’arte, to become Master of the King’s Revels. They think I am not learned enough, and they don’t appreciate my merriness. My strange livery is the livery of a servant—a trickster and a ne’er-do-well—and my mask is a dark color, which they say doesn’t suit the stylish costume of the Master of Revels and Bacchanalias . . .53

Clarice and Leandro enter from opposite sides. Brighella (quietly): Clarice . . . (loudly) What does Signora Clarice think about theatre? What kinds of performances does Signora Clarice prefer to see?” (quietly) Leandro . . . (loudly) Merciful cavalier and most just of knights, Knight of Cups, Signor Leandro, dare I ask your honored opinion about the art of the stage? You’re silent? . . . Both silent, not honoring your poor servant Brighella with a single word? Cruel people! Poor Brighella!

He begins to twirl on one leg across the entire stage. Clarice: Stop your foolish jokes, Brighella! And be serious when respectable, high-class people talk to you. I love to see the great and sublime on the stage. I love tragic performances with characters who hurl themselves out of windows and off towers out of love. Brighella: And stay alive, in all these astonishing situations, without breaking their necks.

During Clarice’s words a group of Extra-tragic Tragedians performs. They roll out a tower on wheels, and in pantomime, in the style of exaggerated parody, play the following scene. A king does not want to give his daughter in marriage to a young knight. In grief, the latter throws himself from the tower. After him, in despair, comes his bride. Finally, the saddened king

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follows their example. The king, still alive, meets the young lovers, also alive, at the base of the tower. Collective joy. The king blesses the young knight and his daughter. Leandro: I disagree with you, kind Signora Clarice. My taste rejects such improbable tragedies. I prefer performances that are subtler, more refined, closer to nature. I love what our court scholars and critics call “comedy of character.”

Brighella shakes his head sadly. The Commonplace Comedians enter, bringing out little flats and props, and, in their usual manner, perform in pantomime the following parody of a scene from a Goldoni comedy.54 The young but lecherous Ottavio forgets his filial duty, distressing his aged father Vittorio: he extorts money from him and spends it on Rosaria and Isabella, actresses at a little theatre. The latter take not only his money but also silk handkerchiefs, a watch, rings, and a staff with a golden knob. Rosaria and Isabella accompany this with tender words and gestures, full of refined taste. The mournful Vittorio sits, bewailing his misfortune. Vittorio’s wife and sisters also bewail Ottavio. Vittorio, out of grief, drinks vino nostrano, and Ottavio, out of loving joy, drinks in the company of friends who come to visit him.55 Brighella rushes at them; he knocks down the flats and chases away the actors. Brighella: Enough! Enough of faithless wives, knavish sons, and courtesans! Down with authors who say that wine is the ruin of humanity and other such nonsense. Make way for Brighella, who will give a solo performance from the old improvised comedy of masks, which is best suited for innocently entertaining the public. Clarice: I cannot watch bumbling buffonades! Leandro: My refined taste cannot endorse obscene rot in an enlightened century.

Both exit. Brighella: Esteemed audience! I’ll perform for you a scene from a very old comedy:

“Harlequin—Nobleman on the Moon.”56 Holá! (Appears in the costume of Harlequin). O, I am most unfortunate! Dottore wants to marry Smeraldina to a farmer, and I will live without Smeraldina! No! I do not want to live! Ignorant Dottore! Thankless and inconstant Smeraldina! Villainous farmer, poor Harlequin! Yes, I want to die; I want it to be written in histories both ancient and new: Harlequin died for Smeraldina. . . . I will go to my room, tie

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a rope to the ceiling, stand on a chair, put a noose around my neck, kick away the chair with my foot, and that’s it—I’ll be hanged! Oof! (Strikes a strangulation pose). Harlequin, you really want to kill yourself over a woman? Well that’s the most foolish thing ever—Ahem! But she was unfaithful to an honest man, is that not a crime?—Of course, it’s a crime. But hanging yourself won’t make you grow fatter, will it?—No, it won’t, just the opposite, I’ll waste away—Then why hang yourself?—Because I want to.—You won’t hang yourself.—I will.—I assure you that you won’t.—I swear to you, I will.—I tell you, you will not hang yourself.—Wait, you scoundrel, I know how to get rid of your pesky meddling! (Here Harlequin takes out a slapstick, deals several full-weight blows onto his own back, and takes off running.) Ah, finally our smart aleck has skedaddled! So, now we can hang ourselves without interference. (He takes a few steps and suddenly stops.) Actually, here’s the thing. Hanging myself, you know, is too ordinary and will bring me exactly zero honor; I’ll look for a different kind of death, a death that’s extraordinary, not cliché but heroic, worthy of Harlequin. (He walks upstage, notices that Leandro and Clarice have left, takes off the Harlequin costume in a flash, returns to the audience, and says): Signora Clarice and Signor Leandro have left. Poor Brighella! So close, it was smiling at you, that position as Master of Revels! My poor, dear commedia dell’arte, my poor actors who performed it not long ago . . . Now they have lost the audience’s love. Some of them die of starvation, while others are forced to work in little late-night theatres and basements, performing three times a day in stupid little playlets by newspaper hacks with big names. Heads hung low, hands outstretched, they perform on the variety stage and sing vulgar little ditties. Poor actors! (exits) SCENE 6 The desert. Celio the Wizard. Farfarello. Later: Tartaglia, Truffaldino, and Devil with a bellows. The scene opens in the desert. We see Celio the Wizard, Prince Tartaglia’s protector, making circles. He summons the devil Farfarello. Farfarello enters and speaks: Holá, who calls me forth from the center of darkness and dread? Are you a real wizard or a theatrical one? If you are from the theatre, I need not tell you that devils, wizards, and spirits are passé.

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In response to Celio the Wizard’s questioning gesture, Farfarello points far off into the distance, where we see Tartaglia and Truffaldino running headlong, driven on by a Devil with a bellows. Farfarello disappears. Celio the Wizard rails against his enemy, Fata Morgana. He explains that Tartaglia and Truffaldino are in great danger, headed as they are for Creonta’s castle, not far from here, where the three fateful oranges are held. He leaves to make the necessary preparations for saving two very worthy people of great use to society. Tartaglia and Truffaldino enter, armed, as previously described, running their fastest. Behind them, the Devil with the bellows blows at them from behind and forces them into a headlong run. The devil stops blowing and disappears. The two travelers fall to the ground when the wind stops, given the pace of their run. When Tartaglia and Truffaldino fall, the fools in the towers shout raucously. Tartaglia and Truffaldino, these two ever-amusing characters, get up from the ground, bemused by their fall and marveling at the wind blowing from behind. Tartaglia says: “The wind has stopped—the oranges are close.” Truffaldino is out of breath; he is hungry and asks the prince if he has brought a supply of money or promissory notes with him. Tartaglia scorns all these petty and useless questions: he sees a castle. He thinks it is the castle of Creonta, warden of the oranges, and he sets out on his way; Truffaldino follows him, hoping to find food. SCENE 7 In front of Creonta’s castle. Tartaglia. Truffaldino. Celio the Wizard. Tartaglia and Truffaldino arrive at Creonta’s castle gates. Celio the Wizard appears and frightens them both; in vain, he tries to dissuade the prince from the perilous undertaking. He describes insurmountable dangers. Celio the Wizard describes them with wide eyes and terrible gestures, as if they are all grandiose things. The dangers consist of iron gates coated with the rust of time, a fierce dog, a well rope half-rotted with damp, and a bakerwoman who has no broom and so sweeps the oven with her bare hands. All this Celio the Wizard shows Tartaglia and Truffaldino. The Prince, not at all frightened by these terrible things, wants to go to the castle. Celio the Wizard, seeing that he is determined, supplies him with magical melted tallow with which to grease the bolts of the gates, bread to throw to the fierce dog, and a bunch of brooms to give to the baker-woman

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who sweeps the oven with bare hands. He reminds them to stretch the rope out in the sun and pull it out of the damp. The Extras run down out of the towers, circle round Celio the Wizard, and warn Prince Tartaglia in chorus:57 May the enamored Tartaglia And his clowningest servant Steal away the oranges And flee without looking back. Their journey will not take long: The dark Devil with the bellows, Blowing at their backs, will help them And push them home: But during the journey, It is dangerous to open the oranges: They may be opened, remember well, Only by a source of water.

The Extras, having finished, rapidly disperse. Celio the Wizard blesses Tartaglia and Truffaldino and exits. Tartaglia and Truffaldino take the things they have been given and set out toward the castle gates. SCENE 8 In front of the palace of the King of Cups. Smeraldina. Brighella. Later: Fata Morgana. At this point, a curtain depicting the palace of the King of Cups is lowered. Two short scenes follow: one with Smeraldina the Moorish girl and Brighella, who rejoice at Tartaglia’s demise, the other with Fata Morgana, who orders Smeraldina to follow her to her lake. SCENE 9 The courtyard of Creonta’s castle. Dog. Rope. Gates. Baker-woman (who sweeps the oven with hands as large as shovels). Tartaglia. Truffaldino. Later: Creonta. The scene opens on Creonta’s castle courtyard. The iron gates, the fierce dog that howls and roams, the well with its coiled-up rope nearby, and the baker-woman who sweeps the oven with two huge bare hands keep the entire theatre silent and attentive.58 On the far side of the gate’s grillwork, we see

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Tartaglia and Truffaldino working away at the bolts with the magic tallow— and lo!—the gate swings wide open. Great wonder! They enter. The dog, barking, attacks them. They give it bread, and it grows calm. Great marvel! While Truffaldino, full of fear, stretches the rope out in the sun and gives the brooms to the baker-woman, the prince goes into the castle and comes back out merrily with the three enormous stolen oranges. But the important events do not end thus. The sun grows dark, the earth quakes, and loud thunderclaps boom. The prince hands the oranges to Truffaldino, who is trembling badly: they prepare to flee. From the castle a terrible voice rings out; in perfect accord with the text of the children’s fairy tale, it shouts (it is the voice of Creonta herself): Oh baker-woman, baker-woman, endure not my shame: seize them by the legs and throw them in the oven.

The baker-woman, a faithful guardian of the fairy-tale text, replies: Me? No. For many years and many months I have worn out my white hands in sorrow and tears. You, O cruel one, gave me not one broom, and they gave me many. May they go in peace.

Creonta shouts in accordance with the text: O rope, rope, bind them!

And the rope, in accordance with the text, replies: O cruel one, remember: For many years and many months, you left me abandoned, filthy, cruelly forgotten in the damp. They have stretched me out in the sun. May they go in peace. Farewell.

Creonta, ever faithful to the text, howls: Dog, O loyal guard, tear these scoundrels apart!

And the dog, a diligent guardian of the text, replies: Creonta, how can I tear these unfortunate ones apart? For many years and many months, I served you without bread, and they fed my hunger. In vain do you shout.

Creonta, in accordance with the text, shouts: Iron gates, shut tight, crush these dishonest thieves!

And the gates, in accord with the text, reply: Cruel Creonta, in vain do you seek our help. For many years and many months, we have rusted, and you left us in sorrow. They have oiled us. We will not be ungrateful.

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Creonta enters; she is a very tall giantess in a wide gown. Tartaglia and Truffaldino flee at the dreadful sight. Creonta, with gestures of despair, speaks, calling out again and again for Pindar: O unfaithful servants—rope, dog, gates, accursed baker-woman, treacherous one! O sweet oranges! Who has stolen you from me? My dear oranges, my friends, my lives! O, I will burst with rage! I feel here in my breast all the chaos, the elements, the sun, the rainbow! I can’t bear any more! O, Zeus, thunder-maker, strike down from the sky, rend me from head to toe! Who will help me, devils, who on earth will slip away from me? Here comes my friend—lightning—to burn and console me!

Fools, from the towers: First: I know what this is! Second: Extra-tragic tragedy! First: Yes.

Lightning strikes and reduces the giantess to ash. INTERMISSION follows. SCENE 10 By Fata Morgana’s lake. Smeraldina. Fata Morgana. Truffaldino. Devil with a bellows. Daughters of Concul: First and Second. Tartaglia. Two soldiers. Ninetta. The King. Leandro. Clarice. Pantalone. Brighella. The Court. Musicians. The scene opens on a lake, Fata Morgana’s dwelling place. We see a large tree and, beneath it, a large stone shaped like a seat. Smeraldina stands on the lakeshore to listen for Fata Morgana’s orders. She runs out of patience and calls her. Fata Morgana enters, gives Smeraldina the Moorish girl two enchanted hairpins, and leads her offstage when she sees Truffaldino approaching, driven on by the infernal wind. Truffaldino enters, running, with the Devil blowing him and with the three oranges in a sack. The Devil disappears. Truffaldino relates that the prince has fallen down nearby because of the speed at which he was running and that he will wait for him. He sits. A prodigious hunger and thirst possess him. He decides to eat one of the three oranges. He feels remorseful and plays a tragic scene. Finally, tortured and enflamed by the prodigious hunger, he decides to make a great sacrifice. He reasons that he can compensate for the loss with a couple of coins.59 He cuts open an orange. O wonder! Out of it comes a maiden, dressed in white, who, faithfully following the fairy-tale text, immediately says:

Love for Three Oranges by Vogak, Meyerhold, Soloviev  |  177 Give me a drink, O, I am unfortunate! I shall die, unfeeling idol! I am dying of thirst, O, unfortunate! Quickly, cruel one! O God!

She falls to the ground in the throes of death. Truffaldino has forgotten Celio the Wizard’s order not to open the oranges except by a water source. Instinctively stupefied and in despair from the incredible turn of events, he does not see the nearby lake. The only thing that comes to mind is to cut open the second orange and help the maiden dying of thirst with its juice. Then and there, he does the beastly deed, cuts open the second orange—and lo!—a second beautiful maiden appears with her text on her lips: Alas, I am dying of thirst! O let me drink, fine tyrant . . . I am bursting with thirst, O God! I will die of sorrow.

She falls down, like the first. Truffaldino expresses strong agitation. He is beside himself, in despair. One of the maidens continues in a piteous voice: O cruel fate! I shall die of thirst! I am dying! I am dead!

She breathes her last. The other adds: I will die, O cruel stars! Alas, who will comfort me!

She breathes her last. Truffaldino weeps and speaks tenderly to them. He decides to cut open the third orange to help them. He is about to cut it open when Tartaglia enters in a rage and threatens him. Truffaldino flees in terror, leaving the orange behind. This grotesque prince’s extreme surprise and his reflections on these two cut-open oranges and the corpses of the two maidens are inexpressible.60 After a funny monologue, Tartaglia sees two soldiers passing by, and he orders them to bury the two maidens with honor. The soldiers take them away. The prince turns to the third orange. To his astonishment, it has miraculously grown to the size of a gigantic pumpkin. He sees the nearby lake, meaning that, according to Celio the Wizard’s instructions, this is a suitable place to open it. He opens it with his sword, and out of it comes a tall, beautiful maiden, who, fulfilling important content from the fairy-tale text, exclaims: Who pulls me from my core? O God, I will perish from thirst! Quickly now, give me to drink, or you will mourn me in vain!

She falls to the ground. The prince understands the meaning of Celio the Wizard’s instructions. He is in a quandary, as he has nothing to scoop the water with. The occasion does not allow for attention to niceties. He takes off one of his iron shoes, runs to the lake, fills it with water, and, begging

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forgiveness for the unseemly cup, lets the maiden fortify herself; she rises up strong, thanking him for his help. She says: I am Ninetta, the daughter of Concul, King of the Antipodes. My two sisters and I were magically condemned by the cruel Creonta to languish within the peels of an orange.

The prince vows to marry her. The city is nearby, but the princess has no appropriate attire. The prince asks her to wait, to sit on the stone in the shade of the tree. He will return with rich clothing and the entire court to retrieve her. Having thus resolved, they part with sighs. Smeraldina, astonished at what she has seen, enters. She sees the beautiful maiden’s shadow in the water of the lake. There is no danger that she would not diligently avoid, as is told in the fairy tale about this Moorish girl.61 She comes upon the young princess, flatters her, and offers to fix her hair. She moves closer to her and betrays her: she weaves one of the two magical hairpins into her head. Ninetta transforms into a dove and flies off into the air. Smeraldina sits in her place, awaiting the court. She prepares to betray Tartaglia that night with the other hairpin. To the sounds of a march, the King of Cups, the prince, Leandro, Clarice, Pantalone, Brighella, and the entire court appear ceremonially to retrieve the princess-bride. The new likeness of Smeraldina, whom they do not recognize when they find her, thanks to Fata Morgana’s sorcery, sends the prince into a rage. The Moorish girl swears she is the princess who was left there. The prince cannot help but provoke laughter in his despair. Leandro, Clarice, and Brighella are merry. They see the source of the mystery. The King of Cups grows serious; he obliges the prince to keep his princely word and marry the Moorish girl. He makes threats. The prince, with a few clownish jokes, agrees, all sadness. Musical instruments play. The procession heads to court to perform the wedding. SCENE 11 Forestage. Celio the Wizard. Fata Morgana. Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana, hostile and furious upon meeting, perform the following scene: Celio the Wizard (entering impetuously, to Fata Morgana): Accursed sorceress, I know about all your trickery! But Pluto will help me. Dishonest witch, accursed witch! Fata Morgana: What are you saying, you charlatan mage? Don’t jab at me, or I will give you a rebuff in Martellian verse that will make you die choking.

Love for Three Oranges by Vogak, Meyerhold, Soloviev  |  179 Celio the Wizard: Ме, you insolent witch? I’ll repay you in the same coin.62 I challenge you to a Martellian verse duel. Such attempted crimes shall always be in vain, fraudulent, treacherous, lacking in any justice—to wit, Fata Morgana’s careless, malicious, destructive witchcraft that obstructs all other things. And, clearly, all the evil deeds committed will be finished, locked up, thwarted, laid to waste. Fata Morgana: O the bad verses!63 My turn, worthless wizard! First the beauteous golden rays of shining Phoebus shall turn to vile lead and East shall change to West; first the waning moon’s most beauteous silver horns and the celestial kingdom shall change places with the stars; babbling rivers of dear crystal shall mount into the clouds on Pegasus the horse—but you, base servant of Pluto, shall not thwart my rosined ship’s great sail and wheel. Celio the Wizard: Oh Fata, bloated like a bubble, just you wait! At the trial’s end shall come the verdict, as I explained in my opening. Princess Ninetta, who has been transformed into a dove, will soon, I know, be restored to her former state. And in chapter two, the one that’s next, Clarice and her Leandro will fall into poverty, while Smeraldina the Moorish girl, undeserving one, will justly feel the fevered flames on her behind. Fata Morgana: Oh fool, rhyming fool! Hear me out, I will terrify you. On flying feathers, prideful Icarus ascends to the heavens, then descends to the waves, careless, babbling, brave. Mount Ossa is piled atop Pelion, Olympus atop Ossa. Brave gods—in order to shake the heavens, send Icarus tumbling into the salty, foaming damp.64 And the gods send lightning thundering into ash. Clarice shall mount the throne, to your defiant woe, if you turn Tartaglia, this Actaeon, into a stag. Celio the Wizard: (aside) She wants to dazzle me with poetic excess. If she thinks she can trap me in a sack, she is mistaken. (loudly): I will leave nothing unanswered, and soon I’ll raise a strong objection to your lies. Fata Morgana: May the land be free of the King of Cups! (she exits) Celio the Wizard: (shouting after her): I shall dispute with you yet! (he exits)

THE THIRD INTERLUDE follows The Herald enters and announces: “Truffaldino receives the title and duties of Royal Chef.” To the playing of trumpets a messenger enters and reads a long scroll with the king’s seal: Tartaglia, the hypochondriac prince, confers upon his servant Truffaldino the title of Royal Chef and the duties of steward of the palace kitchens.

He exits. Kitchen servants enter from both sides, some with spoons, some with pots. They dance the Monferrina, then sit on benches they bring on.

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Music plays. Cooks enter with forks and knives and dance a Bergamasca cooks’ dance. Truffaldino is borne in on a litter. A ceremony follows of adorning him in a chef’s costume and bestowing on him the rank of Head Chef. After adorning him, all exit to the sound of music in a ceremonial march. TWELFTH (AND FINAL) SCENE The Royal Kitchen. Truffaldino. Dove. Pantalone. Ninetta. The King. Tartaglia. Leandro. Brighella. Smeraldina. Celio the Wizard. The Court. The scene opens in the royal kitchen. Never has a more wretched royal kitchen ever been seen. We see Truffaldino in the process of skewering a roast on a spit. As he turns the spit (since this kitchen has no scullion), a dove appears in a little window.65 A dialogue takes place between Truffaldino and the dove. She says to him, “Good day, cook.” He answers her, “Good day, white dove.” The dove adds, “I pray to heaven that sleep may overtake you, that the roast may burn, and that the horrid Smeraldina may not eat it.” A magical slumber envelops Truffal­ dino. This agreeable character makes every effort not to sleep. His antics are very amusing. He falls asleep. The fire burns the roast to cinders. Pantalone appears with a shout and wakes up Truffaldino. He says the king is angry because they have finished eating the soup, boiled meat,66 and liver, but the roast has never appeared. Truffaldino tells him about the incident with the dove. Pantalone does not believe in such marvels. The dove appears and repeats the wondrous words. Truffaldino almost falls asleep. These two characters chase the dove, which flutters about the kitchen. They catch the dove, put her on the table, and stroke her. They feel a little bump on her head: it is the magic hairpin. Truffaldino pulls it out, and the dove transforms into Princess Ninetta. Greatest amazement! His Grace the King of Cups appears, and, with kingly gravity and scepter in hand, he threatens Truffaldino for delaying the roast and for making him, of all people, endure such shame before invited guests. Prince Tartaglia appears and recognizes his Ninetta. He goes mad with joy. Ninetta briefly recounts her adventures. The king is astounded. Smeraldina and the rest of the court appear, following the king into the kitchen. With magnificent, proud bearing, the king commands the prince and princess to retire to the scullery. He declares the hearth his throne and sits on it with regal bearing. The Moorish girl and the entire court come in. The king asks what the punishment for the culprit should be. All, in confusion, say what

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they think. The king, in his rage, sentences Smeraldina to be burned. Celio the Wizard appears. He exposes the hidden guilt of Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella. They are sentenced to cruel banishment. The prince-groom and princess-bride are summoned from the scullery. All are joyful. All exit to the sounds of a wedding march. EPILOGUE Truffaldino, sitting on a royal kitchen pot, delivers the epilogue: Highly esteemed audience! The fairy tale has been played. The hypochondriac prince, my master Tartaglia, is cured from his illness and now shall wed Princess Ninetta. The wicked Leandro, Clarice, and Brighella are banished beyond the nation’s borders, and Smeraldina is sentenced to be burned. I could append the usual ending here, which any little boy who has ever heard the fairy tale about love for three oranges knows by heart—that is, snuff in compote, shaved mice, and skinned cats . . . But our meddlesome newspaper men, who are too busy with their endless praise of Extra-tragic Tragedians, those envies of theatre producers, and Commonplace Comedians, those darlings of audiences, will give us a lashing tomorrow in their pamphlets. Such is the lot of the three Eccentrics, and the comedy of masks, and Carlo Gozzi, and the three oranges . . . So be it! I will be so bold as to say a few words to the audience in favor of this enigmatic trifle. Dear ladies and gentlemen! Small deeds give birth to great events. In future, great things will be found flowing from something so absurd a thing as today’s performance-parody. Anyone who knows Italy cannot be an ingenious enthusiast of French refinement, so . . .

THE CURTAIN covers up Truffaldino, whose head appears and says: Applause!67

Notes Epigraph: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager (1818). Translated by Dassia N. Posner, from E. T. A Hoffmann, Sobranie sochinenie vol. 1. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991. http://lib.ru/GOFMAN/dirteatr.txt. Accessed December 23, 2005. 1. For Meyerhold’s rehearsal notes from 1920s and 1930s productions, see Meierkhol’d, Meierkhol’d repetiruet. 2. One exception is Meyerhold, Yuri Bondi, and Soloviev’s World War I play Fire: “Ogon’,” 19–55. 3. Each Three Oranges author was closely involved in actor training at the studio. See [Meierkhol’d], “Studiia.” For an excellent analysis of improvisation and collective creation

182  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges at Meyerhold’s first (but unsuccessful) studio attempt, the Povarskaia Street Studio, a collaboration with Konstantin Stanislavsky, see Syssoyeva, “Revolution.” 4. In 1911–12, this harlequinade was shown in “up to eight versions . . . as if by a troupe of traveling players.” Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 241. 5. Fel’dman, 236. This work was to feature scenes in various styles and settings (“an antiquarian shop,” “a ridotto,” “a hall of mirrors,” and “marionette theatre”). Based partly on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Signor Formica, it was to conclude “with a framing dialogue between the two authors, Doctor Dapertutto [Meyerhold] and Volmar Liustsinius [Soloviev].” Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Musical Art (hereafter SPbMTiMI), GIK 11287/3, ORU 10336, ll. 5–5 verso. Reproduced in Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 242. For draft notes, see SPbMTiMI, GIK 11293/61, ORU 10831, [n.p.]. 6. Soloviev’s journal: SPbMTiMI, GIK 11287/3, ORU 10336, ll. 5–5 verso. Reproduced in Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 242. For an English translation of Meyerhold’s essay, see Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth.” 7. Vogak left the studio in 1915 to fight in World War I. After the October Revolution, he found himself cut off in independent Finland and emigrated, after which he was unable to maintain contact with his Borodinskaia collaborators. Oves, Nauchno issledovatel’skii proekt, 1:75. 8. Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 237. 9. Vogak, Meierkho’ld, and Solov’ev, “Liubov k trem apel’sinam,” typescript. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11291/61, ORU 10831. 10. In “The Fairground Booth,” written one year earlier, Meyerhold described the ideal actor, who, like Harlequin, “is an equilibrist—a tightrope walker, almost. His leaps reveal extraordinary agility. His ex improviso antics amaze the spectator with a kind of hyperbolic improbability that our gentlemen satirists didn’t even dream of. . . . He knows how to dance both a graceful monferrina and a rough English jig. . . . He can use his body to trace geometrical figures across the stage, then sometimes leaps with merry abandon, as if flying through the air.” Meierkhol’d, “Balagan,” 219. 11. The Three Oranges draft provides valuable insight into the development of new material. The draft already contains the Fools and their towers, for instance. The opening “parade” of warring genre choruses began as a spoken prologue delivered by three Eccentrics. Most illuminating is the draft’s treatment of Gozzi’s commentary. Many reflections are already absent, and others are crossed out. A few are reimagined as early versions of the final piece’s self-referential elements. The Russian authors also initially added some playful bits that they later cut. In the draft, a monochromatic rug functions as “the desert,” and “Truffaldino and the rope are a choreographic number” in which the actor playing the rope was to be a “rubber man”— a contortionist. Gozzian plot details that would not have passed the Russian censor are crossed out by hand, such as the reference to syphilis and the Baker-Woman’s use of her breasts to sweep the oven. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11291/61, ORU 10831. 12. The following three sections are revised and expanded from Director’s Prism, 55–63. Citations from the fiaba and divertissement translations are given in the text. 13. The divertissement’s authors wrote themselves into Three Oranges as the Eccentrics (SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11291/61, ORU 10831, l. 1). By calling themselves Eccentrics (chudaki: misfits, oddballs, cranks), they reveled in their status as a self-selected elite who experimented outside mainstream culture, much as habituees of the famous Stray Dog Cabaret (1911–15) distinguished themselves, artists, from wealthy paying visitors, or “pharmicists.” Ciepella, “Introduction,” vii. 14. Even before the divertissement was published, Soloviev’s studio class included lessons on “forestage servants and their role in performance.” [Solov’ev], “Studiia,” 60–61.

Love for Three Oranges by Vogak, Meyerhold, Soloviev  |  183 15. Posner, Director’s Prism, 50. 16. Posner, 61. For more on Meyerhold’s use of the forestage, see also 49–52. 17. Howarth, French Theatre, xxxix. 18. Verigina, manuscript draft of her memoirs, 175, cited in Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 367. 19. [Meierkhol’d and Solov’ev], “Klass,” 92; translation from Director’s Prism, 67. Solov’ev, “Opyt razverstki ‘Stseny nochi’” (Experiments with Staging the Night Scene), 57–76. 20. Prokofiev reimagines the forestage servants as little devils. 21. Meierkhol’d, “Balagan,” 219. 22. “Monferrina;” “Bergamasca.” Soloviev also taught Bergamo dance in his commedia classes at Meyerhold’s studio. [Solov’ev], “Studiia,” 60–61. 23. Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev. “Open Letter,” 86–88. Translated in Posner, Director’s Prism, 209. 24. Falconi, Le quattro principali maschere, 34–35. 25. Posner, Director’s Prism, 56–57. 26. Soloviev published one of these interludes, Harlequin the Card-Lover (Arlekin, pristrastnyi k kartam), in a later issue of LTA. He based it on a commedia scenario performed for Empress Anna but mirrored Three Oranges in its spatial design, dramatic structure, improvisation, and movement. See Liustsinius [Solov’ev], Arlekin, 17–35. For an English translation, see Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd, 257–71. 27. Sergei Radlov, the first Soviet director of Prokofiev’s Oranges, was a Borodinskaia student. 28. For an English translation of “Muddle Instead of Music” (Sumbur vmesto muzyki), see Seroff and Galli-Shohat, Dmitri Shostakovich, 204–7. 29. Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution, 285. 30. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 336–37. 31. Vogak had a superb command of Italian. His occasional minor mistranslations are far fewer than those in John Addington Symonds’s 1890 English translation. See Gozzi, “Reflective Analysis,” 112–46. 32. The divertissement’s three authors. 33. Placing these Fools in high towers on opposite sides of the stage amplified their metatheatrical force: the Fools would have to shout to deliver short interchanges to one another. Posner, Director’s Prism, 150–52. 34. Elsewhere I have translated this as “supernumaries.” Posner, Director’s Prism, 58. 35. In the early draft of the divertissement held at the Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Musical Arts (hereafter SPBGMTiMI), “Goldoni actors” is crossed out and “domestic (bytovye) comedians” written in pencil. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11291/61, ORU 10831, l. 1. Elsewhere I have translated this as “kitchen-sink comedians” (Posner, Director’s Prism, 58–59). Here I use “commonplace comedians” to emphasize Meyerhold’s polemic against quotidian representations of daily life. 36. In the same early draft, “Chiari actors” is crossed out and replaced with “extra-tragic” (sugubye, literally two-fold) tragedians. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11291/61, ORU 10831, l. 1. 37. Also, town crier or fairground barker, a meaning that is especially relevant in the context of Meyerhold’s interest in fairground-style audience interaction. 38. Also, mage, a word with additional connotations of magic performed by occult means. 39. As in the fiaba, Smeraldina is identified in the divertissement as a Moorish girl. As Maria De Simone observes in a note to her fiaba translation (chap. 1n27), the Italian word mora (dark) in Gozzi’s day referred indistinctly to someone of dark complexion, a Muslim, or a person

184  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges originating from the Ottomon Empire or North Africa. Adriana Sacchi, who played in the original Three Oranges, played extremely varied servetta characters under the name Smeraldina, of which this was one. 40. Meyehold’s forestage servants are the ancestors of today’s black-clad stagehands, although their underscored visibility, and hence their metatheatricality, has largely been lost today. See Posner, Director’s Prism, 49–52. 41. Responsiveness to props, costumes, and physical space was essential to actor training at the Borodinskaia Street Studio. See Meierkhol’d and Solov’ev, “Klass,” 92; quoted in Posner, Director’s Prism, 67. 42. This may refer to the covered galleries (loggia) in Venitian architecture or to the raised balustraded stage platform for which Soloviev advocated when he taught “night scene” lazzi. For the latter, see Solov’ev, “Opyt razverstki,’” 57–76. Boris Anisfeld’s courtyard design for the 1921 Chicago production of Prokofiev’s opera features numerous loggia (see fig. 12.2). 43. In the early draft: goose quills. 44. Martellian verse: a seven-foot, rhyming meter with a sing-song rhythm, commonly used by Gozzi’s rivals. For a fuller definition, see essays by De Simone (chap. 1) and Pietropaolo (chap. 4) in this book. Martellian verse is the only topical reference from Gozzi to be retained across all three dramatic pieces. Although divertissment characters speak about Martellian verse, Gozzi’s verse is translated into prose in Russian, a choice that perhaps led Prokofiev to have his Tragedians call it “tragic prose.” 45. In Gozzi’s fiaba, the phrase is “harmful to the invalid” (51). Meyerhold, Vogak, and Soloviev embraced what was perhaps initially a mistranslation. As the authors declared in a polemical “open letter,” “We had absolutely no need [of the translations] infermo = sick, spezzante = ruinous, or “secret death,” because inferno = hell, sprezzante = contemptuous, and “occult death” in the corresponding places are precisely what we need in this exaggerated parody.” Posner, Director’s Prism, 209. 46. The word for “paper scraps” in the fiaba, brevi (paper charms), has a magical connotation that the Russian, gramota (deed, document, letter missive, paper scrap), lacks. In the fiaba, this word is not “bread” but panatella. See Maria De Simone’s fiaba translation in this book (chap. 1). 47. The divertissement choruses participate less frequently in the stage action than Prokofiev’s choruses. This moment of extra-tragic interuption probably inspired Prokofiev’s expansion of such actions. 48. The divertissement mistranslates the fiaba here slightly (as does Symonds in his 1890 English version): the fiaba notes that the actor worked from only a scenario, not that he was the scene’s sole content. This is the first of five examples of the divertissement retaining phrases from Gozzi’s reflective commentary, each of which I indicate in an endnote. All comment on acting technique or on audience response. 49. The fiaba states instead that the Prince “wept like an imbicile” (53). 50. The divertissement retains Gozzi’s reflective commentary here. 51. The divertissement retains Gozzi’s reflective commentary here. 52. The phrase in the fiaba has the opposite meaning: in Gozzi, Pantalone mixes his tears with the king’s. 53. Brighella, the commedia Zanni, was traditionally from Bergamo and wore a dark leather mask. 54. This is the divertissement’s only reference to Gozzi’s polemic against specific playwrights. Meyerhold viewed Goldoni as both a symbol for contemporary naturalism and as a cause for the centuries of verisimilitude that engendered it. See essays by Raskina (chap. 8) and Galanina (chap. 11) in this book.

Love for Three Oranges by Vogak, Meyerhold, Soloviev  |  185 55. Italian: Vino nostrano, a local wine. Oves, Nauchno issledovatel’skii proekt, 1:77. 56. Divertissement authors’ note: “The translation of this monologue is taken with minor alterations from the anonymous booklet: Four masks of Italian comedy.” The work they refer to is Falconi, Le quattro principali maschere italiane, 34–35. The divertissement follows Falconi closely with a few exceptions: in the latter, Arlecchino wields a scimitar; Arlecchino’s deliberations take a few additional lines; and, curiously, Falconi’s lazzo continues after the divertissement stops. In Falconi’s ending, Arlecchino resolves to laugh himself to death. 57. As is typical of Meyerhold, the traditionally least important performers are tasked with delivering the most important information. In Gozzi’s fiaba and Prokofiev’s opera, Celio delivers this warning. 58. The divertissement retains Gozzi’s reflective commentary here. 59. Literally: soldi, an Italian coin. 60. The divertissement retains Gozzi’s reflective commentary here. 61. In Gozzi’s fiaba, Smeraldina instead “dilligently” avoids deviating from her fairy tale action and text (63). 62. In other words, “I’ll give you tit for tat.” 63. Literally, “evil ones.” As in De Simone’s fiaba translation, I have preferred Symonds’s “bad verses.” Gozzi, Reflective Analysis, 142. 64. The Russian word nebozhiteli (heaven dwellers) generally refers to the Greek gods. Gozzi instead refers to Enceladus, a giant who battled with the gods in Greek mythology. 65. Russian: fortochka, a small vent window. 66. Italian: alesso. 67. Latin: Plausum date.

Bibliography “Bergamasca.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. July 20, 1998. Accessed August 1, 2019. https://www .britannica.com/art/bergamasca. Braun, Edward. Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen Drama, 1998. Ciepella, Catherine. “Introduction.” In The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, edited and translated by Paul Schmidt. New York: New York Review, 2007. Clayton, J. Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in TwentiethCentury Russian Theatre and Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Falconi, Clelia. Le quattro principali maschere italiane nella commedia dell’arte e nel teatro del Goldoni. Rome: Nuova Tipografia nell’ore, 1896. Fel’dman, Olga, ed. Meierkhol’d i drugie. Moscow: OGI, 2000. Gozzi, Carlo. Opere. Venezia: Colombani, 1772. ———. “Reflective Analysis of the Fable Entitled the ‘Love of the Three Oranges’: A Dramatic Representation Divided into Three Acts.” In The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, translated by John Addington Symonds, 112–46. New York: Scribner & Welford. 1890. Howarth, W. D., ed. French Theatre in the Neo-classical Era, 1550–1791. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Liustsinius, Vol’mar [Vladimir Solov’ev]. Arlekin, pristrastnyi k kartam. (Intermediia). LTA 4–5 (1914): 17–35. Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod. “Balagan.” Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy, edited by A. V. Fevral’skii, Vol. 1. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968, 207–229.

186  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges ———. Meierkhol’d repetiruet: spektakli 20-kh godov (i 30-kh godov), edited by M. M. Sitkovetskaia and O. M. Fel’dman. Moscow: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr, 1993. ———. Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy, edited by A. V. Fevral’skii. Vol. 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968. [Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod]. “Studiia: Klass Vs. E. Meierkhol’da,” LTA 1 (1914): 61–62. Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod, Iuri Bondi, and Vladimir Solov’ev. “Ogon’.” LTA 6–7 (1914): 19–55. [Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod, and Vladimir Solov’ev]. “Klass Vs. E. Meierkhol’da i Vl. N. Solov’eva.” LTA 4–5 (1914): 92. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. “The Fairground Booth.” In Meyerhold on Theatre, translated and edited by Edward Braun, 119–42. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1998. “Monferrina.” In The Harvard Dictionary of Music, edited by Don Michael Randel. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Accessed August 1, 2019. http://turing .library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/ harvdictmusic/monferrina/0?institutionId=631. Oves, Liubov' C., ed. Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 1914–1916, with author collective Iu. E. Galanina, P. V. Dmitriev, V. D. Kantor, A. P. Kulish, M. M. Molodtsova, I. A. Nekrasova, L. S. Oves, N. V. Pesochinskii, A. V. Sergeev, L. I. Filonova, A. A. Shepelova. 2 vols. Saint Petersburg: RIII, 2014. Posner, Dassia N. The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical AvantGarde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Seroff, Victor I., with Nadejda Galli-Shohat. Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer. New York: Knopf, 1943. Solov’ev, Vladimir. “Opyt razverstki ‘Stseny nochi’.” LTA 1–3 (1915): 57–76. [Solov’ev, Vladimir]. “Studiia: Klass V. N. Solov’eva.” LTA 1 (1914): 60–61. Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos. “Revolution in the Theatre I: Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Collective Creation—Russia 1905.” A History of Collective Creation, edited by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit, 37–57. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Vogak, K. A., Vs. E. Meierkhol’d, and V. N. Solov’ev. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam. Divertissement. Dvenadtsat’ stsen, prolog, epilog, i tri intermedia.” LTA 1 (1914): 18–47. Vogak, Konstantin, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Soloviev. “Open Letter from the Authors of the Divertissement Love for Three Oranges to A. A. Gvozdev.” LTA 4–5 (1914): 86–88. Тranslation from Posner, The Director’s Prism, 208–10.

8 Carlo Gozzi in The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto Raissa Raskina Translated by Maria De Simone and Dassia N. Posner

Meyerhold’s Fairground Booths Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theatrical periodical Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto (1914–16, hereafter LTA) has long awaited a comprehensive rather than selective analysis in English-language scholarship.1 Significantly, in the context of this present volume, this journal became the epicenter of the Russian neo-Romantic revival of Carlo Gozzi and E. T. A. Hoffmann. This essay traces the foundational steps in Germany, France, and England that inspired this extraordinary interest in the Venetian playwright and analyzes the significant role Gozzi played in Meyerhold’s journal, his theatrical worldview, and the broader Russian reception of Gozzi.2 Meyerhold’s debut as a director-reformer took place within the Symbolist environment of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1906, his staging of Alexander Blok’s The Little Fairground Booth (Balaganchik) at the Vera Komissarzhevskaia Theatre led the director to discover the renewed value of Romantic irony in contemporary theatre. Blok’s play is structured on the coexistence and interpenetration of disjointed planes of reality. In Meyerhold’s production, the device of a theatre-within-a-theatre and the direct involvement of the audience produced abrupt changes in perspective that resulted in oscillations between the main love plot of the Masks and the debates of the play’s framing observers, the Mystics. The little onstage fairground booth became a metaphor for a fully realized but seemingly closed-off world, which, once the

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illusion of its perfect autonomy and impenetrability is ruptured, could suddenly be transcended and seen from the outside. Meyerhold’s production thus materialized the transitions typical of Romantic irony: from complete inclusion to abrupt dissociation, from full participation to estrangement. Blok’s play evoked Ludwig Tieck’s dramaturgy in its mixing of metatheatrical planes and its bold ruptures of theatrical illusion. Meyerhold understood very well that Blok’s “own experiments are connected to the world view of the German Romantics (Novalis, Tieck).”3 In fact, Blok’s drama did seem to achieve a kind of irony that borders on the parodic and the buffoonish, at which Friedrich Schlegel often hinted, by presenting Romantic irony as a form of “transcendental buffoonery” and describing its signature style as the “antics of a common Italian buffoon.”4 Meyerhold’s experience with The Little Fairground Booth was decisive for his artistic path, although not immediately. His article-manifesto, “The Fairground Booth” (balagan), published in late 1912 as the conclusion to his collection of essays On Theatre (О teatre), documents this change: his move away from the framework of the “mystery” and turn toward a “theatrical traditionalism” marked by a clear predilection for models of playwriting suggested by the German Romantics. In this book’s preface, he traces the start of his new artistic direction back to the 1906 production: “The first push toward defining the direction of my art was provided by my successful staging plan for Blok’s miraculous Little Fairground Booth.”5 By 1912, Meyerhold was convinced that the way out of the contemporary theatre crisis was “theatrical traditionalism,” understood not as the direct recovery of ancient staging techniques but as the identification, through the study of the past, of immanent theatrical principles. Returning to invariable laws that comprise the theatre’s foundation in any time and place, trying to extract a sort of universal theatrical grammar—these were the major interests guiding the director’s research on tradition. Commedia dell’arte took on an exceptional paradigmatic value in Meyerhold’s theoretical discourse and practice. In 1915, Iakov Blokh, a contributor to Meyerhold’s LTA journal, summarized why: “In these productions, in which theatricality has, perhaps for the first and only time, been emancipated from literature, we are able to analyze theatre that is not muddled by any other attendant circumstance, theatre in its pure form—theatre as such.”6 For Meyerhold and his collaborators, commedia was a historical example of a theatrical form that embodied “the full power of Theatre’s primary elements: the power of the mask, of gesture, of movement, and of intrigue.”7 Conversely, commedia completely lacks what they defined as “literature”: the naturalistic representation of human

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life, inner conflict, and the playwright’s rhetorical and personal imprint.8 For Meyerhold, commedia provided a possible solution to “literary” theatre in the form of a return to improvised acting a soggetto (from a scenario). As he proposed in “The Fairground Booth”: The actor may get bored with perfecting his craft in order to perform in outdated plays; soon he will want not only to act but to compose for himself as well. Then at last we shall see the rebirth of the theatre of improvisation. Should the dramatist wish to help the actor in this, [. . .] he will quickly find that he is faced with the intricate task of composing scenarios and writing prologues containing a schematic exposition of what the actors are about to perform. Dramatists will not, I trust, feel degraded by this role. After all, Carlo Gozzi lost nothing at all by providing Sacchi’s troupe with scenarios which left the actors free to compose their own improvised monologues and dialogues.9

Gozzi, the First Romantic Vsevolod Meyerhold mentioned Carlo Gozzi for the first time in a letter dated July 28, 1911, after having read art historian Pavel Muratov’s Images of Italy (Obrazy Italii), published earlier that year: “Many wonderful pages about Carlo Gozzi, the first romantic, the predecessor of Hoffmann and Maeterlinck, who wrote fairy tales for the theatre of masks.”10 Muratov disseminated an image of Gozzi as a Romantic by devoting several pages to the Venetian playwright in his book, which became a great editorial success in Russia. The chapter on eighteenth-century Venice, “The Century of the Mask” (Vek maski), was, for the most part, a summary of several passages from Vernon Lee’s Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), published in London in 1880, in addition to a partial transposition of Philippe Monnier’s EighteenthCentury Venice (1907).11 Muratov calls Count Gozzi “the first romantic in history” and describes his artistic universe as a world in which the “blue bird” lives,12 in which animals talk and statues laugh, in which “nothing can be explained with the wretched laws of common sense.”13 It is well known that Gozzi’s works had extraordinary resonance in Europe, initially due to the cultural standing of the German Romantic movement, which viewed Gozzi’s dramaturgy through the lens of its own dramatic poetics. In their university lectures, the Schlegel brothers included Gozzi among the dramaturgical Olympians alongside other great “predecessors” of Romantic poetics, such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Calderón. Gozzi appeared to respond to August Schlegel’s invitation to the Poet: to transfer characters into an ideal realm, a world in which not necessity but the free will of the imaginative mind reigns, in which the laws of reality are abolished.14

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This admiration for Gozzi also prompted rejections of psychological analysis and eradications of sentimentality. In his 1809 Lessons on Dramatic Art and Literature (Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur), Schlegel presents the Venetian playwright as the ideal forerunner of Romantic irony. Gozzi’s masked characters act as an ironic counterpoint to the poetic portions; together they initiate a blending of Tragic and Comic, as in Shakespeare and Calderón.15 It is precisely this celebrated mixture of “the marvelous and the merry jest” that E. T. A. Hoffmann was to laud in his theatre treatise Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager (Seltsame Leiden eines Theaterdirektors, 1819). For Hoffmann’s spokesperson, the actor-manager Brown, Gozzi’s fiabe—Three Oranges, in particular—were an ideal and unattainable goal, entirely beyond the reach of the contemporary stage (which lacked improvisers like Antonio Sacchi’s troupe), except as performed in opera or by a company of marionettes. “It is inconceivable,” Brown fumes, “that these remarkable works . . . do not get adequate use, at least as opera librettos” (as we see, this invitation was taken up by Prokofiev).16 Precisely in line with the Schlegels, Hoffmann defines the theatre of the “magnificent Gozzi” as the product of a “genial, truly romantic poet” who knows the profound meaning of Witz (wit) and irony. Hoffmann’s only dramatic piece—the unfinished Princess Blandina (1814)—is an even more explicit tribute to Gozzi, both because it combines fairy-tale action and comic masks (Brighella, Tartaglia, Pantalone) and because he conceived it as “a modified Turandot.”17 Hoffmann’s model for this unfinished play was Ludwig Tieck’s comedies, which had also re-elaborated individual elements of Gozzi’s theatre in a Romantic key, foremost by combining fairy-tale action with literary parody. Tieck seized the opportunity to turn Gozzi’s use of traditional masks into dizzying metatheatrical play. Thus, in his 1797 Puss in Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater), the fairy-tale plot becomes a stage production, whereas the function of the masks—who, in Gozzi, comment on the main action—is entrusted to audience members and to characters like the Author, Prompter, and Stage Machinist. It is no coincidence that Puss in Boots provoked the enthusiasm of August Schlegel, who considered Tieck the spokesperson for his ideas on comedy. The French Romantics became interested not only in the fiabe teatrali but also in the count’s Useless Memoirs of the Life of Carlo Gozzi.18 Their passion for Hoffmann extended to Gozzi, as well. Excited by the idea of presenting ​​ the Venetian playwright as an “Italian Hoffmann”—an enthusiast of the occult side of existence, a rebellious spirit, a mystic, and a visionary—Paul de

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Musset, brother of the famous poet, fabricated some passages of the Memoirs in this vein. Published in Paris in 1848, this tampered translation remained for many years the only non-Italian source to provide information about Gozzi, until Symonds’s English translation was published in 189019. Indeed, Vernon Lee’s and Philippe Monnier’s writings, the primary channels for transmitting Gozzi’s Romantic myth in Russia, were to be affected by it.

Hoffmann’s Legacy The same year Pavel Muratov’s book was released, Gordon Craig published two excerpts on Gozzi from Vernon Lee’s book in his journal The Mask.20 Craig was one of the first twentieth-century artists to grasp commedia’s potential for nascent theatrical Modernism, and starting in 1911–12, he devoted entire journal issues to commedia. Gozzi occupied considerable space on the pages of these issues. In addition to excerpts from Lee, Craig published excerpts from Symonds’s translation of the Useless Memoirs.21 The famous excerpt from the book by Giuseppe Baretti, published in London in 1868, in which Gozzi launches his challenge to Goldoni, also appeared in The Mask.22 This episode was absorbed into the Romantic mythology of Gozzi, who was seen as commedia’s “Don Quixote” at a time when very different theatrical trends held sway; it also was reproduced in fictional biographies of the playwright that developed in the wake of Romanticism, including writings by Lee and Muratov. In a letter dated March 14, 1912, Meyerhold thanked his friend and disciple Sergei Sergeevich Ignatov (1887–1959) for lending him a “little Gozzi volume.”23 Ignatov, a Hoffmann scholar, was drafting a monograph on the German writer that was published two years later.24 In his book, E. T. A. Hoffmann: Man and Works, Ignatov recounts Hoffmann’s experiences as an orchestra conductor, theatre manager, scene designer, and composer. Moved by a desire to demonstrate a substantial affinity between the theatrical thinking of Hoffmann and Meyerhold, he presents Hoffmann as the Russian director’s theatrical predecessor. Hoffmann’s ideas, presented mainly in Strange Sorrows, could finally find fertile ground and be embraced and implemented in Russia. During the years when the cult of “theatricality” was being established, Ignatov argues, Hoffmann’s treatise was destined to become “a handbook for the contemporary theatre practitioner.”25 Hoffmann’s admiration for commedia, which was “given new life thanks to Carlo Gozzi’s pen,” forms a significant part of Ignatov’s monograph. In Strange Sorrows (translated into Russian in 1894),26 the “sublime fairy tale,”

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Love of Three Oranges, represents the theatre manager’s ideal and utopian goal. The programmatic significance that Meyerhold ascribes to Gozzi’s Three Oranges, as evidenced by the title of his journal, is closely linked to Hoffmann’s Strange Sorrows and to Ignatov’s study.

The Russian Adaptation of Three Oranges Between autumn 1912 and the following spring, Meyerhold worked on an adaptation of Gozzi’s Three Oranges in collaboration with Vladimir Nikolaevich Soloviev (1887–1941) and Konstantin Andreevich Vogak (1887–1938), former students in the Department of Romantic and Germanic Studies at the University of Saint Petersburg, which was a veritable hotbed of Russian formalism. Soloviev recalled that the idea of transforming Gozzi’s fiaba into “a theatrical work that is consonant with our era”27 was born at their first meeting in spring 1912. The adaptation was inspired by a traditionalist canon and aimed at reviving formal devices of the past. In fact, it was conceived as a lavish eighteenth-century divertissement. For an invited reading of Three Oranges at Meyerhold’s apartment on March 22, 1913, the guests—a close circle of friends and collaborators—received a whimsical invitation that read, “Esteemed ladies and gentlemen! Three eccentrics found, at a junk dealer, a crumbly old scrap of a scenario called Love for Three Oranges. Perhaps you would enjoy hearing what became of it.”28 This first reading took place on the eve of Meyerhold’s departure for Paris, where, in the months following, he would stage La Pisanella by Gabriele D’Annunzio. In a letter from Paris, dated May 6, 1913, Meyerhold asked Soloviev whether music had been commissioned for the production, as he was hoping to begin work on the mise-en-scène of what was to be a musical divertissement that autumn.29 The decision to turn Gozzi’s first fiaba into a musical work was in keeping with the spirit of Romanticism. As is well known, the Romantic tradition assigned the realm of fairy tales and the fantastical to music. It is no coincidence that Tieck derived a comic opera libretto from Gozzi’s The Blue Monster, and the young Wagner based the libretto for The Fairies on The Serpent Woman. For Meyerhold and his closest collaborators, the project of adapting Gozzi’s Three Oranges was infused with programmatic value: the production was to serve as a kind of theatrical manifesto of the “new theatre” for which Meyerhold advocated in “The Fairground Booth.” A spirit of defiance and provocation animated its authors. Their greatest ambition was to revive the art of improvisation.

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Literary Battles In May 1913, shortly after the reading of Three Oranges at Meyerhold’s home, Blok corresponded with his wife about the imminent opening of a new studio.30 After overcoming various organizational difficulties, Meyerhold’s “Studio of Dramatic and Musical Art,” later known as the Borodinskaia Street Studio, was inaugurated on September 7, 1913. The aims of the undertaking are encapsulated in a succinct formulation that recurs in the director’s writings: “the education of the actor of the new school” is destined to become the “core of the new theatre” in the next stage.31 Iriada Bachta, a student at the studio, recalled that “the studio did not set itself the task of being only a neutrally oriented theatre school. . . . Its entire collective considered itself the core of Meyerhold’s future theatre, in which improvisation would be revived.”32 Meyerhold, Vogak, and Soloviev’s adaptation of Three Oranges marks the beginning of a long cycle of activity linked to the Venetian playwright. But the Gozzi cycle was not to lead Meyerhold to his intended staging of the fiaba, nor would he ever stage any work by Gozzi. The creative energy aroused by the veritable “myth” created around the author of the fiabe teatrali found an outlet on the pages of the Three Oranges journal, a literary space reserved for historical research, free polemical criticism, and theoretical reflection on theatre (fig 8.1; see also frontispiece).33 In addition to offering an account of the Studio’s experimental activity, the journal also provided a theoretical base for experimental praxis by appealing to “tradition,” the characteristics of which Meyerhold had outlined in “The Fairground Booth.” The journal became a laboratory for promoting a specific concept of ​​theatre, the defense of which was entrusted to authoritative voices of the past, among which Gozzi’s was certainly the most venerated (see frontispiece). Attelan farce; the interludes of Cervantes; scenarios by commedia actors; fiabe teatrali by Gozzi, Tieck, and Hoffmann; and the pantomimes of Jean-Gaspard Deburau are invoked as evidence of the existence of a different playwriting and staging tradition that precedes and, in the eyes of its supporters, far surpasses the methods of the realistic theatre. The title of Meyerhold’s journal ironically mixed two distinct yet closely intertwined artistic universes in the editors’ minds: Gozzi’s fiabe and Hoffmann’s tales. In Hoffmann’s “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” (Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht, 1814), the Mephistophelian Doctor Dapertutto (meaning “everywhere,” from the Italian, dappertutto) was a charlatan, a seller of potions who steals the shadow of protagonist Erasmus Spikher. Meyerhold first used the pseudonym Doctor Dapertutto, suggested to him

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Figure 8.1. Iuri Bondi, design for the front cover of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto, no. 1 (1914). Photo of Vogak's copy of the journal, courtesy of Anna Vagin.

by poet Mikhail Kuzmin, when staging Columbine’s Veil (Sharf Kolombiny), a free adaptation of the pantomime by Arthur Schnitzler and Ernö Dohnányi, in 1910. Love of Three Oranges, Gozzi’s first fiaba, was, according to the Venetian playwright, “no more than a buffoonish caricatural parody of the works by Signori Goldoni and Chiari.”34 The satirical verve that distinguished

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Meyerhold’s journal was thus featured in the title itself. The brief introduction to the first issue already showed a certain disdain for the theatrical ideas of others: “In appearing before the public, we will say nothing about our goals and intentions, we will not advocate any kind of program. We will talk about ourselves and our work, sometimes about the work of others insofar as it interests us.”35 The spirit of erudite polemics, which was not dissimilar to the intransigence shown by Gozzi toward some exponents and events of his cultural world, was a common trait in the nine LTA issues that appeared over three years. To Meyerhold, theatre history was an eternal struggle for primacy between two opposing trends: the literary and the truly theatrical. It was in light of this idea that he read about the polemic that arose in the 1750s between Gozzi and Goldoni. In Meyerhold’s understanding, theirs was an open battle between two different dramaturgical trends that were closely connected to different theatrical systems: the realistic and the conventionalized. The playful and imaginative theatre, which addresses the eyes more than the ears, was positioned against psychological, realistic theatre, which centered on “the delicate lace of dialogue.”36 The eighteenth-century polemic marked, in an exemplary way, the rupture point between these two opposing forces, tipping the subsequent trend in favor of “antitheatrical tendencies” in playwriting.37 Despite Gozzi’s apparent victory, the Goldonian trend—the theatre of character and of realistic representation of the quotidian—eventually became the dominant trend in European theatre.38 Meyerhold thus identifies Goldoni as the representative of a theatrical change in direction toward the poetics of the real, the triumphal entry of the man of letters onto the stage—the primary cause of the theatre’s current decline. Meyerhold was convinced that “in studying Goldoni’s theatre, it is not difficult to recognize in it the progenitor of the naturalists.”39 The opposing force in this confrontation was represented by the “comedy of masks” (commedia delle maschere) and the fairy-tale theatre of Gozzi, whose work was perceived as a quixotic defense of specifically theatrical principles from the intrusion of the purely literary. “In the eighteenth century in Venice,” Meyerhold explained to his students in 1918, “a dispute broke out between Goldoni and Gozzi on the issue of what the theatre should be: Should it follow the path of written comedy, or should it sever its connection with the improvised comedy of masks? To follow all the twists and turns of the battle between these two playwrights is to come to understand for oneself how these two trends—the literary and the theatrical, which are always fighting for primacy, are different from one another.”40

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The ancient dispute between Gozzi and Goldoni regained contemporary relevance on the pages of Meyerhold’s journal. A preferred target for contributors’ polemical attacks became Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Moscow Art Theatre, which was accused of supporting a “Goldonian” trend. The journal sarcastically reported that the Moscow Art Theatre, in its recent production of Goldoni’s Mistress of the Inn, “remained faithful to its principles of representing psychology and daily life by mounting a comedy by Gozzi’s literary opponent.”41 The same issue also disapprovingly informed readers of Alexander Tairov’s choice to stage Goldoni’s The Fan at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre. “It is a very strange and logically inconsistent situation,” they wrote, that “the theatre, having set out to search for long-lost theatricality, for some reason suddenly has taken up a play by a virulent opponent of Carlo Gozzi.”42

The Polemic with Gvozdev As the banner for Meyerhold’s theatre battles, Gozzi occupied considerable space in the journal. In addition to the adaptation of Three Oranges, published in the first issue, subsequent issues included—for the first time in Russian—fragments from the Ingenuous Disquisition and Sincere History of My Ten Tales for the Theatre (translated by Vogak) and the tragicomical fiaba The Serpent Woman (translated by Iakov Blokh).43 The editors also announced the publication of a volume with translations of the complete fiabe teatrali, to be accompanied by a series of essays by journal collaborators.44 Because of the outbreak of World War I and the October Revolution, the first partial collection of the translated fiabe was published only in 1923.45 The Three Oranges divertissement drew severe criticism from Aleksei Gvozdev (1887–1939), then a young Italianist (a scholar of Giacomo Casanova and an expert on eighteenth-century Venice) who worked in the Department of Romantic and Germanic Studies at the University of Saint Petersburg. In a newspaper article, Gvozdev accused the author-translators of disregarding the fiaba’s parodic dimension. Without this parody—a pastiche against Goldoni and Chiari that was especially compelling on a stylistic level— the fiaba, according to Gvozdev, lost its artistic value.46 In response to the accusations, Meyerhold’s journal published “An Open Letter to A. A. Gvozdev by the Authors of the Divertissement Love for Three Oranges,” in which the authors declared their resolution “to continue the interrupted thread of Count Carlo Gozzi’s theatrical activity.” To claim that “Gozzi’s reflective analysis of the fairy tale Love of Three Oranges is noteworthy

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only for its element of polemical parody,” in their opinion, meant “to absolutely ignore its specifically theatrical aesthetic aims, which in our view, are the most valuable part of this scenario.” The divertissement authors explained that their sacrifice of Gozzi’s satire, directed against Goldoni and Chiari, was justified by the fact that “Gozzi’s technical methods of scenario composition are much more important than their transient combative meaning.”47 In October 1915, just after the Russian publication of Vernon Lee’s book, Gvozdev published an essay called “The Social Satire of Carlo Gozzi,” in which he emphasized the close link between the growth of interest in Gozzi in Russia and the theatrical reform promoted by Meyerhold. Gvozdev pointed to the widespread, typically Romantic tendency to extract Gozzi’s fiabe from the rest of his creative work, which led to a neglect of the Useless Memoirs, the “confessions of an anti-revolutionary that were frank to the point of cynicism.”48 Moreover, in Gvozdev’s opinion, by ignoring his Useless Memoirs, the Venetian playwright’s modern followers elected as their tutelary deity a conservative, reactionary aristocrat, who, by fighting Goldoni, fought a supporter of the common people and, through his fiabe, derided Enlightenment values: “In taking on the role of defender of the commedia dell’arte, Gozzi was guided least of all by aesthetic-philosophical considerations.”49 Meyerhold’s journal was quick to respond. The next issue of LTA included “The True but Not Very Plausible Story of a Mysterious Visit by a Certain Nobleman to the Editorial Office of a Little-Known Journal Located on Kazan Cathedral Square.”50 It told of a wondrous handwritten letter, supposedly by Gozzi himself, that the editors had found in their office on Christmas Eve. The letter was reproduced in full. In it, the “Count” sarcastically recounts the accusations from “learned pedants” who consider him a champion of ancient aristocratic privileges, a sworn enemy of free thought, mistaken for a theatrical wizard because of the “blindness, narrow-minded range of ideas, and poor knowledge of the Italian language” of his Russian disciples and translators. Outraged at such slander, Gozzi appeals to the journal editors to rise up in his defense: “Take my collected fairy tales and the three volumes of my Useless Memoirs down from your bookshelves, and you will find out who I am, how I loved the theatre, and how I have been understood by some of your contemporaries.” Wasting no time, the editors supposedly then opened the old Gozzi volumes, where they found the most persuasive refutations of the unjust accusations. In subsequent issues, they aimed to publish a defense written by Gozzi himself: “words that are dear to our heart, on which we place tantalizing hopes to use as refutation of many of the unjust opinions

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leveled at a person who is remembered and loved by us.”51 However, this idea remained unrealized. The Venetian nobleman’s Russian disciples also took pleasure in flaunting their dire financial situation, which forced them to live in the freezing garret of a Saint Petersburg palazzo and to wear old, moth-eaten furs. Gozzian in this as well, they demonstrated that they were aristocratically foreign to the commercial logic of the theatre industry.

“Comedy of Pure Joy” The true manifesto of Russian neo-Romantic “Gozziana,” one might say, was Viktor Zhirmunsky’s essay “Comedy of Pure Joy (Ludwig Tieck’s Puss in Boots),” which appeared in the penultimate issue of LTA.52 The essay’s author was a young Germanist who later became a distinguished philologist associated with the formalist school. His essay contained an indirect response to Gvozdev’s condemnation of the Romantic misunderstanding that, suppos­ edly, was the source of the unfounded interpretation of Gozzi. Zhirmunsky, an expert on German Romanticism, freely admitted that Gozzi was “discovered” thanks to a Romantic worldview. The German Romantics understood the full scope of Gozzi’s inventiveness precisely because they knew how to identify and set aside that which was contingent and outdated and instead embrace that which was vital and capable of further development. Zhirmunsky also claimed that “not only in their general attitude to life, but also in many of the particulars of the development of artistic forms, modern-day symbolism (or neo-romanticism) bears an astonishing similarity to the romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.”53 In his monograph German Romanticism and Modern Mysticism (1914), Zhirmunsky had already emphasized the strong affinity that, in his view, linked the Romantic Weltanschauung (worldview) to the Russian Symbolist movement by drawing attention to parallels between many artistic practices traceable in both eras.54 Viewing Symbolism and Romanticism as synonyms, as Zhirmunsky did, offers a fruitful perspective for the study of Gozzi’s revival in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Zhirmunsky’s essay, it was the Romantic reworking of Gozzi’s plays that made the Venetian playwright so contemporary. The main features of this revision are revealed in Tieck’s Puss in Boots. Romantic authors, Zhirmunsky explains, considered Gozzi’s fiabe to be examples of “comedy of pure joy,” that is, of a theatre of pure play. In opposition to French classical comedy, the Romantics proposed a theatre of diversion and (at least

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apparently) disengagement that grew from an unbridled joy of life rather than from moralistic aims: “for comedy to provoke in us a feeling of beautiful joy, we must cleanse artistic pleasure from the true-to-life residue of a moral approach to things—indignation, denunciation, censure—that violate the purity of our enjoyment of the beautiful.”55 Zhirmunsky also shows how Tieck masterfully amplified ironic play by multiplying fictional planes. In Tieck’s comedy, the action takes place in a theatre in which enlightened and skeptical spectators watch the premiere of Puss in Boots, a dramatic parody of Perrault’s fairy tale, which ends in fiasco. Tieck places spectator-characters who comment on the performance directly onstage, creates comic characters such as the Author and the Machinist, and allows actors to step out of their roles. For Zhirmunsky, these “estrangement” effects are one of the hallmarks of contemporary theatre: “Readers of Puss probably are reminded of much from contemporary literature. They recall the ‘author’ and other examples of ruptured illusion in Alexander Blok’s Balaganchik; it is no coincidence that Blok, in the preface to Lyrical Dramas, uses the Romantic term ‘transcendental irony.’”56 In turn, Puss became an enduring inspiration for Meyerhold and his circle: Tieck’s theatrical fairy tale was published in LTA in Vasilii Gippius’s translation.57 Later, in 1921–22, Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein worked together on Tieck’s play to elaborate a staging plan that, unfortunately, remained unrealized (fig. 8.2).

“Carlo Gozzi: Politician or Artist?” In the final issue of LTA, Zhirmunsky published the essay, “Carlo Gozzi: Politician or Artist? (Regarding the Article by A. A. Gvozdev ‘The Social Satire of Carlo Gozzi’).”58 Taking it as a given that Gozzi’s Romantic image was unfounded, Zhirmunsky warns against the opposite extreme intrinsic to “exaggerated scientific skepticism”: although it is reasonable to take Gozzi’s cultural and artistic conservatism into account, as English scholar J. A. Symonds did, it is another thing entirely to attribute Gozzi’s entire dramatic oeuvre to “a grand campaign against all sources of liberation philosophy in the name of protecting traditional aristocratic ideals.”59 By dismantling or at least minimizing Gvozdev’s accusations, Zhirmunsky attempted to focus on the real reason, in his opinion, for Gozzi’s battle against Goldoni and Chiari. According to Zhirmunsky, the controversy did not originate from a sociopolitical divergence but rather from a purely aesthetic one. The disagreement centered on the fundamental question of the relationship between reality and a work of art. Gozzi maintained a position that was in keeping with eighteenth-century

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Figure 8.2. Sergei Eisenstein, scene design for Tieck’s Puss in Boots, State Higher Theatre [Directing] Workshops (December 30, 1921). Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 1923, op. 2, ed. khr. 1627, l. 2.

aesthetics, which required the artist to create by imitating nature, trying to restore its rational sense while avoiding its detailed reproduction. Zhirmunsky attributes to the count a full awareness of the clear separation between the conventionalized reality of the stage and the reality of life. Putting the issue in contemporary terms, the Russian scholar defines Gozzi as “an opponent of naturalistic domestic theatre, for the purpose of instead preserving conventionalized theatrical idealism.”60 From Zhirmunsky’s perspective, Gozzi thus became a forerunner of the “conventionalized” theatre that Meyerhold called for in the 1910s. Gozzi’s aim was to demonstrate that it is mastery of compositional techniques, more than of realistic subjects, that produces the illusion of reality. It is possible to overcome the audience’s skepticism and gain their trust and emotional participation by using the most unlikely of subjects. Gozzi is a promoter of “idealism in art,” which requires that we “represent the world not as it is but as it ideally might be.”61 Zhirmunsky thus validates Meyerhold’s position, according to which Gozzi was an enemy of naturalism and a precursor of theatrical Modernism.

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“Gozzi’s Comic Technique” The journal’s final issue also featured a dense essay by Konstantin Mochulsky called “Gozzi’s Comic Technique.” Like Zhirmunsky, Mochulsky believed that Gozzi consciously played on the opposition between the truth of life and the truth of the stage. To create “an illusion of truth,” it is not enough to choose realistic subjects or resort to a photographic reproduction of characters and situations: instead, one must master certain formal techniques. M ­ ochulsky considers the following passage from Useless Memoirs to be Gozzi’s genuine profession de foi (declaration of beliefs): “I publicly maintained that the artful construction of a play, the well-managed conduct of action, property of rhetoric and harmony of diction were sufficient to invest a puerile fantastical subject, if treated seriously, with the illusion of reality.”62 According to Mochulsky, however, it is incorrect to assert that Gozzi used his fantastical theatre to rebel against Goldoni’s excessive realism. Both playwrights looked for a realistic effect. For both, the main purpose was to capture the audience’s attention, to “keep their minds engaged and expectant,” to induce the viewer to perceive the stage action as real.63 The difference was in the means used to invite the viewer to a similar perception. And here Goldoni’s and Gozzi’s paths diverge. Whereas Goldoni relies on subjects closer to everyday situations and on the representation of contemporaneous, recognizable customs and settings, Gozzi’s poetics are based on different assumptions: the plot (fabula) itself does not have absolute importance—rather, the point is how to develop the chosen subject in order to elicit the spectator’s emotional trust. Ultimately, Gozzi’s intention, according to Mochulsky, is “to prove the total autonomy of theatrical truth, which has nothing in common with the truth of life.”64 In this we hear a strong echo of the “conventionalized incredible” that Meyerhold adhered to in his practical and theoretical activity. Moreover, we already sense future developments in this vein, such as the “attraction” or “any element of a production that exposes the viewer to sensory or psychological shocks” that Sergei Eisenstein was later to theorize in his postrevolutionary “Montage of Attractions” (1923), which also derived from Meyerhold.65 In the 1920s, the ideas promoted in LTA became the common heritage of the theatrical avant-garde. Foregger, Eisenstein, Kozintsev, Trauberg, the improvisers of the “Semper Ante” studio, and the founders of the People’s Comedy (Radlov and Miklashevsky)—these artists all absorbed the lessons of Carlo Gozzi.66 In addition, the journal had a brief follow-up. In 1922, a group of Meyerhold’s followers published the almanac The Green Bird. This time

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the title featured Gozzi’s “philosophical fiaba,” in which the Venetian playwright resumed motifs and characters from Love of Three Oranges. The new Gozzi-inspired almanac opened with a verse prologue, dedicated to Doctor Dapertutto and composed by the same Mikhail Kuzmin who had proposed Meyerhold’s fortuitous Hoffmannian pseudonym. The end of the long era of neo-Romanticism came in 1933, when one of Meyerhold’s former collaborators—Stefan Mokulsky, the first of the “penitents”—published a fervent self-denunciation in which he renounced the “fairground” era with distaste. On the stand in his article was the commedia dell’arte, which was accused of being a product of the culture of the ruling classes, mistaken for an authentic expression of people’s art.67 Given its predilection for form over content, commedia was merely “opium for putting the class consciousness of the mass-spectator to sleep.”68 Mokulsky’s attack explicitly targeted Meyerhold and his disciples. Just a few years later, the accusation of “formalism” ultimately brought the director the death penalty.

Notes 1. Editor’s note: for more on Meyerhold’s journal, see Raskina, Mejerchol’d e il Dottor Dappertutto, by this chapter’s author, and Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt. 2. This chapter is developed from my book Mejerchol’d e il Dottor Dappertutto (2010). 3. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 188. 4. See D’Angelo, L’estetica, 101. 5. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 103. 6. Blokh, “Kommediia dell’arte,” 81. For more on the cliché that arbitrarily considers commedia to be “theatre emancipated from literature,” see Taviani, “Ideologia teatrale,” 17–25. 7. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 213. 8. On the need for historiography to distinguish between the real experience of Italian professional theatre companies and the retrospective myth of a theater of masks, improvisation, and corporal and acrobatic primacy, see Taviani’s Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte. The book is enriched by an anthology of historical and critical literature, edited by Mirella Schino. 9. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 214–15. Translation from Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 127. 10. Volkov, Meierkhol’d, 183. 11. Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century; Monnier, Venise au XVIII siècle. Muratov supported the translation of Lee’s work into Russian; he himself edited its publication in 1915. See Li, Italiia. 12. A reference to Maurice Maeterlinck’s fairy-tale play The Blue Bird (L’Oiseau bleu, 1908), famously staged at the Moscow Art Theatre the same year it was written. 13. Muratov, Obrazy Italii, 31–32. 14. On this theme, see Schwaderer, “Gozzi romantisch,” 169–85. 15. Schwaderer, 179–80. 16. Hoffmann, “Singolari pene,” 270–71. 17. As Posner notes, the summary of the Three Oranges fairy tale that Brown-Hoffmann provides in Strange Sorrows can be considered a full-fledged scenario drawn from Gozzi’s fiaba

Carlo Gozzi in The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto | 203 and adapted in a German context. See Posner, Director’s Prism, 19–20. Quote is from Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, 380. 18. The full Italian title is Memorie inutili della vita di Carlo Gozzi scritte da lui medesimo e pubblicate per umiltà. 19. Symonds, Memoirs. 20. Lee, “Carlo Gozzi on Improvised Comedy” and “Survival of the Commedia,” 29. 21. Symonds, “On Actors and Actresses,” 173–74; “On Improvisation,” 121–23. 22. Baretti, “Carlo Gozzi and His Plays,” 128–29. 23. Dassia Posner directed me to an unpublished letter by Ignatov from December 2, 1911, held at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (hereafter RGALI). In the letter, Ignatov offered to send Meyerhold a volume of Gozzi’s fiabe from his university library: “I think I can send it to you . . . (it is in Italian, of course); as far as I can tell, it is lacking several of the Gozzi prefaces that Hoffmann, for example, talks about.” December 2, 1911, RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634. This was likely the two-volume edition of Gozzi’s Fiabe published by Zanichelli (Bologna, 1884–85) and edited by E. Masi. 24. Ignatov, E.T.A. Goffman. 25. Ignatov, 31. 26. Hoffmann, Neobychainyia mucheniia. 27. Solov’ev, “Fragmenty 1923 goda,” 242. 28. Blok, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 298. 29. Meierkhol’d, Perepiska, 154. 30. In an April 15, 1913, letter, Blok wrote, “Verigina . . . says they have not abandoned the idea of creating ‘Meyerhold’s studio;’ they are looking for money and already have something in sight. Meyerhold left for Paris hoping to have his own studio in the fall.” Blok, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 304. 31. Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 355. 32. See Fel’dman, 355. 33. For more on the Russian commedia myth, see Shcherbakov’s essay in this book (chap. 9). 34. Gozzi, Fiabe teatrali, 6. 35. LTA, no. 1 (1914): 3. 36. Meierkhol’d, Lektsii, 35. 37. Meierkhol’d, 37. 38. Meierkhol’d, 38 39. Meierkhol’d, 38. 40. Meierkhol’d, 35. 41. Khronika, LTA, no. 1 (1914): 63. 42. Khronika, LTA, no. 6–7 (1914): 117. 43. The full Italian title of Ingenuous Disquisition is Ragionamento ingenuo, e storia sincera dell’origine della mie dieci Fiabe teatrali. 44. LTA, no. 6–7 (1914): 125. 45. The first volume of Gozzi’s works was published in 1923 in the series “Vsemirnaia literatura.” The edition included three theatrical fairy tales translated by Ia. Bloch and M. Lozinskii—Love of Three Oranges, The Raven (Il corvo), and The King Stag (Il re cervo)—with a preface by Bloch, dated 1919. See Gotstsi, Skazki. 46. Gvozdev, “Liubov k trem apel’sinam,” 3. 47. Vogak, Meierkhol’d, and Solov’ev, “Otkrytoe pis’mo,” 86–88. Translation from Posner, Director’s Prism, 208–9. 48. Gvozdev, “Obshchestvennaia satira,” 124.

204  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 49. Gvozdev, 130. 50. A parody of an eighteenth-century convention, the title continues on for three more lines: “On Pages Left Behind on the Editorial Table, On the Learned Pedant in the Brown Tailcoat, On Several Characteristics of Our Thick Journals, and on Other Events Worthy of Being Disclosed.” “Pravdivaia.” 166. 51. “Pravdivaia,” LTA, no. 4–7 (1915): 168–70. 52. Zhirmunskii, “Komediia chistoi radosti,” 85–91. For a full English translation, see Posner, Director’s Prism, 210–14. 53. Zhirmunskii, 91. Translation from Posner, Director’s Prism, 214. 54. See Zhirmunskii, Nemetskii romantizm, 205–7. 55. Zhirmunskii, “Komediia chistoi radosti,” 85–6. Translation from Posner, Director’s Prism, 210. 56. Zhirmunskii, 91. Translation from Posner, Director’s Prism, 214. 57. Tik, “Kot,“ 7–62. 58. Zhirmunskii, “Karlo Gotstsi,” 119–31. 59. Zhirmunskii, 120. 60. Zhirmunskii, 126. 61. Zhirmunskii, 126. 62. Gozzi, Opere, 916. 63. Mochul’skii, “Tekhnika komicheskogo,” 83. 64. Mochul’skii, 84. 65. Eizenshtein, “Montazh attraktsionov.” Regarding Meyerhold, see Kraiski, “Carlo Gozzi in Russia,” 271. 66. For more on Radlov and Miklashevsky, see essays by Senelick (chap. 10) and Bartig (chap. 17) in this book. 67. Mokul’skii, “Komediia masok,” 20–27. 68. Mokul’skii, 24.

Bibliography Baretti, Joseph. “Carlo Gozzi and His Plays: An Extract from the ‘Manners and Customes of Italy’ by Joseph Baretti. 1768,” The Mask, no. 3 (January 1911): 128–29. Blok, Aleksandr. Literaturnoe nasledstvo. Pis’ma k zhene, no. 89. Moscow: Nauka, 1978. Blokh, Iakov. “Kommediia dell’arte v novom entsiklopedicheskom slovare Brokgauza-Efrona,” LTA, no. 1–3 (1915): 80–88. D’Angelo, Paolo. L’estetica del Romanticismo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Eizenshtein, Sergei. “Montazh attraktsionov.” LEF 3 (1923): 71. Fel’dman, O. M., ed. Meierkhol’dovskii sbornik. Vol. 2, Meierkhol’d i drugie: Dokumenty i materialy. Moscow: OGI, 2000. Gotstsi, K. Skazki dlia teatra. Translated by Ia. Bloch and M. Lozinskii. Saint Petersburg: Gos. publichnaia biblioteka im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, 1923. Gozzi, Carlo. Fiabe teatrali. Milan: Garzanti, 1994. ———. Memorie inutili della vita di Carlo Gozzi scritte da lui medesimo e pubblicate per umiltà. Venezia: Stamperia Palese, 1797. ———. Opere, edited by F. Taviani. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2000. Gvozdev, Aleksei. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam (Gotstsi v russkoi peredelke).” Rech’ (March 3, 1914): 3.

Carlo Gozzi in The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto | 205 ———. “Obshchestvennaia satira Karlo Gotstsi.” Severnye zapiski (October 1915): 124–31. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. Neobychainyia mucheniia odnogo teatral’nogo direktora, translated by M. V. Karneev, edited by M. I. Pisarev. Moia Biblioteka . Vol. 60–61. Saint Petersburg: Lederle, 1894. ———. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. II/1. Frankfurt am Mein: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. ———. “Singolari pene di un direttore di teatro,” Il vaso d’oro e altri racconti, 175–273. Milan: Garzanti, 2006. Ignatov, Sergei. E. T. A. Goffman. Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo. Moscow: Tipografiia O. L. Somovoi, 1914. Kraiski, Giorgio. “Carlo Gozzi in Russia.” Siculorum Gymnasium, no. 1 (1975): 263–75. Lee, Vernon. “Carlo Gozzi on Improvised Comedy.” The Mask, no. 3 (January 1911): 29. ———. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. London: W. Satchell & Co., 1880. ———. “A Survival of the Commedia.” The Mask, no. 3 (January 1911): 29. Li, Vernon. Italiia. Izbrannyia stranitsy. Moscow: Izd. M. & S. Shabashnikovych, 1915. Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod E. Lektsii, 1918–1919. Moscow: OGI, 2001. ———. Perepiska: 1896–1939, edited by V. P. Korshunova and M. M. Sitkovetskaia. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976. ———. Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy, edited by A. V. Fevral’skii. Vol. 1. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, translated and edited by Edward Braun. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1998. Mochul’skii, Konstantin. “Tekhnika komicheskogo u Gotstsi.” LTA, no. 2–3 (1916): 83–106. Mokul’skii, Stepan. “Komediia masok kak istoricheskaia problema.” Teatr i dramaturgiia 5 (1933): 20–27. Monnier, Philippe. Venise au XVIII siècle. Paris: Perrin, 1907. Muratov, Pavel. Obrazy Italii. Moscow: Respublika, 1994. Oves, L. C., ed., Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 1914–1916. 2 vols. Saint Petersburg: RIII, 2014. Posner, Dassia N. The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical AvantGarde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. “Pravdivaia, no maloveroiatnaia istoriia o tainstvennom poseshchenii odnoi osoboi znatnogo roda redaktsii maloizvestnogo zhurnala, nakhodiashchegosia na ploshchadi Kazanskogo sobora.” LTA, no. 4–7 (1915): 166–70. Raskina, Raissa. Mejerchol’d e il Dottor Dappertutto: Lo studio e la rivista “L’amore delle tre melarance.” Rome: Bulzoni, 2010. Schwaderer, Richard. “Gozzi romantisch. L’immagine di Carlo Gozzi nel romanticismo Tedesco,” in Carlo Gozzi. Letteratura e musica, edited by Bodo Guthmüller and Wolfgang Osthoff, 169–85. Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Solov’ev, Vladimir. “Fragmenty 1923 goda,” Meierkhol’d i drugie: Dokumenty i materialy, edited by O. M. Fel’dman. vol. 2 of Meierkhol’dovskii sbornik. Moscow: OGI, 2000. Symonds, J. A. “On Actors and Actresses by Count Carlo Gozzi.” The Mask, no. 3 (April 1911): 173–74. ———. “On Improvisation by Count Carlo Gozzi.” The Mask, no. 4 (July 1911): 121–23. ———. The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi. 2 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1890. Taviani, Ferdinando. “Ideologia teatrale e teatro materiale: sul ‘teatro che fa a meno dei testi’.” Quaderni di teatro (August 1978): 17–25. ———. Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte. La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo. Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982. Tik, Ludvig. “Kot v sapogakh,“ translated by Vasilii Gippius. LTA 1 (1916): 7–62.

206  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Vogak, Konstantin, Vsevolod Meierkhol’d, and Vladimir Solov’ev. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” LTA, no. 1 (1914): 18–47. ———. “Otkrytoe pis’mo avtorov divertissmenta ‘Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam’ A. A. Gvozdevu.” LTA, no. 4–5 (1914): 86–88. Volkov, Nikolai. Meierkhol’d. Vol. 2. Moscow: Akademiia, 1929. Zhirmunskii, Viktor. “Karlo Gotstsi—Politik ili khudozhnik?” LTA, no. 2–3 (1916): 119–31. ———. “Komediia chistoi radosti.” LTA, no. 1 (1916): 85–91. ———. Nemetskii romantizm i sovremennaia mistica. Saint Peterburg: Axioma, 1996.

9 Meyerhold and the Russian Commedia dell’Arte Myth Vadim Shcherbakov Translated by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig

Of Citrus and Studios The foundation of Sergei Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges opera was not Carlo Gozzi’s fairy-tale play but a divertissement in scenario form composed by a trio from Saint Petersburg: Konstantin Vogak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Soloviev. The divertissement was published in January 1914 in the first issue of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dappertutto (hereafter LTA). This journal originated on a whim—or so it seems, at a cursory glance. According to the memoirs of actress Valentina Verigina, the idea first arose in December 1913 during a convivial revelry in a Caucasian wine cellar, to which her husband (the wealthy engineer Nikolai Bychkov) and Liubov Blok (wife of the poet; she dreamed of the stage) had dragged Soloviev (then a commedia scholar) and Meyerhold. Verigina wrote, “The kabobs were unmemorable, the wine a touch sour, but the mood was excellent. . . . Nikolai Pavlovich [Bychkov] proposed an idea: to publish a journal that would reflect the studio’s experiments. Everyone latched on to this idea and began to discuss it excitedly. Nikolai Pavlovich suggested putting in money straight away. A hundred rubles were collected. The journal began publication with this modest sum. Staff wrote for free; the cover was designed for free. The editorial office was housed in Meyerhold’s apartment; those induced to subscribe were mainly relatives.”1 The “studio” mentioned by Verigina was one of the most important events in the history of directorial theatre. Founded by

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Vsevolod Meyerhold in Saint Petersburg in September 1913, it opened in the N. E. Dobychina Gallery of Contemporary Painting (63 Moika). After a month, however, because of the damage that the studio participants’ improvisations inflicted on the paintings hanging on the walls, the studio was obliged to move to Pavlova Hall (13 Troitskaia). In September 1914, it settled at the Society of Railway Transport Engineers at 6 Bordinskaia Street. Not long before, in 1912, the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) First Studio was founded in Moscow. It is impossible to imagine any two theatrical laboratories more different from each another than Konstantin Stanislavsky’s and Meyerhold’s studios. In one, the disparagement of anything external or spectacular as inadmissibly false; the sacrament of inhabiting a stage persona; the fullest possible identification between actor and character; the annihilation of the stage itself; and a strict adherence to the demands of “public solitude.” In the other, a cult of expressive movement, mischievous cabotinage, and presentational performance; a mockery of psychology; experiments with direct spectator contact; and the constant involvement of the audience in the theatrical playing space. And yet, some things also united these studios. First, neither engaged with contemporary sociopolitical reality. Much more significant is that both were created with the same goals—to cultivate actors for a new director’s theatre; to work out what the creative freedom of this actor might consist of and how this freedom could work in conjunction with a production score planned in advance; and, finally, to determine the optimal proportion in the new theatre of what is set and what is improvised. In the MAT First Studio, this problem was solved via the internal “justification” of the playwright’s and director’s given circumstances, the transformation of what is given externally into subjective necessity, a definitively formulated process of dramatic identification, and the process of “living through” a role, “each time anew.”2 For Meyerhold, such a solution was absolutely unacceptable. Inspired by a beautiful commedia dell’arte myth, in his Borodinskaia Street Studio, Meyerhold searched for “improvisatoriness” in the relationship between actor and mask, actor and audience. Meyerhold emphasized the virtuosic craft (masterstvo) of showing human feelings and the enthralling nature of play. He discovered in the example of the historical commedia players the maxim of the “joyful soul”—anima allegra.3 According to Meyerhold and his collaborators, commedia actors believed that only one who gains insight into the wide-open soul of “divine inspiration” through the performer’s craft (remeslo) can be an improviser. As Soloviev asserted, “‘The actor must have a joyful soul’—this is typical advice that Italian actors gave to the next generation.”4 This concept of anima allegra

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denoted a state of emotional responsiveness, of being ready at any moment to respond to a partner’s action and to an audience’s mood. In Meyerhold’s conception, the “joyful soul” enabled actors to experience a thrill that was contagious for the audience, due to their own craft, a boundless freedom in relation to character, and a virtuosic ability to implement the director’s “plan” (risunok). It forced the player, in accord with audience response, to invent—every time—new physical adjustments for completing the meaning of the stage picture being created. Subsequently, in the 1920s, when materialism was to become the dominant worldview and the “soul” became a counter-revolutionary catchword, Meyerhold was to rename this fundamental principle and to call it “reflex excitability.” Playing with the devices of naïve creative work was one of the avantgarde’s most important, formative discoveries. Many reformers in painting, music, theatre, and literature paid homage to the charms of the “childlike,” innocent, bold, yet incredibly succinct solutions of nonclassical art. For Meyerhold, the most important feature of olden-day theatre was the frank conventionality of its forms. Consciously using its free stylizations, the director created his own extraordinary spectacle, emphasized without the theatrical illusionism typical of the early twentieth century. Meyerhold’s theatre was a consciously organized presentational environment. The playing space was not divided into stage and audience but remained whole. There was no need to convince spectators with the aid of clever machines and stage-painting devices that they were in a forest or on the seashore. They came to the theatre and were shown—the theatre. Along with this striving for overt conventionality, Meyerhold’s theatre was a magical art. Here actors masterfully wielded the ability to breathe life into dead matter. A sparkler on a long bamboo pole transformed into a falling star, and its contact with the earth revealed the world to the Unknown Woman in Meyerhold’s production of Alexander Blok’s play. The illusion of transformation—of essence, space, and time—was born of the actor’s play alone. The simplest prop and physical sculptural metaphor—these things proved to be all that was needed to activate the spectator’s imagination.5 In Meyerhold’s studio, the practice of commedia al’improviso players served as a source of acutely modern solutions. In their practical work, studio participants experimented with the concept of a simplified organization of stage space free from superfluous detail and with creating a new acting technique. At the studio, Italian commedia characters and the sardonic, fantastical genius Gozzi combined with another poet of wonders—E. T. A. Hoffmann.6 In his novels and tales, magic shimmers mysteriously through the rough

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fabric of the mundane. A fire salamander works in an archive, a seamstress turns into a princess, and dolls battle heroically with mice. Everything is jumbled up. And, most importantly—laughter and horror go hand in hand. Meyerhold was always able to sense the comic turns in mankind’s tragic existence. In the 1910s, he became not only a great master of their stage realization but also the creator of an acting technique based on the principle of the grotesque. The life of the studio in which this technique was developed was reflected in the Three Oranges journal. As mentioned, Meyerhold and his colleagues worked on it without pay. The journal’s only patron, as noted by Soloviev, was A. Lavrov, the owner of the printing house, meaning that printing was also free. Subscriptions funded the purchase of paper. Only a few copies were available for sale. Acquiring paper became difficult during the war period, and, in the end, it was precisely because of restrictions on the purchase of paper that the journal was forced to cease publication in 1916. Well then, isn’t it a miracle that such a rare journal issue should end up in the hands of composer Sergei Prokofiev? Nay, a miracle it was not.

Commedia’s Russian Adventures Commedia dell’arte first came to Russia under Peter the Great because it was part of everyday European life. Russia’s first emperor was not especially interested in theatre. For him, there was enough theatricalization in life— carnival revelries, fireworks and illuminations, and military parades. Still, the tsar invited German actors to the Russian capital. Thus it was that commedia characters first appeared, in reflected and adapted form, to the Russian public. Actual Italian improvisors showed their art to Russians during the reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna (1730–40). Peter the Great married his niece to the Duke of Courland, who diligently participated in the wedding celebrations but was unable to withstand the excessive abundance of Russian libations—and died before returning home. The young duchess found herself in quiet, poor, provincial Mitava (present-day Jelgava, Latvia). When the fortyyear-old, childless duchess became empress, she gained the opportunity to overcome boredom with the help of a huge state budget. During her reign, the treasury spared no expense for foreign entertainers. The first troupe of Italian players arrived in 1731. Then, in 1734–35, the Sacchi family troupe—which included Antonio, the great Truffaldino for whom both Goldoni and Gozzi were to write—gave regular performances.7

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To make their Italian performances easier for Russian aristocratic spectators to understand, court poet Vasily Trediakovsky translated the short libretti of comedies from their repertoire into Russian. An anthology of these texts was published only in 1917, but they were available earlier to researchers, including Meyerhold’s collaborator Vladimir Soloviev, who published three of them in LTA.8 During Empress Elizabeth Petrovna’s reign, Italian troupes transitioned to performing opera repertoire. The dramatic theatre moved away from Italian influence and toward the aesthetics of the French classical stage. However, commedia dell’arte masks—deprived of court patronage and disparaged by those with “elegant taste”—did not disappear but transformed into commercial and amateur entertainments for urban inhabitants. The beginning of the Russian nineteenth century was marked by the appearance of a new genre that harbored the commedia tradition: French pantomime extravaganza. In the seventeenth century, Italian theatre troupes had become firmly established in France. Through the efforts of actors Tristano Martinelli (c. 1556–1630) and Domenico Biancolelli (1618–88), the second zanni, a simpleton from Bergamo, dressed in patchwork rags, transformed into a cunning, sly cynic, a genius of comic intrigue. His former patches became elegant, colorful diamonds, and his short, wooden slapstick a magic wand. The simpleton’s vacant post was filled by the mask of Pierrot. Only in the 1830s did Jean Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846) envelop this mask with a sheer veil of melancholy poetry and pave the way for its transformation into a symbol of the artist. The comical fantesca, the feisty servetta from the Italian scenarios, became Columbine, the object of Harlequin and Pierrot’s love escapades. Thus, over the course of over two centuries, the pantomime féerie’s classic triangle was formed. In Russia, pantomimes and harlequinades most likely first appeared after the end of the Foreign Campaign of the Russian army (1813–14). Troops that defeated Napoleon brought these entertainments back, practically in their convoys, from Paris. From the 1830s on, this performance genre became a traditional Shrovetide festivity. In Saint Petersburg on Admiralty Square (later on Tsaritsyn Meadow) and in Moscow on Maiden Field, in special-built wooden booth theatres (balagany), townsfolk could see Harlequin’s adventures. He kidnapped the beautiful Columbine from her oafish groom Pierrot, the lovers ran away to a magical forest where trees came to life, a fairy gave them a chest filled with gold, the forest changed into a beautiful palace before the astonished audience’s eyes, and Columbine’s father was forced to bless the young.

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Balagan to Balaganchik The generation born in Russia in the 1870s recorded the naïve elation they experienced from the “wonders” of the balagan pantomimes in the most treasured of their childhood memoirs. In the words of artist Alexander Benois: My need for something wondrous and brilliant was fulfilled entirely by the spectacle that I was able to watch in one of the large wooden theatres . . . in which . . . harlequinades were still presented. . . . My memory of this visit has not lost its freshness and force even to this day. . . . I was already familiar with Harlequin as a character . . . but here I saw him alive, in action, triumphant, mocking all who got in his way. I myself wanted to become Harlequin, and I dreamed seriously of obtaining a magic wand like the one the beautiful, kind fairy gave him.9

The famous ballet Petrushka (Ballets Russes, 1911), the libretto for which Benois composed with Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Mikhail Fokine, captured these reminiscences and brought a new quality to the commedia myth’s general motifs (fig. 9.1). This myth became linked with the process of searching for an acutely modern artistic language. In the dramatic theatre, director-experimenter Meyerhold’s encounter with the stock characters of fairground pantomime took place sooner—in the waning days of 1906. At Vera Komissarzhevskaia’s theatre, he staged Blok’s lyrical drama The Little Fairground Booth (Balaganchik). On the horizon of a blue expanse, at center stage, stands a little theatre with a red plush curtain embroidered with gold stars. Above it is a web of ropes extending upward. Is it the theatre’s fly loft, revealed? Or is it the control that operates a marionette? The rumble of a drum. A prompter slips out from behind the curtain, briskly climbs into the booth, and lights the candles. Music plays. The curtain parts. On the little theatre’s stage is a box set with two doors and a paper window onto which a distant vista is drawn. At the window, on a delicate gilded chair, sits Pierrot, in a white smock with red pompoms. He gazes into the distance, awaiting his bride. A long table stands upstage. Behind it, facing forward, is a “mystical gathering.” They look at the audience for a long time, then right, left, and at the audience again. Their hands on the table, fingers trembling, they await Death (fig. 9.2). Meyerhold’s encounter with Blok’s play became a major event in the history of twentieth-century world theatre. With his poetry and stage directions, Blok, in a sense, trained Meyerhold in conventionalized theatre, the Symbolist mise-en-scène that the director was subsequently to develop, refine, and

Figure 9.1. Alexandre Benois, scene design for the ballet Petrushka (1911). HTC 6,762 fMS Thr 368, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 9.2. Nikolai Sapunov, mystical gathering. Design for the production of Alexander Blok's lyrical drama Balaganchik (The Little Fairground Booth), directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold at the V. F. Komissarzhevskaia Drama Theatre, St. Petersburg (1906). 48.5 x 82.3 cm. Inv. 5963, State Tretiakov Gallery.

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hone. Naturally, as he continued to move along his previously chosen path, Meyerhold would himself have come to the discoveries of The Little Fairground Booth. Seeds only germinate in prepared soil. Influence is the process of discovering formulations in someone else’s work that are about to burst from one’s own mouth. However, Meyerhold’s encounter with The Little Fairground Booth prompted an acceleration that was so powerful that the spectacle the Komissarzhevskaia Theatre audience saw on the eve of that new year marked a total break from the director’s previous productions. Even earlier, during Meyerhold’s “static” theatre experiments with plays by Maeterlinck and other Symbolist writers, the director vaguely sensed that movement lies at the basis of all theatrical art. And it is upon movement that the priceless pearls of theatrical play are strung—all those wonderful lazzi, clown noses and cotton padding, flour-powdered faces, and wooden swords seemed like something from childhood or, perhaps, from great-grand childhood: merry and sad, poetic and crude, frightening and kind—a theatrical performance. Inventing the staging “plan” for Blok’s play brought Meyerhold to reevaluate his own directing experience. His encounter with commedia characters revealed to him the possibility of transforming the principle “all as it is not in life.” Commedia masks, who openly play with partners on both sides of the footlights, who understand spectators as coplayers, find themselves simultaneously both beyond life and within it. They exist at a point in space in which the reality of life is transformed into a kind of new reality. Theatre is conventional by its very nature, and one should not be afraid or ashamed of this fact. The Russian director-auteur, which came into existence (in the early practice of the MAT) along with a dream of vanquishing theatrical conventionality, now validated that existence by intentionally baring the theatre’s conventional nature. Conventionality was not opposed to unity but was recognized as its hallmark. The fairground pantomime’s eternal masks revealed to Meyerhold the full expressive power of gesture, pose, and movement. And it was precisely on movement—on abrupt changes of rhythm, on the traditional pose made ironically meaningful—that The Little Fairground Booth was constructed. Thus was born the method of the theatrical grotesque, capable of expressing “(via the ‘conventionalized improbable,’ of course) the fullness of life.”10 Blok’s playwriting demanded a dynamic, effective compression of life circumstances into character and sign. The text of Blok’s lyrical drama indicates that Columbine turns into a cardboard puppet. The director and the designer, Nikolai Sapunov, built their

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production of The Little Fairground Booth almost entirely out of cardboard. The cheap, artificial, breakable material was, for the poet, a metaphor for pseudoexistence. For Meyerhold and Sapunov, it became the dead flesh of the theatrical prop that is animated through play—an instrument of theatre’s otherness. Harlequin, appearing out from under the table of the “mystical gathering” and ringing little bells, leads Columbine off into the snowy night. Pierrot, “like a broken puppet,” lies prone on the floor.11 The “mystics” disappear in horror. Behind the table only immobile torsos—headless, armless—are left. “It turns out that the figures’ outlines were cut out of cardboard and their frock coats, dickeys, collars, and cuffs were drawn on with charcoal and chalk.”12 And only the actors, with their play, with the magic of theatrical action, endowed cardboard with the properties of living flesh. The production’s meaning was most clearly legible in Meyerhold’s performance as Pierrot. As The Seagull’s Treplev once had done, Pierrot gave Meyerhold the opportunity for lyrical self-revelation (fig 9.3). Meyerhold’s Pierrot, a fragile figure, spinning in spirals, yet simultaneously all angles, played on a little pipe a sad theme of somber earthly nothingness in which characterspirits twirl—like snowflakes—then collide and fly apart once more. From the outside, this is a little funny and very sad. “And we smile in horror and laugh at our smiles,” wrote Kornei Chukovsky.13 Attendees of the Komissarzhevskaia Theatre were offended, having recognized themselves in the “mystics.” But the main aggravator was not the impudent mockery of one of the era’s common ideas. The outrage was caused by the fact that the director consciously rejected illusionism of any kind. Meyerhold often treated The Little Fairground Booth audience’s wild outburst of entirely different emotions as a methodological lesson. The simultaneous applause and lambast seemed to him to be the most ideal reaction that any true work of art—but especially a theatrical work—should provoke. “Let part of the audience heed Blok and his actors in silence,” Meyerhold wrote. “It was theatre as theatre. And, perhaps, this very circumstance, what it was that the audience dared to whistle at so fiercely, proves best of all that what was established was a relationship to performance as specifically theatrical.”14

The Wings of Theatre History Working on Blok’s play opened up theatre history to Meyerhold. For him, this history became a vast storehouse of devices, tricks, and expressive solutions that could find a place in the newest theatrical compositions. With the aid of this experience, directing came to know its own art—its nature and its

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Figure 9.3. Nikolai Ulianov, Vsevolod Meyerhold in the role of Pierrot in Alexander Blok's Balaganchik, V. F. Komissarzhevskaia Drama Theatre, St. Petersburg, 1906. Reproduced from the frontispiece of N. D. Volkov, Meierkhol’d, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad: Academia, 1929. Original drawing in colored pencil held at the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, f. 2954, op. 1, ed. khr. 1223, l. 1.

structure. At the close of the twentieth century’s first decade, a process began that was extremely important for the theatre’s development in the century to follow, one of searching for a specific stage language that was not dependent on other creative forms. The insightful Sergei Glagol called this a “liberation movement.”15 Above all, the theatre wanted to “liberate” itself from literature. Russian culture has always been oriented toward the primacy of the word. In this

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hierarchy, theatre occupied a subordinate position, playing the inferior role of dramatic literature. Actors were to illustrate verbal constructs with intonations and strokes of vivid characterization. Naturally, people of the theatre have always felt that performance is not drama’s equivalent, that it gives birth to feelings that arise parallel to or separately from words or that give wing to emotions that only the rare reader’s fantasy can imagine. The emergence of a new profession, directing—which takes responsibility for a unified artistic concept—inspired theatre to declare loudly its right to an equal place in the arts. This imperative naturally raised the question of the particularities of theatrical language. If the painter works with color, the musician with sound, and the poet with words, with what does the theatre create? The answer in the 1910s emerged from the battle against “literariness”: the theatre’s primary material is the actor’s body. While the efficacy of words spoken from the stage was recognized, directors, in the heat of battle, naturally preferred not to recall this in their articles. The desire to cleanse theatre of “word-mongers” sparked interest in commedia on the dramatic stage. A fanciful myth arose in the minds of Russian directors and theatre theoreticians about “theatricalist” theatre within theatre history. In the polemic with literature-centrics, commedia became the theatre’s main argument. The image of a pure theatre is that which itself contains everything necessary for nightly performances and for its own development. It does not need a playwright, as actors can improvise in direct response to the audience’s mood. Their fantasy is winged, and their bodies are the perfect instrument, ready to play anything at all. The intensity of the polemic with “word-mongers” generated a remarkable phenomenon in the Russian reception of commedia. The Italian comic masks presented themselves to the Russian public primarily in wordless pantomimes. Meyerhold staged Columbine’s Veil (Sharf Kolombiny, libretto by Doctor Dapertutto after Arthur Schnitzler’s scenario, 1910) and two versions (in different stagings) of Harlequin the Marriage Broker (Arlekin, khodatai svadeb, 1911, 1912). In his Borodinskaia Street Studio, Meyerhold led an expressive movement course in which he worked out nonverbal modes of theatrical communication. The program of the first and only public presentation of the studio’s work (1915) also consisted of commedia-inspired pantomimes.16

The Most Theatrical Theatre: The Borodinskaia Street Studio In 1913, Meyerhold became interested in researching improvised theatre techniques. His studio became the apogee of the development of the Russian commedia myth. All of the studio participants were commedia fanatics. Soloviev

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instilled in his young disciples a proficiency in each traditional mask’s laws for how to move. Meyerhold assigned physical improvisations on the theme of the masks’ relationships. Studio attendees were expected to compose constantly and to play pantomimic études “in the spirit” of commedia. Meyerhold’s studio became a laboratory for a new acting technique. It was not a school for feeding existing theatre troupes, nor was it the “kernel” of a new collective (as was the MAT First Studio). From 1913 to 1917 on Borodinskaia Street, Meyerhold worked out techniques and refined methods for the nonverbal revelation of the soul in the characters that actors represented. It was precisely this solution to the issue of a new theatrical language that was to fuel the furious flowering of Russian (and world) theatre in the 1920s. The contradictory declarations by the studio’s leaders—over the years its directorate included Yuri Bondi, Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Gnesin, and Konstantin Vogak—are difficult to bring into a cohesive whole. From time to time, essays appeared in LTA that proclaimed the purpose of the studio’s existence was to find the path to The New Theatre. These uppercase letters indicate that the work Meyerhold headed was by no means subordinated to the creation of a specific, concrete theatre but rather was movement toward an ideal. The art’s entirely vague contours were to be clarified through theoretical discussions and rehearsal. Having received police permission to conduct private musical-dramatic classes, Meyerhold naturally planned the studio’s activities in school categories. Structurally, the studio was divided into courses, foremost among which were stage movement, led by the director himself; commedia dell’arte history and technique (Soloviev); and musical recitation in drama (Gnesin). In addition, there was a constant variety of short-term courses: production design (Bondi), poetic meter (Vogak), and stage diction (Ekaterina Munt-Golubeva). Meyerhold often attempted in public speeches to unify these courses under the concept of rhythm. Understanding well that rhythm’s extremely rich expressive potential is one of the director’s primary tools, Meyerhold experimented fully consciously in this direction. The biomechanical exercises that have come down to us, which grew out of Borodinskaia études and pantomimes, serve as an excellent textbook on the rhythmic organization of theatrical movement. Their timing provokes in the spectator a sense that an action’s dramatic tension is changing, simply by slowing and accelerating movement and by using discontinuity and cohesion. Meyerhold’s course was closely connected with Soloviev’s. Both masters led practical classes in commedia dell’arte technique. Unlike the commedia scholarship of Konstantin Miklashevsky, who also published his research in

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LTA, Soloviev’s understanding of commedia often falls short of today’s scholarly standards.17 Guided by information from various Italian and French sources, Soloviev composed his own picture of the past. For Meyerhold, however, this turned out to be entirely enough: he aimed to enrich the theatre of the future with the aid of historical knowledge. Meyerhold, as a theatre practitioner, gladly put into practice materials from Soloviev’s historical studies, from which it was possible to derive something concrete. The young scholar asserted that commedia troupes consistently obeyed the law of alternating even and odd numbers of characters onstage. He asserted that each stock character had a specific gait and that the characters’ stage positions conformed to specific geometrical figures. Meyerhold enthusiastically translated these instructions into action, discovering how the abstract movement of figures in space can create a spectacle from which audiences cannot tear themselves away. Ultimately, both Meyerhold and Soloviev came to a fundamental conclusion: the renowned improvisation of the Italian masks was an ingenious combination of elements honed by repeated rehearsal. The actor should be constantly occupied with solving specific, efficient tasks. These tasks can be clear or mysterious for the spectator, but their existence must be felt. In other words, improvisation is the master-actor’s free play with attractions that hold the audience’s attention. Studio classes were structured as follows. First, the director and his students worked out individual elements: shooting from a bow, a strike with a dagger, a slap in the face, accurately throwing an object (real or imaginary) a great distance, and so on. Next, studio participants improvised études that incorporated the refined element into a short plot. Then pantomimes— small, wordless performances with a beginning, middle, and end—gradually emerged from these études (fig. 9.4). In these pantomimes, actors performed a given sketch but had ample room to freely color it in with their individual discoveries within the framework of the director’s canvas. The studio consistently worked to ensure that improvisation, while preserving the appeal of action created in the here and now, was always built on a well-prepared foundation. There is, however, another explanation for Meyerhold’s great enthusiasm for commedia. At this time, he began to be seriously interested in the democratic sources and folk roots of theatre in popular entertainment. He dreamed of a different popular audience, open and naïve, able to be delighted, to perceive theatre sincerely and without bias. It is with this spectator that the artist must speak. The elite theatrical wizard Doctor Dapertutto worked

Figure 9.4. Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939). Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1916. Next to Meyerhold is an archer from the Borodinskaia Street Studio pantomime “The Hunt.” Meyerhold later used the physical form of this pantomime to create his biomechanical exercise “Shooting from a Bow.” State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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to create an expressive language of pure theatricality that was accessible to all and for all. It was a different matter that thus far his only nonbourgeois spectators (and these only by happenstance) were the wounded soldiers who, during World War I, were quartered in the same House of Railway Transport Engineers in which the studio operated. Meyerhold identified mask and movement as the two inextricably intertwined primary elements of this language of theatricality. “The mask theatre has always been Fairground Theatre (balagan), and the very idea of an actor’s art that is based on mask, gesture, and movement is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Fairground Theatre,” Meyerhold maintained, seeing in the fairground a genuinely popular theatre.18 Initially, he saw gesture and movement as the most direct paths to finding the effective framework of any dramatic plot. Meyerhold never went as far as the rigorism of Etienne Decroux, who prohibited beginning actors from speaking text onstage for three years. However, Meyerhold took as his axiom the unwavering understanding that visual means of conveying artistic meaning are primary in the theatre. The other most important element of the “new” language of the stage— the mask—is a multivalent concept in Meyerhold’s theatrical system and creative work. Meyerhold related everything in his art to the duality of humankind and the world, to the diabolical suspension of human-marionettes on the strings of Fate. In addition to the many variations of the mask’s substantive functions in Meyerhold’s poetics, its interpretation remains ambiguous and subject to different readings by the director himself at various stages in his creative practice. In the early 1910s, Meyerhold considered the mask—as a traditional commedia character type or as a concrete object worn on the face—to be an absolutely essential attribute for a theatre in which improvisation is to be revived. According to his point of view, the mask immediately presents the represented character as a well-defined, long-known persona—as an archetype—thus freeing actor and director from the need to create detailed exposition of the role. This freedom allowed the actor to improvise freely on behalf of the mask without losing stage time on a given deed’s motivation. In addition, Meyerhold perceived the mask as a tangible sign of theatre’s conventionality. “Is it not the mask which helps the spectator fly away to the land of make-believe?” he asks in “The Fairground Booth.”19 Gradually, as he delved deeper into the practical studio study of mask, movement, and their interrelationship, Meyerhold made his most important discovery: The mask is not simply a guise made from leather or papier-mâché that the actor places on the face. Through historical explorations and studio

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experiments, Meyerhold, revealed that the mask is, above all, behavior. Any character manifests itself not primarily through appearance but through action—and, ultimately, through movement. Costume and makeup provide information about specific essential traits, details that somehow depict the character, but the general information is conveyed through movement. As with a mask, an actor can “put on” a slouch, a limp, a nervous tic, or vanity, grief, madness, and so on, together comprising the entire array of the traits and particulars of the type being presented. The mask itself became for Meyerhold a kind of system, a specific combination of actor movements. The significance of this discovery to Meyerhold’s post–October Revolution creative work is difficult to overestimate. The master-actor who creates the mask’s sculptural forms effortlessly and freely and who just as unconstrainedly emerges from behind it and performs his own pantomimic commentary on the role being played—this is the ideal toward which the director led his students. In Borodinskaia documents, one frequently encounters the concept of “play.”20 For Meyerhold, play justifies the very existence of theatre, the place where actors, according to their whim, play with imagined (rather than Stanislavsky’s given) circumstances and demonstrate to the audience the brilliance of their skill, thus revealing to spectators—and to themselves!—something important about human relationships. Meyerhold’s words about the actor’s will for play should not be underestimated. It is no wonder that the director constantly proposed that actors remember their lover as they played. Only love, it seems, justifies play. Perhaps this is why Meyerhold was so close to Carlo Gozzi—with his unrequited passion and wondrous fairy tales about the magical power of love. Yet there were many reasons for Meyerhold’s infatuation with the Venetian count who wished to stop artistic progress only because its adherents seemed to him to be untalented hacks. Gozzi, the radical and consistent theatre modernizer, was obliged to surmount the far-reaching aftereffects of Goldoni’s reforms. In his native Venice, Goldoni lost to Gozzi and left the battlefield by moving to France. Even so, the petty-bourgeois drama birthed by his efforts conquered the European stage. This theatre achieved artistic heights and, in due time, became a series of run-of-the-mill clichés. And here is why the banner of the conservative Gozzi proved necessary to the revolutionary Meyerhold. A hundred and fifty years later, the talented Goldoni was made to answer for the sins of middling play hacks like Krylov, Ryshkov, and Potapenko.21 For Meyerhold, it was important to counteract the timid conventionality of verisimilitude with commedia’s overt conventionality. In the eighteenth-century Venetian polemic over the direction of theatre, Meyerhold

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saw an important parallel to his own daily battle against showing life as life itself onstage—hence his fondness for Gozzi’s magical, ironic fairy tale about three oranges, in which a naïve romantic plot is intermixed with witty invectives leveled at literary opponents and generously seasoned with the amusing topsy-turvydom of the masks. And hence his belief in a beautiful Russian myth—that commedia is the most theatrical theatre in the history of humankind.

Commedia Joins the Circus: Mystery-Bouffe Until 1991, Russian theatre history studies adopted a strict pre- and postrevolutionary divide. Without a doubt, the October Revolution tore apart the lives and fates of Russia’s population with a red-hot iron. Often overlooked is the fact that the bloody scar of this third Russian Revolution was inflicted on those who, by 1917, had already spent many years in art and had already fully developed their own aesthetic views. This fact applies in particular to Meyerhold, who was a theatrical revolutionary before 1917 and who therefore acknowledged the leaders of the social revolution as comrades. Despite the sharp change in his everyday mask, the Red Army cap was jammed down on the very head that for many years had already intensely sought theatrical forms for all. Meyerhold’s first postrevolutionary production, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe (Misteriia-buff ), demonstrated obvious continuities with Borodinskaia experiments. The Mystery balagan (premiered November 7, 1918) was somewhat different in spirit than what Meyerhold had imagined to be the magnificent goal of his studio experiments; the “urgently current moment” pushed tomfoolery into blasphemy, naivety into crudeness, and uninhibitedness into insolence. In the realm of form, however, this “moment” required only previously worked-out innovations. Although there was an apparent dissimilarity between the external appearance of the “extraordinary spectacle” (as Mayakovsky called his play) and the director’s pre-revolutionary works, there was a natural continuity with Meyerhold’s ideas in the years before October. In Rudnitsky’s words, in Mystery-Bouffe Meyerhold’s long beloved “masks” simply “took on the tasks of a merry and very specific political satire.”22 And at Borodinskaia Street, Meyerhold had already devised a single costume for all, to which actors added accessories. Nevertheless, there were formal innovations in Mystery-Bouffe. One of these—the art of the circus—was critically important to Russian theatre’s subsequent development. The Meyerhold-initiated “circusization of the theatre” became the most modern issue of the 1920s. Strictly speaking, Doctor

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Dappertutto had long attended to the circus closely and brought it into his directorial compositions. The most vivid and oft-noted example was the knifetossing street jugglers he invited to perform during the intermission of Unknown Woman (Neznakomka, 1914). And Meyerhold’s article “Long Live the Juggler!,” published in July 1917—between the two revolutions—is permeated with love for the circus, for its festive and féerie-like art, and with a conviction that the circus’s extraordinary modernity was consonant with twentiethcentury life. Meyerhold insisted that “when propellers spin over our roofs, when the speed of trains has reached nearly 120 versts per hour . . . in order to make life joyful and strong in the brilliance of the sun, a person needs to know what courage is. But from whom to learn this art? . . . From you, gentlemen of the circus.”23 The director fully implemented “circusization” devices for the first time in Mystery-Bouffe. Individual numbers and entire circus entrées (acts) became striking attractions that shaped the performance’s meaning. Mayakovsky himself, playing the role of the Ordinary Man, leaped off the upper edge of the proscenium arch and soared high above the stage. The political balagan’s masks were now armed not only with commedia’s virtuosic physical technique but also with dizzying circus tricks. Meyerhold’s and Mayakovsky’s conventionalized theatre demanded a search for a visible equivalent to the somersaults of the era they reflected. After Meyerhold left Petrograd,24 the idea of circusizing the theatre did not lie unclaimed on the banks of the Neva River.25 Sergei Radlov’s People’s Comedy Theatre (1920–22) is a particularly relevant example of dramatic action infused with circus. Radlov, Meyerhold’s former student, assembled a troupe of performers that included gymnasts, jugglers, clowns, a contortionist, and even a ventriloquist. With the advent of NEP (New Economic Policy), state subsidies of theatres ended. When the People’s Comedy was therefore forced to become self-funding, it failed to draw a mass audience. Its most loyal spectators were boys who sold cigarettes in the Petrograd Side.26 They responded exuberantly to the wonderous atmosphere of comedies from a life “not ours,” but they could not bring financial stability to Radlov’s enterprise. The People’s Comedy Theatre ceased to exist in January 1922.

The Triumph of Improvisation: Biomechanics and Magnanimous Cuckold Because of his imprisonment in a Novorossiysk White Guard prison, it was only in September 1920 that Meyerhold had the opportunity to stage

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productions in Moscow, the new seat of the Bolshevik government. However, the troupe of the RSFSR Theatre 1, with which the director quickly mounted Verkharin’s The Dawns (Zori) and a second version of Mystery-Bouffe, was a motley conglomerate of actors who struggled to unite even under Meyerhold’s leadership. Only after Soviet authorities, who previously had supported him unconditionally, took away this theatre and removed Meyerhold from his post as head of TEO (the theatre division) of Narkompros (the Commissariat of Enlightenment) did the director finally undertake the methodical training of actors of his own theatre. In Meyerhold’s actor training “workshops,” which were periodically reorganized under various names, the main focus was a course in expressive movement.27 In the spirit of the then-popular concept of the scientific organization of labor developed by American Frederick Winslow Taylor and his Soviet follower Aleksei Gastev, this course became known as biomechanics. Meyerhold asserted that the actor’s body is a machine organized by a fully aware mind. This meant, first, that the mind-machine needs to understand the machine’s principles of construction and laws of functioning and, second, that it uses this knowledge to obtain maximally efficient labor from the body, that is, to create the most effective—in the sense of aesthetic impact on the spectator—spatial physical forms with the least expenditure of psychophysical energy. All of this “industrial” terminology, which bears the era’s imprint of labor’s joyful triumph over capital and science over mysticism, shaped Meyerhold’s search for the laws of expressive movement, which had begun long before the 1920s. Meyerhold’s students stated correctly that “the beginnings of theatrical biomechanics were first felt at . . . the Studio in 1915 . . . and resulted from studying the movement techniques of Italian commedia dell’arte–era players.” This work “was continued by V. E. Meyerhold . . . in the Courses in Stage Production Craft in 1918,” where his movement system was first given “the name ‘biomechanics.’”28 These Courses on Stage Production Craft were a new theatre school that Meyerhold opened after leaving the State (former Imperial) theatres in 1918. They lasted only two seasons but left an indelible mark on theatre history and theory. One of the school’s underlying principles was Edward Gordon Craig’s maxim that in the theatre, everyone should be able to do everything. Courses therefore included joint sessions for directors and designers. Biomechanics was added to the curriculum in March 1919.29 Meyerhold’s archive reveals that the initiator and teacher of this new discipline was Dr. Alexander Petrov, a doctor and athlete who was one of the champions of introducing the

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Figure 9.5. Group biomechanics exercise “Bow and Arrow.” Actors: R. Genina, I. Khold, L. Sverdlin, Zosima Zlobin. Meyerhold State Experimental Theatre Workshops (GEKTEMAS), Moscow, 1927. Photo by A. A. Temerin. Glass negative, 13x18 cm. KP 295944/272. Mneg 3085. © A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

science of mechanical movement into movement training.30 Meyerhold liked the term very much, as it fit well with the era’s rhetoric, which called for the implementation of “healthy engineering” in life. The teaching of biomechanics in Meyerhold’s workshops meant elucidating various theoretical principles and the repeated execution —to perfection— of special exercises. Such exercises originally numbered twenty-two: Bow and Arrow; Jump on the Back and Carrying Heavy Loads; Drop, Interception, and Throw of Gravity; Blow to the Nose; Slap in the Face; Casting Off a Kneeling Figure with the Foot; Play with a Stick; Ball Toss; Throwing a Stone; Leap on an Opponent’s Chest; Play with a Dagger; Quadrille; Rope; Horse; Four Skaters; Wire Snare; Bridge; Saw; Scythe; Funeral; Jester; Leapfrog (fig. 9.5). Through these exercises, students mastered the ability to control each part of the body with acrobatic precision and maximum expressivity. Meyerhold asserted that the exercises satisfied all possible stage situations, giving the actor a method and concrete movement models for realizing any task the director set. These exercises were essentially small performances with core plot structures. Most had their own dramatic conflict, their own complication–climax–denouement (or, in the language of biomechanics, intention–execution–reaction). Notwithstanding the acrobatic nature of the exercises, which required the actor to leap with ease onto a partner’s chest or back, they were specifically theatrical

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training. Meyerhold, albeit much later, in 1935, illuminated their purpose to American director Harold Clurman, explaining that “each exercise is a melodrama. Each movement gives the actor a feeling of performing on the stage.”31 Meyerhold’s statement clarifies a great deal. Above all, it explains the complexity and nonoptimal movements used in the études and their apparent contradiction of the Taylor-Gastev formula to which Meyerhold had declared his commitment. According to Taylor, the same things can be done more quickly, more simply, and with less energy! But Meyerhold’s students were readying themselves for stage work, specifically. It was not enough to simulate precise, economical movements, such as an archer shooting at a target. They needed to be taught to see the bow, arrow, and target; taught to want to hit the target so much that they themselves become the flying arrow. In addition, they needed to remember that they were demonstrating how this is done, that the body moves in accord with a conscious understanding of the laws of expressive movement. Each exercise was therefore divided into action “elements”: tochka (full stop: stasis), otkaz (refusal: a movement in the opposite direction that increases the amplitude), osushchestvlenie (execution), tochka (full stop). This contradictory confluence of dramatic efficiency and the demonstrativeness of the exercise’s task explains their somewhat strange rhythm, particularly for the modern spectator. Meyerhold’s reply to Clurman contains yet another crucial point, namely, his declaration of the connection between movement and the emotional hue this movement contributes. In his 1935 statement, we see that the deep connection between biomechanics and the director’s overall theatrical system is revealed. Like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold created a system. True, it was never written down, nor was it compiled into a single handbook. Meyerhold’s apprentice, future film director Sergei Eisenstein, believed that the Master hid the system from his students, that he did not want or was afraid to share the “recipes” that explain how to stage productions. Evidently, Meyerhold created a particularly brilliant atmosphere in his teaching, as his apprentices believed the cherished secret would be divulged to the most diligent and talented among them. But to stage a production is not to brew beer, to mill cloth, or even to cut and polish a diamond. Something else is needed. Meyerhold never hid these recipes, incidentally. From the early 1900s, when he was working in the provinces and released a premiere every three days or so, he realized that, at such a tempo, one cannot manage with the baggage of psychological theatre alone. The only way to avoid hackwork is to place actors in mises-en-scène that help—and even compel—them to feel the necessary emotions. For the rest of his life, the director maintained that

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theatre is a material art, whereas psychology is a thin, tenuous thing upon which it is impossible to rely—one never knows when the whole structure will collapse. One must therefore proceed from the external, from the body, in the creation of each role. By the end of the 1910s, Meyerhold elevated this principle to the level of scientific truth confirmed by modern reflexology. Based on the work of James, Pavlov, and Bekhterev, he began to assert that psychological reactions are caused by motor reflexes—that is (using James’s example), I saw a bear, I ran, I was frightened. First, the body reacts, then its muscle contractions cause the feeling of fear. In the lecture, “The Actor of the Future and Biomechanics,” Meyerhold stated that “once actors find the correct solution to a physical state, they are able to give rise to an ‘excitability’ that infects the audience, drawing them into the actor’s play. . . . With such a system of ‘emotion genesis,’ the actor always has a foundation: a physical premise.”32 Biomechanics exercises provided this very “physical premise.” Another principle of Meyerhold’s theatrical system, conscious theatre, is important for understanding biomechanics. The actor’s art, Meyerhold argued, lies in the ability to use the expressive possibilities of one’s own body correctly. The actor is at once creator and material, the engineer and the worker (to use biomechanics terminology). In practice, this meant that actors in Meyerhold’s theatre always knew what they were doing onstage and how and why they were doing it. Therefore, every movement—ideally—was purged of arbitrary elements and characterized by pure precision. Meyerhold believed that “[actors] should study the mechanics of the body. This is essential for them, because every manifestation of force (including in a living organism) is subject to the same laws of mechanics (and the actor’s creation of physical forms on the stage is, of course, a manifestation of the human organism’s power).”33 His students learned to obey these laws consciously, to observe the expressiveness of the angles of their bodies—“to mirror,” as Meyerhold said, for the sake of always being interesting to the audience. The premiere of Fernand Crommelynck’s farce The Magnanimous Cuckold (Velikodushnyi rogonosets, 1922) brought the biomechanical actors their first, bountiful fruits of recognition. As one reviewer wrote, the production was “a brilliant parade of such exuberant, invincibly true theatrical mastery that it fertilized Russian theatre with new riches of theatrical expressiveness.”34 On the eve of the premiere, a noisy throng of actors, headed by the Master himself, with laughter and banter, cleared the stage. Opened up to its full depth and height—to the red brick wall and the fly loft—the stage became a city square on which was placed Liubov Popova’s light, open wooden

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Figure 9.6. Act III, dance of the lads, close-up. Scene from The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand Crommelynck, translated by I. Aksenov. Directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, designed by Liubov Popova. State Meyerhold Theatre (GosTIM), Moscow (GVYTM premiere: April 25, 1922; photograph from 1928 GosTIM remount). Photo by A. A. Temerin. Glass negative, 13x18 cm. KP 295944/260. Mneg 3074. © A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

structure, fitted at varying heights with platforms, ladders, ramps, revolving doors, and spinning wheels. Into this wide-open space appeared vivacious actors—strong and nimble—mimes who used their calculated, swift movements to express an entire world. They were merry, these players, and free from stagnant ways of doing things—from the grip of daily life, from old, musty theatrical vulgarity. Makeup did not hide their real faces; the identical dark blue prozodezhda (coveralls) that covered their sturdy, trained bodies had the look of a simple worker’s uniform (fig. 9.6). As theatre critic Boris Alpers recalled, “It was perhaps the first time on the Russian stage that such a light and joyful art was unleashed in this theatre’s brilliant improvisations; in it there was a kind of uniquely abundant sense of life; free, triumphant laughter resounded in it, and all was enveloped in continuous, swift movement.”35 Meyerhold structured the production as a demonstration of acting virtuosity. The actors worked with the plot to use Popova’s set to its fullest, their work with imaginary objects compelling the audience to see in its various

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parts a bedroom, a mill yard, a dining room, or a study. The masks the actors presented were also drawn into joyful play that mastered time, space, and matter. In Meyerhold’s production, “there was at times an almost literally visual impression,” Alpers recalled, “that the actor played with the stage persona as if with an object or thing, turning it on every angle in front of the audience, as if juggling it in the air, tossing it onto the stage structure, so that it, like a boomerang, returned to the hands of its creator.”36 Arguably, the primary outcome of Meyerhold’s production was the demonstration of a new expressive theatrical language. Inheriting all the director’s experiments from his earlier years, The Magnanimous Cuckold showed the might of the actor’s improvisatory play, founded on attentiveness to the “life of the body,” through which— in action and in movement—the human soul’s every vibration is revealed. * * * The Russian theatrical commedia myth’s postrevolutionary age of inspiration destroyed prohibitions and taboos that had abounded in earlier theatrical art. This theatre of conscious conventionality proved, in Mikhail Chekhov’s words, “that if you have true imagination, if you have a vivacious, keen sense of truth, you can do anything at all.”37 Nevertheless, this omnipotent sense of a new, free, expressive stage language, to which theatrical productions of the early 1920s gave rise, became, by decade’s end, out of place in a nation of “labor unchained.” The Bolshevik regime confidently seized the reins, directing the dynamic and divergent society toward an established path. The authorities’ determination to totally regulate its subjects’ thoughts and daily existence, to achieve comprehensive control gradually—but steadily—dispelled any illusions of freedom gained in the revolution. War-communism Russia—hungry, cold, plagued by terror and military conscription—turned out to be much freer spiritually than the well-fed and, at first glance, peaceful Russia of the NEP era that followed.38 The freedom that many artists so deeply and joyfully experienced after October turned out to be unexpectedly transient. The new order of existence, as it turned out, had an arsenal of much more rigid yokes. These unhappy discoveries dealt an irreparable blow to the belief in the triumph of emancipated art, which had prompted the celebratory spirit of postrevolutionary theatrical productions. Thus it was that the brilliant actor’s uninhibited play—and with it the new philosophy of a theatre that freely built its own worlds—lost what was most important to it: the anima allegra that filled stage masterpieces of the 1920s with a heretofore unknown breath of free will. Thus it was that this play, once it lost its reliance on the

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artist’s worldview, began to be perceived by the followers and imitators of true creators not as a philosophy or aesthetic system for contemporary theatre, or even as an omnipotent expressive stage language, but as a collection of devices, a set of tricks, a compendium of ready-made recipes for any production. Among Meyerhold’s productions, The Forest (Les, premiered in 1924) was the freest, the most wild in its abandon, and, in my opinion, the most joyful. Meyerhold’s exultant, carefree, and festive worldview forced out, for a brief time, his tragic awareness of humankind’s place in the universe—without detriment to multivalent meanings. In Nikolai Erdman’s The Mandate (Mandat, 1925), however, comedy again took on tragic facets. And one year later—in 1926—fear, which became the strongest passion of the will-deprived inhabitants of the Soviet nation and was immortalized by Erdman, grew to the deathly horror of The Inspector General (Revizor). Nevertheless, until the mid-1930s, conventionalized theatre was still permitted to live in Russia: the regime was too busy fighting the remnants of political dissidence and economic multiformity. Only after having dealt with those issues did the authorities find the necessary leisure to eradicate the last of the surviving pluralisms: artistic pluralism. The new empire naturally strove for a single imperial style, a strictly normative aesthetic system. Artists were obliged to reflect the “greatness” of the era of “building socialism” only in the mirror of “socialist realism.” Improvisations by Russian directors on commedia motifs were forcibly silenced. And even the most perfect, brilliant harmonies born of these improvisations were sentenced to long years of mandatory oblivion.

Notes 1. Verigina, Vospominaniia, 200–201. 2. Stanislavsky first revealed his views on “experiencing” in his 1921 article “Craft” (Remeslo), which reflected the principles of the acting system on which he worked in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Stanislavsky, Sobranie sochinenie, 42–64. 3. Editor’s note: this notion of the “joyful soul” originates in a phrase from Gozzi’s Three Oranges: “Consider that if parodies do not spill over into caricature, they do not achieve the desired purpose; thus, be indulgent with this capriccio, which was born of a playful and purely joyful soul (anima allegra).” Gozzi, Opere, 108. Translation from this book, 64. 4. Solov’ev, “K istorii,” 243. 5. See Fel’dman and Panfilova, “Blokovskii spektakl’,” 309–51. 6. For more on Russian “Hoffmaniana,” see Posner, Director’s Prism. 7. In some Western biographies of the great Truffaldino, his years in Russia have been shifted to the mid-1740s, but Liudmila Starikova, a renowned Russian theatre expert, has found

232  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges documents in Russian archives about the Sacchi company at Empress Anna’s court—none of which indicate a later arrival. See Starikova, Teatral’naia zhizn’, 28; Ferratstsi [Ferrazzi], Komediia, 271. 8. Peretts, Ital’ianskie komedii. These three commedia pieces are “Vliubivshisia v samogo sebia”; “Podriatchik opery v ostrovy Kanariiskie”; and Liustsinius [Soloviev], “Arlekin, pristrastnyi k kartam.” The latter is adapted from “Igrok v karty,” in Peretts, 206–15. 9. Benua, Moi vospominaniia, 293. 10. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 225. 11. Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol’d, 117. 12. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 28. 13. Chukovskii, “Peterburgskiie teatry,” quoted in Pesochinskii, Kukhta, and Tarshis, Meierkhol’d, 104. 14. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 208–9. 15. Glagol’, “Iz zhizni,” 59. 16. This chapter focuses on a “Meyerhold-centric” view of Russian commedia myth. For broader information on Russian commedia, see Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd; Golub, Evreinov; Posner, Director’s Prism. For Russian readers, I suggest my book on pantomime and articles on Princess Brambilla and Princess Turandot: Shcherbakov, Pantomimy; “Magiia triuka,” 260–70; “Ozhivlenie materii,” 252–64. 17. Editor’s note: see Laurence Senelick’s essay in this book (chap. 10). 18. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 221. 19. Meierkhol’d, 219. Translated in Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 131. 20. For an annotated selection of these documents, see “K istorii Studii,” 352–444. 21. Editor’s note: see Galanina’s essay in this book (chap. 11). 22. Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol’d, 230. 23. Cited in Meierkhol’d, “Zabytaia stat’ia,” 218. 24. When Russia went to war with Germany in 1914, a wave of anti-German nationalism resulted in Saint Petersburg (which sounded too German) being renamed Petrograd; in 1924, after the death of Lenin, the city was renamed Leningrad. 25. For more detail, see Sergeev, Tsirkizatsiia teatra. 26. The district on the Neva River’s right bank. 27. GVYRM: State Higher Director’s Workshops (1921); GVYTM: State Higher Theatre Workshops (1922); GITIS: State Institute of Theatre Arts (1922); GEKTEMAS: State Experimental Theatre Workshops (1923–32). 28. “Biomekhanika,” 14. 29. Meierkhol’d, Lektsii, 231. 30. For more information, see Sirotkina, “Zagadochnyi doktor,” 168–75. 31. Cited in English translation in Gordon, “Meуerhold’s Biomechanics,” 78. 32. Meierkhol’d, “Aktor budushchego,” 11. 33. Meierkhol’d, 11. 34. Kolpakchi, “Eshche o Rogonosetse,” 9. 35. Alpers, Teatral’nye ocherki, 50. 36. Alpers, 281. 37. Chekhov, “O piati,” 373. 38. War Communism was the name of the Bolshevik economic policy during the Russian Civil War. All products became State property without monetary compensation and were distributed to citizens, free of charge.

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Bibliography Alpers, Boris. Teatral’nye ocherki. Vol. 1. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977. Benua, Aleksandr. Moi vospominaniia. Vol. 1. Moscow: Nauka, 1980. “Biomekhanika. Iz besedy s laborantami Vs. Meierkhol’da.” Zrelishcha 10 (1922): 14. Chekhov, Mikhail. “O piati velikikh russkikh rezhisserakh.” In Mikhail Chekhov, Literaturnoe nasledie. Vol. 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1995. Clayton, J. Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in TwentiethCentury Russian Theatre and Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. Fel’dman, O. M., and N. N. Panfilova. “Blokovskii spektakl’. Rabochie zapisi V. E. Meierkhol’da i komentarii k nim.” In Meierkhol’dovskii sbornik. Vol. 2, Meierkhol’d i drugie, edited by O. M. Fel’dman, 309–51. Moscow: OGI, 2000. Ferratstsi [Ferrazzi], Marialuisa. Komediia del’arte i ee ispolniteli pri dvore Anny Ioannovny, 1731–1738. Moscow: Nauka, 2008. Glagol’, Sergei. “Iz zhizni sovremennogo iskusstva.” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik 26 (1910): 59. Golub, Spencer. Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Transformation. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984. Gordon, Mel. “Meyerhold’s Biomechanics.” TDR: The Drama Review 18.3 (1974): 73–88. Gozzi, Carlo. Opere. Venice: Colombani, 1772. “K istorii studii V.E. Meierkhol’da, 1913–1914 i 1914–1915.” In Meierkhol’dovskii sbornik. Vol. 2, Meierkhol’d i drugie, edited by O. M. Fel’dman, 352–444. Moscow: OGI, 2000. Kolpakchi, L. “Eshche o Rogonosetse.” Teatral’naia Moskva 3 (1922): 9. Liustsinius, Volmar [pseudonym of Vladimir Soloviev]. “Arlekin, pristrastnyi k kartam.” LTA 4–5 (1914): 17–35. Meierkhol’d, V. E. “Aktor budushchego. Doklad Vs. Meierkhol’da v Malom zale Konservatorii.” Ermitazh 6 (1922): 10–11. ———. Lektsii: 1918–1919, edited by O. M. Fel’dman. Moscow: OGI, 2001. ———. Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy. Vol. 1. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968. ———. “Zabytaia stat’ia Meierkhol’da.” Voprosy teatra, edited by K. L. Rudnitskii, 215–20. Moscow: VNII Iskusstvoznaniia, 1990. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, translated by Edward Braun. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1998. Peretts, V. N., ed. Ital’ianskie komedii i intermedii, predstavlennye pri dvore imperatritsy Anny Ioannovny v 1733–1735. Petrograd: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Rossiskoi akademii, 1917. Pesochinskii, N. V., E. A. Kukhta, N. A. Tarshis, eds. Meierkhol’d v russkoi teatral’noi kritike. 1892–1918. Moscow: ART, 1997. “Podriatchik opery v ostrovy Kanariiskie,” translated by Vasilii Trediakovskii. LTA 2 (1914): 12–23. Posner, Dassia N. The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical AvantGarde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Rudnitskii, K. L. Rezhisser Meierkhol’d. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981. Sergeev, Anton. Tsirkizatsiia teatra. Ot traditsionalizma k futurizmu. Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’ E. S. Alekseeva, 2008. Shcherbakov, Vadim. “Magiia triuka. O poetike kaprichchio Kamernogo teatra ‘Printsessa Brambilla.’” Voprosy teatra/Proscaenium 1–2 (2015): 260–70. ———. “Ozhivlenie materii.” Voprosy teatra/Proscaenium. 1–2 (2016): 252–64. ———. Pantomimy Serebrianogo veka. Saint Petersburg: Peterburgskii teatral’nyi zhurnal, 2014.

234  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Sirotkina, Irina. “Zagadochnyi doktor Petrov: Biomekhanika, Tefizkul’t, Vsevobuch.” Voprosy teatra. Proscaenium 1–2 (2014): 168–75. Solov’ev, Vladimir. “K istorii stsenicheskoi tekhniki commedia dell’arte.” Nauchnoissledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam, 1914–1916, edited by L. S. Oves, with author collective Iu. E. Galanina, P. V. Dmitriev, V. D. Kantor, A. P. Kulish, M. M. Molodtsova, I. A. Nekrasova, L. S. Oves, N. V. Pesochinskii, A. V. Sergeyev, L. I. Filonova, A. A. Shepelova, 44–46. Vol. 1. Saint Petersburg: RIII, 2014. Stanislavsky, K. S. Sobranie sochinenie. Vol. 6. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994. Starikova, L. M. Teatral’naia zhizn’ v epokhu Anny Ioannovny. Dokumental’naia khronika 1730–1740. Moscow: Radiks, 1995. Verigina, V. P. Vospominaniia. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1974. “Vliubivshisia v samogo sebia, ili Nartsiss,” translated by Vasilii Trediakovskii. LTA 1–3 (1915): 24–38.

10 The Miklashevsky Connection Laurence Senelick

The Usual Suspects Theatre histories invariably cite the rediscovery of the commedia dell’arte as an inspiration for Modernist theatre practice. Copeau found his way in through Molière, Reinhardt by means of traditional Viennese comedy, but the Russians had no such national past to exploit. The native skomorokhi and the foreign troupes that visited eighteenth-century courts were too remote and exotic to serve as examples. So where did Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai Evreinov, Vladimir Soloviev, Sergei Radlov, and so many others find the material for their experiments?1 If they had a scholarly bent, they might have consulted Luigi Riccoboni’s two-volume Histoire du théâtre italien depuis la décadence de la comédie latine (1728). This work was the first to suggest that the comedy of the Italian Renaissance was directly descended from ancient Roman plays of the third and fourth centuries. Or they might have dipped into Francesco Valentini’s Trattato su la commedia dell’arte, ossia improvisa: maschere italiane ed alcune scene del carnevale di Roma (1826), which was also available in German. Although its chief concern was carnival revels, it did describe the commedia masks and lauded Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi. Both these works were illustrated, the former with engravings by Joullain, the latter with twenty colored plates. It is more than likely that one of their sources would have been Maurice Sand’s Masques et bouffons (comédie italienne) of 1860, with a preface by his mother, the novelist George Sand, and fifty engravings by Alexandre Manceau based on the Joullain plates of 1728. It was frequently reprinted and

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in 1915 appeared in English, misleadingly retitled as The History of the Harlequinade. This was not a scholarly work, but, inspired by the French school of mime, it offered a romantic, uncritical, and suppositious history of the commedia dell’arte. The chapters on individual characters made little effort to distinguish local variations but speculated freely about origins and practices. As a child, Sand and his mother had operated a puppet theatre at their estate in Nohant, and they imputed a child-like ingenuousness to the commedia, lending it an air of triviality in contrast with literary drama. Maurice Sand’s work was frequently despoiled for its plates, which were framed and widely reproduced, so that Manceau’s conception of the commedia types became imbedded in the popular imagination. George Sand’s preface followed the pattern laid down by Riccoboni, the notion that a straight line could be drawn from the Greek phallophoria and Atellan farces to the commedia dell’arte.2 Also in step with Riccoboni, she and her son explained that the crudely painted faces of antiquity slowly evolved into masked stock characters from a need to categorize humankind into types. So each chapter began by examining the mask and then the bouffon who assumed it. Not being a historian, Maurice Sand provided no documentation to support this thesis, but he brought to bear a muddle of analogues, disguises, and rituals to constitute a prehistory of the Zanni. (This practice would continue long into the twentieth century and beyond.3) Other than Sand, before World War I, beyond some monographs and articles in Italian of interest chiefly to specialists, there was Winifred Smith’s The Commedia dell’Arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy (1912). Smith’s study was the work of a scholar who, having mastered the literature, including the scenario collections, and, after considering the existing theories, proposed that the commedia’s development was influenced by mountebanks and charlatans who had something to sell. Their methods of attracting audiences were crucial to outdoor performances. She covered both trans-European movements and England, as well as the alterations effected by Gozzi and Goldoni; however, European (and Russian) scholars rarely paid attention to English publications. Smith was seldom cited. Smith’s only rival on this ground was Konstantin Miklashevsky, whose monograph on the commedia became the sourcebook for his Russian contemporaries and whose participation in the theatre of the Silver Age plunged it into debates about acting and improvisation more directly than any work by a non-Russian author. Meyerhold characterized Miklashevsky’s research as “revolutionary” and Evreinov called him a “true authority” and an

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“outstanding theatrical maître.”4 Yet there is no entry on Miklashevsky in the six-volume Russian Theatrical Encyclopedia nor any mention of him in the standard histories of twentieth-century Russian theatre by Konstantin Rudnitsky. Even the exhaustive Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo ignores him.

A Wellborn Amateur Konstantin Mikhailovich Miklashevsky (1885–1943) came from a dynasty of Ukrainian warriors ennobled in the seventeenth century; his family was also connected with the famous Miklashevsky porcelain factory.5 His father, Mikhail Ilich, served as a member of the State Council. Konstantin grew up on the family estate “Belenkii” near Kyiv, with his mother, Olga Nikolaevna Troinitskaia, and his siblings: Vadim, who became an official in Ministry of the Imperial Court; Ilia, a cavalry officer; and Tatiana, later Princess Gagarina. Family photographs show a nest of gentry, more Tolstoi than Turgenev. Konstantin appears in them as a prematurely balding, slender young man with a receding chin, horsey teeth, and a self-effacing smile (fig. 10.1). His unprepossessing appearance was more than compensated for by great charm and poise. Konstantin was out of step with his family. After expressing pro-Semitic sentiments at the dinner table, he was banned to his rooms whenever guests were entertained. When he graduated in 1904 from the most elite educational establishment in Saint Petersburg, the Imperial Alexandrine Lyceum, his father almost threw him out when the youth turned down a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and entered the Imperial Theatre School. While studying with the famous character actor Vladimir Davydov, he simultaneously pursued music theory at the Conservatory, for he believed a knowledge of music was invaluable to a theatre artist.6 He played a few small roles at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre but was more attracted to the artistic ferment bubbling away in less hidebound theatrical venues. In December 1907, he joined the troupe of the newly formed Society for the Antique Theatre.7 The Antique Theatre (Starinnii teatr) was the brainchild of two very different minds: Nikolai Evreinov, a former law and music student known as a cabaret innovator and promoter of the concept of monodrama, and Baron Nikolai Drizen (von Osten-Driesen), a theatre historian, government censor of plays, and editor of the Yearbook of the Imperial Theatres. Evreinov claimed to have introduced the idea of reviving bygone theatrical methods to the Alexandrinsky Theatre in early 1905, but its leaders had advised against it as

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Figure 10.1. Konstantin Miklashevsky around the time his book was first published. St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

uncommercial. Miklashevsky was enrolled in the acting company of the first season. The Antique opened December 8, 1907, with a bill of medieval European plays spread over two evenings; the reaction was highly favorable and even patriotic, with some claiming this could show the West what the Russian theatre could do in the way of revivals. Evreinov referred to the method as “artistic reconstruction” (khudozhestvennaia rekonstruktsiia), a creative “free composition” intended to reconstruct the spectator as well.8 This remained the core of Miklashevsky’s own work from then on.

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Figure 10.2. Photo from Martha the Pious or the Holy Woman in Love, directed by Miklashevsky at the Antique Theatre, 1911. Postcard. Laurence Senelick Collection.

When the second season, devoted to the Spanish Golden Age, was in preparation in 1908–9, Miklashevsky was made the youngest member of a directorial triumvirate. In summer 1911, he accompanied Drizen to Spain, collecting documentation and iconography and studying folkloric dance. Owing to his wealth, Miklashevsky had widely traveled on his own and was acquainted with France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Balkans. He preferred to ride third class to learn dialects and local customs. Miklashevsky spoke four languages, including English, fluently; read another two; and later learned Yiddish in Odessa. When the Antique Theatre’s Golden Age cycle opened, he made his directorial debut on November 28, 1911. Under the pseudonym K. Miklaev, he staged Maria la Piadosa (Martha the Pious or the Holy Woman in Love/ Blagochestivaia Marta ili Vliublennaia Sviatosha) by Tirso de Molina—not a popular choice. He mounted it as if performed by a troupe of traveling players in the courtyard of an inn (fig. 10.2). Miklashevsky was acknowledged to be highly educated and intelligent, a man of taste and talent, but he had no practical experience of directing. Critical opinion was divided. According to Eduard Stark, he turned a merry comedy into an intolerably dull evening.9 Three acts without an intermission, the breaks filled with dancing, were too leisurely in pacing, devoid of temperament. It was too refined, not bawdy enough. On the other hand, Valerian Chudovsky said Miklashevsky had directed the play

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“wittily, cleverly and ingeniously with many subtle details and good general comic business.”10 Whatever the case, the Spanish cycle was a success with cultured audiences and ran for two months. However, the Antique Theatre foundered on a couple of shoals familiar in the theatre. First, for all the praise, the audience remained selected and brought in little revenue. Next, Evreinov and Drizen quarreled over who was to be credited for the success. Evreinov, supported by Miklashevsky, refused to tour with the theatre to Moscow in 1912 and withheld the costumes. A court of arbitration sided with Evreinov but chided him for bad behavior. The theatre never recovered from this schism. In summer 1912, Miklashevsky joined the Fellowship of Artists, Writers and Musicians, founded and led by Vsevolod Meyerhold, at the Finnish seaside resort of Terijoki. It says a great deal for Miklashevsky’s tact and abilities that he could remain a friend and collaborator of both Evreinov and Meyerhold, for the two Petersburg directors frequently locked horns. In the court case, characterizing himself as Mozart to Drizen’s Salieri, Evreinov had called Meyerhold as a witness to his originality and later insisted that it was he, not Meyerhold, who had initiated the concept of “theatricality.” Meanwhile, Meyerhold never missed a chance to run down Evreinov as an opportunistic plagiarist, denigrating the achievements of the Antique Theatre as an old curiosity shop because it neglected movement. For him, it was mere pastiche, not even archaeology.11 Still, he is reported to have had a “particular regard” for Miklashevsky and “a profound respect” for Evreinov.12 In Terijoki, Meyerhold’s right-hand man was Vladimir Soloviev, who was pursuing his own explorations into commedia. The repertory included two Meyerhold revivals that smacked of Antique Theatre practice: Calderón’s The Adoration of the Cross, first staged at Ivanov’s Tower in 1906, and Soloviev’s synthetic pantomime Harlequin the Marriage Broker. Owing to his experience with the Spanish season, Miklashevsky was assigned the staging, with Liubov Blok, of Cervantes’s one-act farce The Two Chatterboxes, in an old translation by Alexander Ostrovsky. One night the electricity failed and the actors began shouting at one another in the darkness, leading to a total failure of the Spanish farce. Meyerhold, desperate to save his harlequinade that followed on the bill, had the bright idea of lighting the stage with stearin candles ringed on top of two empty barrels. As one of the actresses recalled, “To us, the actors, it gave the sensation that we were singing and dancing underground in a timeless place.”13 Back in Petersburg, Miklashevsky pursued his interest in the classical traditions of European theatre; much of his research was carried out at the Hermitage Museum, where his maternal uncle Sergei Nikolaevich Troinitsky

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was curator. This enabled him to cite not only Jacques Callot’s etchings but also his initial drawings, preserved there in the Jullien album.14 His attempt at a synthesis of academic studies and actual Russian stage practice attracted the attention of would-be reformers. Long before Yury Tynianov’s formalist concept of the “archaist-innovator,” Miklashevsky affirmed its universality and pursued it in all his various experiments. He threw himself into the life of the artistic cabarets and served as “The Tail” at Evreinov’s Stray Dog, where, in December 1913, he staged Mikhail Kuzmin’s Puppet Nativity (Kukol’nyi vertep) “with touching child-likeness.”15 He also took part in the General Conference on March 30, 1914, when members of Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio and the editorial board of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto (LTA), including Soloviev and Alexander Blok, met to discuss “The Italian Renaissance and Theatre”; topics included the Gozzi/Goldoni debate, commedia dell’arte, improvisation and masks, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and old Spanish theatre. At the same time, Miklashevsky, in league with Evreinov, was preparing a third season for the Antique Theatre, this one to feature commedia dell’arte. It became known that Miklashevsky was writing a scholarly book on the subject, which was advertised in the first issue of Meyerhold’s journal as “a great work.”16 Concerned that his own experiments might be preempted, Meyerhold took an interest in both projects, the book and the season. He wrote to Soloviev that he hoped Miklashevsky would participate in the studio work.17 A direct request for an article for LTA received this reply from Miklashevsky on May 29, 1914: “I’ll be in Petersburg, I suppose, until the end of June. I don’t know what I could give you for the journal. After all, I’m not a writer, I write on occasion; at the moment I have no theme. Maybe something might be carved out of my little book.”18 The brief article, which appeared in the third issue of 1914, was “Basic Types in the Commedia dell’arte.”19 Miklashevsky’s essay deals primarily with the tipi fissi or set types, offering an almost Stanislavskian precept: “Improvisation demanded from the actor complete confidence on stage; he had to ‘enter into the role’ and identify closely with it.”20 Hence the actors themselves often bear their character’s name and might enjoy a very long career playing only one line of business. A standard troupe, ten to fifteen in number, had had to have two old men, two Zanni, a Capitano,21 two lovers, a lady, and a servant-girl. Miklashevsky quotes at length testimony as to why the masks are funny: dialect, gestures, costumes, pretensions, poses, bold improbabilities, infirmities, and deformities are all mirth-raising. One of his prime concerns is to distinguish the commedia from other types of drama: in Shakespearean and Spanish tragedy,

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comedy is relegated to interludes; Spanish comedy mixes high and low, segregated into individual scenes and characters; Molière has some of the contrast of commedia, but modern drama is concerned that no one character break loose from the author’s intended style. Even as music develops towards greater orchestration, the theatre loses the secret of “orchestrating roles,” so comedians stick out like oboes and bassoons in the string section. Meyerhold lent great importance to Miklashevsky’s article, “Debate about the Use of Masks,” which appeared in the influential journal Teatr i iskusstvo (Theatre and art). It pointed out that facial mimicry onstage was like a cameo on a wall—it cannot be seen except up close (except in the movies) and does not enhance beauty. Masks are preferable to Dalcroze exercises because they allow actors to forget about their bodies. “Physical mimicry is theatrical,” Miklashevsky argued.22 To this, the editor, Alexander Kugel, hostile to theatrical stylization, replied that masks evolved into the emploi, or line of business, and were supplanted by realism and fully rounded characters. For him, masks were best used in silence as visible stage directions.23 Meyerhold’s desire to enlist Miklashevsky as a scholarly contributor to his journal was not as aboveboard as it may have seemed. He was still intent on dominating the theatre-reconstruction scene and asked Soloviev to meet with Miklashevsky “without fail” and worm out of him (vyudit’) whether he had spoken with Evreinov and Butkovskaia about joining in a possible merger.24 A few days later he enjoined Soloviev: Please don’t say another word to K. M. Miklashevsky concerning the possible participation of the Studio in performances of the Antique Theatre. It’s enough that we cast out a line. If we go on talking and asking questions it might seem to him that we are eager to join in with them. For now let them defer to us. Please be careful too in disclosing the bibliographical lists. Don’t forget that you are also about to publish a book on Commedia dell’arte. Ask K. M. whether there isn’t a misprint in his article, printed in no. 3. Today I wrote to him a request to carve out something else from his little book for our no. 4. Back up this request.25

In December 1914, Soloviev gave a lecture at the studio on techniques of improvised comedy that was published in the fourth and fifth issues of LTA as installments in his series, “Toward the History of the Stage Technique of Commedia dell’arte.” He maintained the traditional position that commedia originated in ancient Rome with the mimes and Atellan farces, was revived by medieval minstrelsy, and from then on progressed in an unbroken line. Throughout his writings on the subject, Miklashevsky disputed and disproved this position. In the Soviet era, however, Soloviev’s position was disseminated

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by Mikhail Bakhtin in his writings on Rabelais and repeated by the leading Soviet expert on commedia, A. K. Dzhivelegov. It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Bakhtin’s position, which has been propagated ad infinitum and ad nauseum in writing about the “carnivalesque,” should be founded on such a shaky hypothesis. By this time, Russia had declared war on the Central Powers, and Miklashevsky was among the first to be conscripted. The commedia dell’arte season at the Antique Theatre would never be realized. To Meyerhold’s request for another slice from his “little book,” Miklashevsky replied from the sixth Opolensk brigade of the thirty-third Smolensk detachment to offer him a “little article,” “On the Acrobatic Elements in the Techniques of the Comici dell’Arte.”26 Shortly thereafter, he had to write from the front: “At the moment I happen to be in a close to combat situation, about 1200 paces from the Germans, in a deep trench. That’s why I have not managed to work out a whole article, for, having available in the trench scraps of paper, I have to be limited to only a little historical survey. Please make corrections in the publication (especially the foreign quotations).”27 This piece began by stating that acrobatics is the thread that runs through the whole history of the commedia; in early phases, the histrion and the funambulist were one.28 The article is essentially a chrestomathy of quotations from various observers of leaps and stunts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Miklashevsky translated freely to make his points, but his argument tended to confirm Meyerhold in his own insistence that the actor must be a cabotin (strolling player) and that physical movement was fundamental to his craft.

The Commedia Book The war halted full publication of Miklashevsky’s commedia book. Although it won a prize from the Imperial Academy of Sciences on September 19, 1915, only the first part would appear with the double date 1914–17. None of his contemporaries could fault Miklashevsky’s scholarship. He had read 275 scenarii and tabulated which masks appeared in which. His bibliography of 342 items was unparalleled. At the same time, for all his insistence on sound historical documentation, Miklashevsky was a protoformalist. J. Douglas Clayton points out that the very first sentence is the question, “Does the history of art exist as a science?”29 What must be remembered is that Miklashevsky began his research not as a disinterested academic pursuit but as material for pragmatic theatrical

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experimentation. “The study of theatre history in general cannot be put on a solid footing until everyone concerned with theatre history clearly understands the difference between ‘theatre’ and ‘dramatic literature’.”30 Hence he always highlights the actor. This squared with the heady explorations by other theatre workers in the Russian Silver Age and beyond. The performer and the technique of performance remained the crux of the matter, from Evreinov’s monodramatic “protagonist” to Vakhtangov’s emotionally charged grotesques to Meyerhold’s puppets and biomechanical automata. Allardyce Nicoll gets it backward when he states that Miklashevsky was influenced by the experiments of Gordon Craig, Meyerhold, and Blok.31 The interest was “in the air,” and Miklashevsky was concurrently seeking to interpret the past and to influence the present.32 Another aspect of the Zeitgeist may lurk implicitly behind Miklashevsky’s convictions: Evreinov’s theory that theatricality (teatralnost’) is a basic element and requirement of human nature. Consequently, the Italian scholar to whom Miklashevsky was most sympathetic was Lorenzo Stoppato, whose 1887 work on “popular comedy in Italy” posited a medieval tradition of “implicit” theatre, in which its origin amidst the lower orders or common people was the identifying marker.33 This, rather than specific historical circumstances, explained the anachronistic overlapping of types and gags. To label this phenomenon, Miklashevsky coined the term narodnii balagan, a term pregnant with meaning for his original readers. At this time, Russian intellectuals, particularly those aligned with the World of Art, were turning to folk music and folklore, peasant handicrafts, and decorative arts for inspiration. Narodnii, from narod (people), can be translated as “people’s” (as the Soviets usually did), “popular” (in the French or Italian sense), “folk” (with intimations of the Nazi völkisch), or even “national.” Balagan was a carnival show booth, featuring a ded (granddad), a spieler improvising to the crowd, with a knockabout pantomime played within. Meyerhold had co-opted it as the title of his influential essay of 1911–12, arguing that actors must be all-purpose performers, in the tradition of the fairground, as had Blok for his pantomimic one-act The Little Fairground Booth (Balaganchik, 1906). Miklashevsky glosses the “people’s show booth” as an ensemble effort: “The most characteristic feature . . . consists in a sort of collective creation in which the actors elaborated in common the text of the show in the absence of an individual author. The actors chose for their show a suitable subject which they took from some comedy ancient or modern, or which they devised themselves. They adapted it to their stage, modified it, occasionally

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assembling materials from various sources, and then performed the skeleton of the theatrical action thus obtained, the text of each role being almost entirely left to the ingenuity of the actor who performed it.”34 Hence the similarity between ancient Roman secular comedy and the commedia was not a matter of historical lineage but of analogous impulses, the antinomian festival spirit in conflict with civil and religious authority. There is nothing here of the naïveté and playfulness in Maurice Sand’s interpretation of commedia. Rather, the characteristic “folk” aspect of commedia was its opposition to the ruling classes, a revolt against “bourgeois” conventions. As Mirella Schino has pointed out, this is “easy to prove wrong but leads to the notion of commedia dell’arte as experimental theatre,” running parallel to official or legitimate theatre.35 It is plain to see why such an idea would appeal to the Russian artist between revolutions, a period when the transcendental afflatus of the Symbolists had been replaced by the cynical Kleinkunst of cabaret and miniature theatres. For Miklashevsky, collective creation was inflected less by the Symbolist concept of sobornost' (spiritual communality) than by the Modernist interest in reviving popular traditions and his own attack on the cult of the director. Miklashevsky speaks of the mid-sixteenthcentury decline of literary theatre, the rhetorical and theatrical flabbiness of which was offset by commedia’s vitality, passion, grotesquerie and macaronic improvisation: “While the literary theatre was undergoing this crisis, from the depths of the people, for whom theatrical art was a genuine need, there was born a new theatre, imbued with the humor, the imagination, and the spirit of observation of the people, which not only thoroughly satisfied the aspirations and tastes of the public at large, but even won over the upper classes, and brought them back to the theatres they had abandoned.”36 This is to read back into the past the decadence of the contemporary theatre and the need to reinvigorate it by recourse to popular entertainments. Consequently, Miklashevsky had little regard for either Gozzi or Goldoni. Maurice Sand had typically characterized Gozzi’s fiabe as “fairy-tale extravaganzas in action,” meant to be a compliment.37 Winifred Smith was more censorious; for her, Gozzi had driven masks “into alien territory” with his use of music, machinery, and local satire.38 For different reasons, Miklashevsky concurred, although he preferred Gozzi to the “bourgeois” and “sedate” Goldoni, who was heavy on moralizing but successful in his time because an Enlightenment public preferred reason and probability. In the French recension of his work, Miklashevsky would dismiss Gozzi, pronouncing that “the brilliant aesthetic fantasies of this decadent aristocrat naturally had only an ephemeral success.”39 No Marxist critic could be more dismissive.

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Miklashevsky regarded physical comedy to be the genre’s essence and the dialogue an ornament, but he distinguished commedia from pantomime, for the former had available a plethora of rhetorical devices, with the choice left up to the performer. He believed that a complex theatre cannot be built solely on improvisation. The scenario, or literary element, “written for the psychology and stage logic of professional actors,” was organic to the form. Miklashevsky also disliked the mixture of the robust liveliness of the Italian commedia with the duplicity and double entendres of the refined French variant. It was commedia Italian-style that was to serve as a model for the renewal of Russian theatre on a theatrical rather than a literary basis, not only in the years before the Great War but well into the Soviet period.

The Book Revived After the Revolution, Miklashevsky worked for several theatre organizations with indifferent success. His attempts to adapt commedia to the new order rarely won approval. His frustration, isolated on the margins of theatrical activity, and his long-simmering skepticism about theatre for the proletariat and the unbridled experimentation of the NEP (New Economic Policy) period burst forth in no uncertain terms. His essays and lectures attacking constructivism, biomechanics, proletarian culture, and agitprop were taken as blasphemy. In summer 1924, Miklashevsky and his wife, bearing concealed jewelry, left for Berlin. After relieving the financial woes of his brother Vadim, they moved to Paris, where they settled in Montparnasse. There he must have been chagrined to learn that a new French work on the commedia dell’arte had just appeared: Pierre Louis Duchartre’s La Comédie italienne: l’improvisation, les canevas, vies, caractères, portraits, masques des illustres personnages de la commedia dell’arte (1924; a second edition came out the following year). Duchartre (1894–1983) was neither a theatre historian nor a literary specialist but a collector who later became a government official in charge of museums and exhibitions; his chief interests were popular imagery and hunting.40 His relations with the émigré community were close enough to enable him to write a book about Russian folk pictures (lubki) without knowing a word of the language. His commedia book was much in the tradition of Maurice Sand, full of positive statements unsupported by documentation and perpetuating a view of improvised comedy as naïve and romantic. Lacking a scholarly apparatus, the book’s chief virtue was its abundance of illustrations. What must have been particularly galling for the Russian was that Duchartre, in

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Miklashevsky’s words, “had the goodness to reproduce [my bibliography of 342 titles] in his second edition.”41 Miklashevsky was motivated to revise his own work and publish it under the more accessible name Constant Mic, in French: La commedia dell’arte, ou le théâtre des comédiens italiens des XVI, XVII & XVIII siècles (fig. 10.3). It was thoroughly revised and enlarged, with the first chapter moved to the end; in addition, as if to challenge Duchartre, he added a great many new illustrations. Picking up where the earlier edition had left off, Constant Mic addressed “L’Art de l’acteur” (style, corporeal expression, acrobatics, masks, rhetoric and lazzi, women’s roles, music, and dance). “Les comédiens et le public” discussed open-air performance and the relation to mountebanks and princes. “Le décor and la mise en scène” concerned Italian perspective scenery, lighting and “night scenes.” In line with Russian interest in “people’s entertainment,” he saw the form emerging from the conflation of street entertainment and literary comedy (a hypothesis characterized by Vito Pandolfi as “fantasiosa”). Drawing on his past theatrical experiments, he insisted that the commedia provided freedom for the actor. The bibliography for this recension included only books that had appeared after 1914, to show that unlike Duchartre, Miklashevsky had kept his research up to date.42 * * * The last years of Miklashevsky’s life were spent under the German Occupation. Desperately poor, he returned to acting, appearing in a few plays for his old friend Evreinov in the Theatre of Russian Drama at the Salle Jéna. Very late on Christmas night 1944, after the successful premiere of a revival of Evreinov’s The Main Thing (Samoe glavnoe), Miklashevsky returned home. Lighting a gas burner to heat his room, he fell asleep without even removing his theatrical masquerade costume and was poisoned by the carbon monoxide fumes. In the aftermath of the Liberation, his papers were scattered. The rediscovery of Miklashevsky in recent years has been far less dramatic than that of commedia in the early twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, he had long been a “nonperson,” and his area of study was not considered relevant to Socialist progress or proletarian advancement. Under Stalin, no foreign influence on Russia was admissible, and all theatre history was viewed through a Marxist–Leninist lens. In 1933, the theatre historian Stefan Mokulsky substituted the term italianskaia narodnaia komediia (Italian people’s comedy) for commedia dell’arte. The form’s “popular” character eclipsed its professional aspect. The first Soviet work on the subject, a posthumous publication in 1954 by Aleksei Dzhivelegov, imposed a Marxist grid on commedia,

Figure 10.3. Title page of the French edition of Miklashevsky's book (under the pseudonym Constant Mic). Laurence Senelick Collection.

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characterizing it as a progressive counterblast to the “feudal-Catholic” reaction of the sixteenth century. It did, however, mention Miklashevsky’s two works in its bibliography, without comment.43 Only now, as part of a reclamation effort to recover aspects of Russian art suppressed under communism have Miklashevsky’s life and endeavors been exhumed, though more as tributes to White Russian culture than as contributions to theatre history. Outside Russia, the great teacher of mime and movement Jacques Lecoq recommended Miklashevsky to his students, and the prominent Italian theatre historian Cesare Molinari called attention to Miklashevsky’s importance as a precursor. Finally, Kenneth and Laura Richards granted him pioneer status as “the first instance of practical investigation and academic enquiry” in their documentary history of commedia in 1990.44 Perhaps, at last, Miklashevsky can be listed not as a walk-on but as a featured player in the twentieth-century revival of commedia dell’arte.

Notes 1. Editor’s note: The commedia sources in this essay provide a valuable contextual frame for Miklashevsky’s place in commedia historiography. Meyerhold and his collaborators at the director’s Borodinskaia Street Studio read broadly on commedia as a tool for the new actor. Their sources also included Muratov, Obrazy Italii (Images of Italy); nineteenth-century works on Gozzi; German works that filtered commedia through a Romantic lens; and Falconi, Le quattro principali. See essays by Natalya Baldyga (chap. 6), Dassia N. Posner (chap. 7), and Raissa Raskina (chap. 8) in this book and Meyerhold’s personal Gozzi bibliography; Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (hereafter RGALI), f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 842. 2. Sand, Masques et bouffons, 1:vi. 3. Drusi, “Popular traditions,” 36. 4. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 40; Evreinov, Pamiatnik, 10. 5. There are no formal biographies of Miklashevsky. I have pieced his life together from the outline given in Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt, 1:238–40; Ingirova, Preface to “’Za revoliutsionnim frontom,” 404–12; and the memoirs of his second wife, Liudmila Miklashevskaia, Chemu svideteli and Povtorennie proidennogo. 6. He married twice and divorced twice, both times to Jewish women: Irina Sergeevna Michelson (née Irma Spielberg, 1883–1953), a prize-winning pianist and graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; and Liudmila Pavlovna Eizengardt (1899–1976), who left him in Paris to return to the Soviet Union. 7. He officially graduated from the school in 1911 in the class of A. I. Dolinov. 8. Golub, Evreinov, 104–49. 9. Stark, Starinnii teatr, 51–52. 10. Chudovskii, “O starinnom teatre,” 58–62. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 11. Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol’d, 178. For a full exploration of this prickly relationship, see Pearson, “Meyerhold and Evreinov,” 321–32.

250  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 12. Sayler, “Meyerhold,” 351. 13. Verigina, Vospominaniia, 171–77. For more recollections of the Terijoki seasons, see Mgebrov, Zhizn’, 189–222. 14. I am indebted to Dr. Kyna Hamill of Boston University for this information. 15. S. Auslender, quoted in Parnis and Timenchik, “Programmy,” 203–4. 16. “Khronika,” 64. 17. June 13, 1914. Meierkhol’d, Perepiska, 165. 18. RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr 1998, l. 1; Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proеkt, 1:239. Although some of the Meyerhold–Miklashevsky and the Meyerhold–Soloviev correspondence is published in this collection, I have consulted the originals of their letters preserved in RGALI, thanks to Dassia Posner, who photographed them, and Irina Yakubovskaya, who transcribed them. 19. Miklashevskii, “Osnavnye tipy,” 71-76. 20. Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt, 1:235–38. 21. Il Capitano: commedia’s braggart captain. 22. Miklashevskii, “Razsuzhdenie,” 464–66. 23. Kugel’, “Editor’s Note.” 24. May 30, 1914. Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Musical Art (hereafter SPbGMTiMI) Glavnaia Interval’naia Kniga (GIK) 11282/84, Otdel Rukopisi (ORU) 10417, l. 1. 25. July 4, 1914. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11287\89 ORU 10422, l. 2; Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proеkt, 1:239–40. 26. January 21, 1915. RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr 1998, l. 2. 27. February 22, 1915. RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr 1998, l. 3; Oves, Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proеkt, 2: 89. 28. Miklashevskii, “Ob akrobaticheskikh elementakh,” 77–79; Oves, Nauchnoissledovatel’skii proеkt, 2:88. 29. Miklashevskii, La commedia dell’ arte, ili teatr, 13. Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd, 64–67. 30. Miklashevskii, La commedia dell’ arte, ili teatr, 21. 31. Nicoll, World of Harlequin, 218. 32. Miklashevsky’s study was book-ended by two Russian monographs on commedia in Russia: Tikhonova, Odinadtsat’ intermedii XIII veka (Eleven interludes of the eighteenth century); and Peretts’s Italianskiia komedii i intermedii predstavlennyia pri dvorie Imperatritsy Anny Ioannovny v 1733–1735 (Italian comedies and interludes presented at the court of Anna Ioannovna, 1733–35). See Kazakova, “La rédécouverte.” 33. Stoppato, La commedia. See also, Drusi, “Popular Traditions,” 34–35. 34. Miklashevskii, La commedia dell’ arte, ili teatr, 26. 35. Schino, “Commedia dell’arte,” 308–9. Winifred Smith believed this comparative approach discounted commedia’s historical specificity and warned about combining data from remote, distinctive eras. Her warning went unheeded in Europe, partly because scholars did not read English, and partly because Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic, which rejected factual, historical context, was in fashion. Plus ça change . . . 36. Miklashevskii, La commedia dell’ arte, ili teatr, 218. 37. “Féeries en action.” Sand, Masques et Bouffons, 2:355. 38. Smith, Commedia dell’Arte, 210–11. 39. Mic, La commedia dell’arte, 234. 40. Maguet, “Pierre-Louis Duchartre,” 263–73. Duchartre continued to work as a bureaucrat under the Occupation but, to his credit, served as one of the Monuments Men, retrieving art confiscated by the Nazis. The 1929 English translation of Duchartre by Randolph T. Weaver, The Italian Comedy, in addition to pilfering more from Constant Mic, reproduced his bibliography

The Miklashevsky Connection  |  251 intact; it remained unchanged even in the 1966 reprint. Duchartre, in collaboration with another collector René Saulnier, published La commedia dell’arte et ses enfants (1955), but it failed to supplant his earlier work, which, for all its outdated misstatements, is still in print and cited as an unquestioned authority (though not by serious commedia scholars). 41. Mic, La commedia dell’arte, 235. 42. The work was later translated into Italian by Carla Solivetti (1981); Miklashevskii, Commedia dell’arte. Her terminal essay “La commedia dell’arte in Russia e Konstantin Miklashevsky” (109–91) was the first substantial account of his contribution. 43. Dzhivelegov’s Italianskaia narodnaia komediia was published in a German translation in East Berlin in 1958, making it available to Western scholars; Dzhivelegov, Commedia dell’arte. 44. Richards and Richards, Commedia dell’Arte, 304.

Bibliography Chudovskii, V. “O starinnom teatre.” Russkaia khudozhestvennaia letopis’ 4 (February 1912): 58–62. Clayton, J. Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Drusi, Riccardo. “Popular Traditions, Carnival, Dance.” In Commedia dell’Arte in Context, edited by Christopher B. Balme, Piermario Vescovo and Daniele Vianello, 34–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Duchartre, Pierre-Louis. La Commedia dell’Arte et ses enfants. Paris: Éditions d’art et d’histoire, 1955. ———. The Italian Comedy: The Improvisation, Scenarios, Lives, Attributes, Portraits, and Masks of the Illustrious Characters of the Commedia dell’arte, translated by Randolph T. Weaver. London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1929. Dzhivelegov, A. K. Commedia dell’arte die italienische Volkskomödie. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1958. Golub, Spencer. Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Transformation. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984. Evreinov, Nikolai. Pamiatnik mimoletnomu: Iz istorii emigrantskogo teatra v Parizhe. Paris: [no publisher], 1953. Falconi, Clelia. Le quattro principali maschere italiane nella commedia dell’arte e nel teatro del Goldoni. Rome: Nuova Tipografia nell’ore, 1896. Ingirova, Rashita. Preface to “‘Za revoliutsionnim frontom ia pletus v oboze 2-go razriada . . .’ Iz pisem K. M. Miklashevskogo k deiatelii teatra (1914–1941).” Minuvshee. Istoricheskii al’manakh 20 (1996): 404–12. Kazakova, Violeta. “La rédécouverte théâtrale et critique de la commedia dell’arte en Russie au cours du premier quart du XXe siècle.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2006. “Khronika.” LTA 1 (1914): 63-65. Kugel’, Aleksandr. “Editor’s Note.” Teatr i iskusstvo 21 (1914): 466. Maguet, Frédéric. “Pierre-Louis Duchartre et l’imagerie, la construction d’un discours sur l’image.” In Du folklore à l’ethnologie, edited by Denis-Michael Boëll, Jacqueline Christophe, and Régis Maguet, 263–73. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1983. Meierkhol’d, V. E. Perepiska 1896–1939, edited by V. P. Korshunov and M. M. Sitkovetskaia. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976.

252  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges ———. Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy. Vol. 2, 1917–1939, edited by A. V. Fevral’skii. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968. Mgebrov, Aleksandr. Zhizn’ v teatre. Vol. 2. Moscow: Academia, 1929–32. Mic, Constant. La commedia dell’arte ou le théâtre des comédiens italiens des XVI, XVII & XVIII siècles. Paris: Schiffrin/Editions de la Pléiade, 1927. Miklashevskaia, Liudmila, with Nina Katerli. Chemu svideteli my byli. Zhenskie sudby XX vek. Saint Petersburg: Zvezda, 2007. ———. Povtorennie proidennogo. Saint Petersburg: Zvezda, 2012. Miklashevskii, Konstantin. La commedia dell’ arte, ili teatr ital’ianskikh komediantov XVI, XVII, i XVIII stoletii. Saint Petersburg: Sirius’, 1914-1917. ———. La commedia dell’arte, o il teatro dei commedianti italiani nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII, translated by Carla Solivetti. Venice: Marsilio, 1981. ———.“Nechto vrode retsenzii.” LTA 1 (1916): 92–96. ———.“Ob akrobaticheskikh elementakh v tekhnike komikov dell’arte.” LTA 1–2–3 (1915): 77–79. ———. “Osnovnye tipy v commedia dell’arte.” LTA 3 (1914): 71–76. ———. “Razsuzhdenie o pol‘ze maski.” Teatr i iskusstvo 21 (1914): 464–66. Muratov, Pavel. Obrazy Italii. Vol. 1. Moscow: Nauchnoe slovo, 1911. Nicoll, Allardyce. The World of Harlequin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Oves, L. C., ed. Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol'da Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam (1914–1916), 2 vols. Saint Petersburg: Ministerstvo kul’turii Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Russiskii Insititut Istorii Iskusstv, 2014. Parnis, A. E., and R. D. Timenchik. “Programmy ‘Brodiachei sobaki.’” In Pamiatniki kul’tury. Novye otkrytiia. Ezhegodnik 1983, 160–257. Leningrad: Nauka, 1985. Pearson, Anthony G. “Meyerhold and Evreinov. ‘Originals’ at Each Other’s Expense,” New Theatre Quarterly 8, no. 32 (November 1992): 321–32. Peretts, Vladimir N. Italianskiia komedii i intermedii predstavlennyia pri dvorie imperatritsy Anny Ioannovny v 1733–1735. Petrograd: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1917. Riccoboni, Luigi. Histoire du théâtre italien depuis la décadence de la comédie latine. Paris: Pierre Delormel, 1728. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards. The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1990. Rudnitskii, Konstantin. Rezhisser Meierkhol’d. Moscow: Nauka, 1969. Sand, Maurice. Masques et bouffons (comédie italienne). 2 vols. Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1860. Sayler, Oliver. “Meyerhold and the Theatre Theatrical.” The Bookman (December 1919): 350–56. Schino, Mirella. “Commedia dell’Arte and Experimental Theatre.” In Commedia dell’Arte in Context, edited by Christopher B. Balme, Piermario Vescovo, and Daniele Vianello, 298–310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Smith, Winifred. The Commedia dell’Arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1912. Stark, Eduard. Starinnii teatr. Saint Petersburg: Tret’ia strazha, 1922. Stoppato, Lorenzo. La commedia populare in Italia. Saggi. Padua: A. Draghi, 1887. Tikhonova, P. N. Odinadtsat’ intermedii XIII veka. Petrograd: Pamiatniki drevnei pismennosti i iskusstva, 1915. Valentini, Francesco. Trattato su la commedia dell’arte, ossia improvisa: maschere italiane ed alcune scene del carnevale di Roma. Berlin: Wittich, 1826. Verigina, Valentina Petrovna. Vospominaniia. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1974.

11 From Divertissement to Opera Two Russian Oranges Julia Galanina Translated by Dassia N. Posner

F

or a century, it has been commonly believed that Sergei Prokofiev based the libretto for his opera Love for Three Oranges on the fiaba (theatrical fairy tale) by Carlo Gozzi. Unpublished documentary evidence demonstrates, however, that the composer’s direct source was Konstantin Vogak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Soloviev’s divertissement Love for Three Oranges, a free adaptation of Gozzi’s fiaba. Meyerhold drew Prokofiev’s attention to the divertissement by giving a copy of it to the composer in 1918 and suggesting he develop it into an opera. This essay traces the path from divertissement to opera and introduces archival sources that document a behindthe-scenes legal struggle over the attribution of Prokofiev’s source when the opera received its 1926 Soviet premiere. After Prokofiev left Russia in 1918, he began working on Three Oranges, which he completed in the US the next fall. In an autobiographical sketch, Prokofiev reflected back on his 1918 negotiations with the Chicago Opera directorate: “I proposed to them that I write a new opera based on the plot of Carlo Gozzi’s Love for Three Oranges. This plot was recommended to me by Meyerhold before my departure from Russia, and on the way to America I thought about it a great deal.”1 On April 21, 1918, he wrote in his diary, “When I told Meyerhold of my desire to find an effervescent subject for an opera, he gave me . . . Love for Three Oranges to read.”2 Five days later, he added, “[I] read . . . Love for Three Oranges. It is wonderful! Something could really be done with it, except that the plot would need to be completely rewritten.”3

254  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

In these writings, Prokofiev refers to the divertissement published in the first (1914) issue of Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto (LTA). The divertissement’s authors turned to Gozzi’s dramatization of a popular fairy tale, which Gozzi then directed polemically against playwright contemporaries to mock the domestic (bytovye) comedies of Carlo Goldoni and heroic tragedies of Pietro Chiari. The Russian authors transplanted this polemic to contemporary soil and redirected it at the battle against the stage predominance of plays that merely entertain, on one hand, and against gloomy, “doubled” (sugubye, exaggerated) tragicality on the other. Later recalling the history of the divertissement’s development, Soloviev (fig. 11.1) was to explain the essence of its embedded conflict: Take the repertoire of that time. There were two main trends: L. Andreev’s panpsychism, the doubled “psychologism” that crossed over into mysticism, and, on the other hand, the quotidian [obivatel’skii] comedies of [Viktor] Ryshkov and [Ignaty] Potapenko.4 In this context, we declared war on these trends, and a particular hatred for panpsychism and for quotidian comedy was perhaps our motive for using Love for Three Oranges specifically, rather than one of Gozzi’s other fairy-tale plays, as this scenario’s existence gave us a great deal of material for the polemic we intended to conduct with these two theatrical trends. Our analogy was as follows: panpsychism—Andreevism, domestic comedy— Signor Goldoni.5

The tragicality of Leonid Andreev’s worldview was indeed reflected in his creative oeuvre: many of his compositions end with the death of the hero. Thus, in Andreev’s play The Life of Man (Zhizn’ cheloveka), which Meyerhold staged in 1907, humankind’s doomed existence was emphasized symbolically by comparing it to a candle that sputters and goes out. According to Andreev’s concept of panpsychism, conflict in contemporary life penetrated deep into the human soul, and a theatre of action and of movement was a thing of the past. Regarding the “quotidian comedy” of plays by Ryshkov and Potapenko, works with outdated, everyday domestic conflicts (family dramas, betrayal, etc.) were designed for the tastes of undemanding audiences and were successful at theatres thanks only to the outstanding actors who played in them. Most likely, this specific, hidden polemic with “box-office” playwrights was too veiled and did not allow contemporaries to fully appreciate Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s composition. Alexander Blok, for instance, characterized their Three Oranges as “dry and florid.”6 Meyerhold and his LTA colleagues shared Gozzi’s views of Goldoni, seeing in the latter’s comedies the destruction of commedia dell’arte principles. They associated Goldoni with domestic (bytovоi, quotidian) and naturalistic

From Divertissement to Opera  |  255

Figure 11.1. Caricature of Vladimir Soloviev by N. Radlov (Sergei Radlov’s brother). Zhizn iskusstva 27 (February 12, 1924): 12. Photo by the author.

theatre; as theatre historian Maia Molodtsova notes, by “speaking ‘for’ Gozzi against Goldoni, they polemicized not with Goldoni, but with contemporary proponents of quotidian verisimilitude in the theater.”7 From 1913 to 1915, Meyerhold planned a production of Three Oranges that would allow him to lay bare and emphasize its satirical thrust.8 On May 6 (new style; April 23, 1913), he wrote to Soloviev from Paris: Should we translate our Love for Three Oranges into Fren[ch] and Ger[man]? We really must hurry with the music. I advise both you and Vogak . . . to visit Tereshchenko and ask his advice regarding to whom we should give it to write music. For some reason I’ve cooled toward [Richard] Strauss due to his rather poor taste. We need a French composer. Or one of the newest Russian ones. It’s better to decide this in conjunction with Teresh[enko], and if we need a French one, write to me immediately, and I’ll scout around, converse, and commission. We need to have music by fall.9

Significantly, it is clear from this letter that Meyerhold intended to present the divertissement as a manifestation of “new art” entering into the battle against

256  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

outmoded artistic forms. Given the considerable attention paid to music, it is likely that a musical production was planned—something that indicates the closeness of Meyerhold’s and Prokofiev’s artistic positions. On December 16, 1913, Soloviev and Vogak gave a reading of Three Oranges for Mikhail Tereshchenko, an official in the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres who had founded his own theatre.10 Tereshchenko “liked the divertissement” but considered it “impractical for theatrical realization due to a lack of actors who are able to improvise.”11 Plans for a production of this work in the 1910s remained unrealized. At the same time, Prokofiev was doubtlessly aware of a famous parody of opera conventions and absurdities that was first shown in Petersburg at the end of 1908: Vampuka (after the name of its heroine; a word that soon came into broad, general use).12 The parody, which poked fun at the outmoded traditionalism of opera plots (wars, captures, love scenes, miraculous rescues, etc.), was a great success and achieved widespread renown.13 Above all, however, it mocked opera’s conventionality, which required that actors remain immobile while singing (running was represented by jogging in place), the nonsensical breaking down of words into syllables, the distortion of text, the repetition of individual syllables, the performers’ bombastic overacting, and absurd plots, such as a hero who is in the desert yet right next to a water source or who prays to heaven for rain. Prokofiev seemingly remained opposed to such light genres, at least in their American iterations. On October 5, 1918, not long after his US arrival, he wrote in his diary, “An operetta tenor introduced himself to me with the libretto of an American [operetta] and proposed that I write the music. If it was a hit the receipts would be fantastic. I said ‘all right’, but with the proviso that I would cede to him the credit for composing it, as I did not wish to sully my good name with a musical. . . . It may be all to the good that we did not reach an eventual agreement, since for me it would, of course, be an act of musical prostitution.”14 Two days later, another diary entry related: “My encounter with the [operetta] has reawakened my thoughts about a light-hearted opera, and . . . Three Oranges.”15 Earlier, on June 16, 1918, Prokofiev had written, “Benois gave me the Italian original, and I must read it in that language.”16 This entry provides evidence that, while contemplating what was to become his opera, his familiarity with Three Oranges was not exclusively limited to its Russian adaptation. Prokofiev’s opera received its USSR premiere on February 18, 1926, at the Leningrad State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in a production directed by Sergei Radlov, with N. M. Foregger, and conducted by Vladimir

From Divertissement to Opera  |  257

Dranishnikov.17 On the eve of the Russian premiere, Meyerhold was dismayed to learn that when Prokofiev indicated the source for his opera’s plot, he credited Gozzi but did not mention the authors of the divertissement; the use of which was clearly reflected in the opera. Unlike Gozzi’s scenario, the Russian adaptation included more extensive dialogue than Gozzi’s scenario, and the spoken lines of divertissement characters—the choruses in particular—were more suitable for integrating into an opera libretto. Meyerhold and Soloviev (Vogak was in emigration in Finland at the time and connecting with him had become difficult) began an intensive correspondence about this omission. On February 15, [1926], Meyerhold wrote to Soloviev from Moscow: Today I filed a claim at the Union of Drama[tic] Writers in Leningrad,18 in which I asked for author royalties for myself and for you for S. Prokofiev’s opera libretto for Love for Three Oranges. Stop by the Union and sign your name to my claim. In case there is any squabbling on the part of Ekskuzovich,19 carefully check the libretto against our treatment (drama[tic] construction, sequence, quan[tity] of scenes, characters, and so on) and energetically insist that the Union enforce our claim. Otherwise we will sue. Answer me straight away.20

Two days later, on February 17, Soloviev replied to Meyerhold: I received your letter and began acting immediately. The situation has become a bit more complicated, and it seems likely that we will need help from a lawyer. I telephoned Boris Emilevich,21 and he gave us a great deal of helpful advice and suggested I approach Arkady N. Meshcheriakov,22 who represents your interests in a number of matters. I’m sending my wife to the Union tomorrow to inquire about the status of your claim. It has been two years since I was a Union member, as I have transferred, along with most Petersburg playwrights, to the Moscow society.23 Before we go there, it is essential that I determine precisely the extent of Prokofiev’s use of our divertissement Love for Three Oranges. All of us from the institute (Gvozdev, myself, Mokulsky) expected that we, as the only Gozzi and eighteenth-century Venetian theatre specialists in the entire Union, would be at the premiere.24 But now there is almost no chance of us attending. . . . I’ve used all my connections to get ahold of a ticket to the premiere at any price, and thus far I’ve received no consolation. From the playbill printed in the supplement to Zhizn' iskusstva [Life of art], it is clear that there are “oddities,” “operetta lovers,” “lyricals,” and “Eccentrics” (that is, our “Extra-tragic Tragedians” and “Commonplace Comedians”).25 Next week I will definitely attend the second performance, and I will try while there to compare the . . . opera libretto, Gozzi, and our divertissement. With precise data in hand, I will appeal to the Moscow Society to protect our authorial rights. With their permission, Gvozdev and Mokulsky will appear with me as experts. Vsevolod Emilevich, I ask you to give me your written permission to contact Meshcheriakov; Boris Emilevich told me that it is very important to learn where Prokofiev is living now.26 For several

258  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges reasons it would be good if you could raise this fundamental question at various Moscow organizations (Glavrepertkom,27 with Iakovleva,28 and at MODPiK). . . . PS. Can I telephone you in the evening, and when and where?

At the top of the page Soloviev wrote in by hand, “The precise date on which you gave Prokofiev the manuscript for Love? Or at least the rough season and year?”29 In a second letter, written that same day, Soloviev wrote, I received your letter and this very day sent an express post reply. This is what happened after that letter. I saw Union agent V. F. Romashkov,30 who started processing your claim. I filed a claim at the Moscow S[ociety], where they will also start processing my claim soon. Prokofiev assigned his rights to the pub[lisher] “Russische Verlag,” with which the Academic Theatre directorate entered into a contract.31 It is very important that we win the case on principle. Both the Union and S[ociet]y support us in Leningrad. The resolution to this question will essentially be determined in Moscow. I am sending you a note with a casual courier. The usual law is that the author of the libretto receives 30%. This is a big deal. In any case, worth thousands.32

Meyerhold wrote in response to Soloviev’s first letter: Dear Vladimir Nikolaevich, 1) Get legal advice from Meshcheriakov. 2) Asking comrades Gvozdev and Mokulsky to serve as experts is a brilliant idea. 3) I gave Prokofiev a copy of the first number of our journal Love for Th[ree] Oranges just before his departure for America (I believe it was the very end of 1918). When I gave him the issue, I urged him to write an opera to the text of our Love for Three Oranges. He answered, “I’ll read it on the ocean liner.”33 4) One couldn’t write an opera based on the reflective record left by Gozzi, while the reference to “eccentrics,” “operetta lovers,” “lyricals,” and oddities tells us that Prokofiev drew from our reworking, and not from Gozzi.34 5) Where Prokofiev is right now I do not know. 6) It doesn’t matter that you are a member at the [Moscow] Society and I at the [Leningrad] Union; file a claim at the Society; both organizations via their agents will put pressure on Ekskuzovich; that way it will be even stronger. 7) You won’t be able to ring me either day or night. I’m almost never home. I come back only to sleep. Write to me by express post.35

On February 24, Meyerhold wrote, “I am sending you . . . a playbill from Persimfans.36 There on p. 5 look ten lines from the bottom. Show this program both at the Union and to Meshcheriakov. Hold onto this program, as, if we sue, it could prove essential!”37 Soloviev answered this letter only on March 7: Apologies that I haven’t written for so long. You see, after the second performance of Oranges,38 which I attended, I came down with the flu and have been in bed for over ten days. The signs of Prokofiev having used our scenario are incontrovertible and are especially felt in the first and second acts of his play. Most striking of all are the two staircases, which are located at the edges of the

From Divertissement to Opera  |  259 forestage and very much recall our towers.39 In Prokofiev, the “eccentrics” bear the same meaning as our “fools”—that is, they intervene directly in the action— and climb up and down. Gozzi has no scene in which Fata Morgana and Celio the Wizard play cards, while in Prokofiev this is one of the best parts of the opera.40 The word “divertissement,” which we named our scenario, is repeated several times by Truffaldino when he shows diversions to the ailing prince.41 In Act I, scene 3 (the dialogue between Leandro and Clarice), there is another borrowing from our scenario (p. 25): “Meanwhile, Truffaldino crosses the stage toward the curtain carrying clownish props” and “At this, Celio the Wizard crosses the forestage.”42 Instead of a forestage in the current production, Celio crosses on a bridge that connects the two staircases. Gozzi has no such crossings by Celio and Truffaldino. In scene 2 (of act II) there are also textual borrowings, “The son has raised his hand against his father” (p. 38),43 that are not present in Gozzi. In act III, scene 3, the dead princesses are carried away by soldiers (again, our scenario), where Gozzi has “peasants.”44 In the same act, Farfarello greets Celio the Wizard with our word, “Holá!” (p. 35).45 The first portion of Prokofiev’s opera (prologue, acts I and II, and [partly III?]) follow the treatment of stage actions according to our scenario. The eccentrics, theatre critics, operetta lovers . . . all this bears evidence of the use of our divertissement.

After listing these borrowings, Soloviev continued: But here arises one difficulty: the ambiguity of the situation in current law about authorial rights. “Borrowings” are not forbidden on one hand, as they say; theatre administrations deal only with the author of the music. The question of libretto authors’ royalties is a matter of personal agreement between the author of the text and the author of the music. The Academic Theatre directorate acquired the rights to Prokofiev’s opera by entering into a contract with Russische Verlag in Berlin. They say we can bring our suit against Prokofiev. Prokofiev, a member of the Moscow Society, receives both author royalties and fairly sizeable royalties for his other works. This raises a series of additional questions, which I tried to resolve with Meshcheriakov, with whom I met again and with whom the connection was interrupted due to my illness. I think . . . that I will have to come to Moscow for a day or two in order to definitively clarify many things in this matter. . . .46 P.S. I received your letter with the Persimfans program. Thank you. In Leningrad the publishing house Academia has also released a booklet dedicated to Oranges,47 which also contains this information about you giving Prokofiev our scenario.48

Prokofiev's opera does indeed include all the divertissement elements enumerated in these letters. Like the authors of the adaptation, Prokofiev integrated elements of commedia into his work.49 These manifested, above all, in the introduction into twentieth-century opera of traditional commedia characters (Tartaglia, Truffaldino, Pantalone, and Smeraldina), and in the opera’s structure, including the obligatory prologue. Prokofiev also duplicated the spatial stage design described in the divertissement.

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The opera was written five years after the divertissement was published. In that time, massive, historical changes took place in Europe. In Krasnaia gazeta (Red gazette) on the day of the Leningrad premiere, Radlov, the director, stated, “In staging the opera, I considered it my responsibility to turn not to the aesthetic reception of the Italian comedy characteristic of the 1913–14 era of Meyerhold’s journal Love for Three Oranges, with its interest in formal mise-en-scène and stylistically devised pantomime, but to use the experience of my work at the People’s Comedy Theatre in 1920–22, with its sharp dynamism and the rough vivacity of the half-circus, popular, improvised theatre.”50 Opera, a distinctive genre that unites vocal and instrumental music, dramatic and visual art, does indeed assume, compared to drama, an entirely different approach to plot than that of the divertissement; it requires broader meaning and more generalized forms. Therefore, the attacks against specific writers that were present in both the fiaba and the Russian divertissement were not feasible in an opera. This was one of the reasons for the appearance in Prokofiev’s libretto of “Tragedians,” “Comedians,” and “Empty Heads” (lovers of farces) rather than the divertissement’s “Extra-tragic Tragedians” and “Commonplace Comedians.” Prokofiev’s adaptation also stemmed from his own compositional particularities. Prokofiev described the reasons for his changes to the Prologue in a diary entry from November 30, 1918 (new style; November 17, 1918): The main problem is the beginning . . . it is amusing in Gozzi but somehow too esoteric. I thought a lot about how people like Demchinsky will attack me for contemplating writing an opera like The Love for Three Oranges: this is not the time, they will say, when the world is groaning under the yoke (but the art I create is outside time and locality). On the other hand, it has been the assaults of those who want from me lyricism and sensuousness that gave me [the] idea for the Prologue, which I started sketching out on the train.51

Prokofiev’s Three Oranges aimed at reforming operatic art and at finding new means of musical and visual or performed expression.52 It was directed against outmoded, canonized forms of old art; it broke down and parodied stagnant canons and dogmas, presented them in comic form, and mocked them. Above all, in the opera, which was written in the US, with its heretofore unfamiliar (to Prokofiev) accelerated rhythms of big city life, the composer presented dynamics that were unusual for the art of vocal performance. Twentieth-century opera attempted to eliminate opera’s static nature; the advent of film played a significant role in this. Prokofiev replaced Romantic sufferings and lyrical outpourings with concentrated action, and even the traditionally immobile opera chorus acquired the traits of an actively participating

From Divertissement to Opera  |  261

character. The composer used a brisk tempo and unexpected plot twists, and he trimmed the individual episodes devised by the divertissement authors (see chap. 7 and chap. 12 in this book). Love for Three Oranges is known as one of the merriest and most life affirming of operatic works. The opera’s most important feature is laughter, not only as a plot motif for curing the Prince’s hypochondria; rather, the entire opera is permeated with an element of laughter that radically distinguishes it from the Romantic irony of Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev’s divertissement. Comic mockery is subjected to an elevated pathetic element, a grandiose dramatism specific to opera (the King’s role, the chorus of tragedians, the Cook). In the opera, the shroud of mystery is also removed from the theatrical magic. In the infernal scenes, aside from the use of stage effects (fireworks, thunder, lightning, etc.) that correspond to the appearance of otherworldly forces, there are disruptions of expected fairy-tale reality. Magical beings conduct themselves like mere mortals: they play cards, argue, clown around (the Little Devil vocal parts: “the choral singing is like howling on the letter ‘eee,’”53 “the chorus sings into megaphones”54), and their magic is defeated. Prokofiev’s opera also mocks and lays bare the magic in the scene at the castle of Creonta, in place of whom Prokofiev’s characters confront a female Cook (sung by a hoarse bass), who unexpectedly loses her power because of a trifle, a little magic ribbon (bantik), that allows the Prince to steal the oranges from her with ease. In the scene where the oranges are cut open, the action in both Gozzi’s fiaba and the divertissement takes place on the shore of Fata Morgana’s lake. The maidens who emerge from the oranges die of thirst right next to water. In Prokofiev, this scene is transferred to the desert (perhaps a tribute to the swooning heroine of the immortal Vampuka and her search in the desert for water?). But here, too, the ridiculousness of conventionalized situations is pushed into the absurd by the implausible appearance of sharply caricatured figures: in the middle of the desert sands, “Four soldiers march across the stage with exaggerated military bearing” and “come to a dead halt” by order of the Prince, who instructs them to bury the maidens.55 In Prokofiev, it is the Eccentrics, not the Prince, who save the third maiden, Ninetta. Grotesquely exaggerating her thirst, they bring her an entire bucket of water. In the opera, the Eccentrics participate more actively than the divertissement’s Fools: when they rescue the Prince, they force Fata Morgana, who would wreak revenge on the Prince, into one of the side towers and lock her up there. Prokofiev used this olden-day plot to create his own, more modern reading. His nimble vocal writing, based on the intonations of ordinary speech,

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allowed him to create a gallery of vividly drawn characters that recall Musorgsky’s Father Varlaam (from Boris Godunov) and portions of Prokofiev’s own Gambler (Igrok). In the joie de vivre of the musical structure of Three Oranges, Russian contemporaries saw motifs of the new, revolutionary reality, “a powerful flood of sounds,”56 the expansive boldness of the Russian soul striving for freedom and independence, a joyful acceptance of life, and a mighty “resolute” character.57 Meyerhold and Soloviev’s claims against Prokofiev, recounted in the earlier correspondence, were reflected in newspapers and other publications to only a minor degree.58 In a review of the Leningrad production, Aleksei Gvozdev—the Gozzi specialist who polemicized with Meyerhold about the Three Oranges divertissement in 1914 but later became his staunch defender in all theatrical storms—repeated the same divertissement borrowings Soloviev had listed: The libretto of Prokofiev’s opera was written not after “Gozzi,” as stated in the playbill, but after the Gozzi adaptation written by Meyerhold, Soloviev, and Vogak and printed in the first issue of the journal Love for Three Oranges. . . . This is not difficult to prove by checking the Italian scenario against the Russian adaptation. The latter contains “tall towers with external spiral staircases, little balconies, and balustrades for the fools,” situated at both sides of the forestage; in it appear eccentrics, actors, comedians, tragedians, and a little boy Prologue. The Fools climb into their towers and accompany the entire performance with their commentary. In invented interludes added to Gozzi’s scenario, Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana play cards, etc. None of this is in Gozzi, but all of it is in the Russian adaptation, and all of it is included in the opera libretto and production.59

The Russian premiere of Prokofiev’s opera coincided with a period of increasingly sharp polemics, and the reorganization of the Moscow and Leningrad organizations responsible for enforcing copyright protection hindered the resolution of pressing issues. Uniting these two organizations essentially meant the absorption of the Leningrad division into the Moscow one, against which its leadership sharply objected.60 The consequence of this process was the transfer of members from the Leningrad Union to the Moscow Society. I have found no information in Saint Petersburg and Moscow archives on Meyerhold and Soloviev’s claim at the Leningrad and Moscow Societies. No details of Meyerhold and Soloviev’s appeal are reflected in the annual Dramsoiuz report.61 Neither are their surnames and works listed in the minutes of board meetings of the Society of Dramatic and Musical Writers62 or in the list of works reviewed by individual divisions of the Society in Moscow and Leningrad.63

From Divertissement to Opera  |  263

The behind-the-scenes legal wrangling did not affect Meyerhold’s relationship with Prokofiev, who seems to have been unaware of Meyerhold’s claims. In Prokofiev’s diary, he described seeing Meyerhold in Paris in May 1926, three months after the Leningrad premiere. He wrote, “It seemed to me that [Meyerhold] had a stony stare; he came in like a wolf. But after that he was as kind as ever and said he loved me. I looked at him, was glad to see him, but I couldn’t shake the thought that he is an ‘atheist.’”64 The divertissement authors’ efforts to draw attention to the opera’s true source were to remain unfulfilled. Such attention to Prokofiev’s “error” did not align well with attempts by the Narkompros leadership to demonstrate allegiance to Prokofiev, whose return to the Soviet Union they desired. We might think of the following resolution by Glavnauka, a Narkompros branch responsible for the development and support of research and artistic organizations, regarding “copyright infringements of Sergei Prokofiev’s works,” to be an indirect response to Meyerhold and Soloviev’s claim. It begins by noting that the tremendous international popularity of Prokofiev’s music paired with the unavailability of his newest compositions in the Soviet Union had “given rise to an idea to reprint his latest compositions” in the Soviet Union, an idea that prompted a heated controversy about copyright protection for the composer’s works. The resolution, which I reproduce at length, goes on to state: Although Prokofiev’s compositions are being published in Germany, with which we have not yet reached an agreement, and although Soviet law cannot therefore protect against copyright infringements of Prokofiev’s works, the Music Division of the State Publishing House considers it impossible in this instance to be guided only by formal considerations. Firstly, reaching an agreement is close at hand, for this will be resolved by the very essence of the Soviet-German trade treaty. Secondly, the Music Division of the State Publishing House considers it improper to violate the copyright of a Russian composer. Thirdly, a number of Soviet composers are being published abroad, and the violation of Prokofiev’s copyright [would] inevitably set a precedent, the recurrence of which could destroy the establishment of commercial publishing relations with foreign nations and provoke retaliatory copyright infringements of contemporary Soviet works abroad. However, a different, paltry press, semi-private (though essentially private), owned by Cit[izen] Pereselentsev, has started preparing for publication in Moscow the March from the op[era] Love for Three Oranges, thus initiating a copyright infringement of S. Prokofiev’s works. In view of the aforementioned, and also in view of recent efforts by the governing body of Narkompros to connect Prokofiev and his works with Soviet Russia as closely as possible, something that Prokofiev has been seen to be striving toward, as well, it is strategically necessary to prevent the release of this counterfeit publication of Prokofiev’s opera’s March.

264  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges S. Prokofiev is a member of the Moscow Soc[iet]y of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers. On one hand, the publishing house of Cit[izen] Pereselentsev operates under the company “Music Depot (Notnyi sklad) of the Leningrad Union of Dramatic and Musical Writers. Moscow, 27 Leontevsky Lane.” But both societies are under the jurisdiction of Glavnauka Narkompros. Comparing this information and proceeding from the assumption that the composer’s interests that are protected by the Moscow Society are being violated by an agent, essentially a hidden private entrepreneur, of the Leningrad Union, one assumes that this counterfeit could be warned by the corresponding agreements between both societies, with the guidance of the Artistic Division of Glavnauka.65

A letter sent to Prokofiev on June 14, 1926, by the Moscow Society of Dramatic and Musical Writers stated that publication at the State Music Press of the act II March from Three Oranges had been halted, pending clarification of Prokofiev’s conditions for publishing his works in Russia. Prokofiev considered the Leningrad production of Love for Three Oranges to be the most successful theatrical treatment of his opera. Contact between the composer and Soviet Russia continued. In 1936, the composer moved back permanently to the USSR.

Notes 1. Prokof’ev, “Gody stranstvii,” 356. 2. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 2:132. Translation from Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 271. 3. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 2:133. Translation from Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 273. 4. Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev (1871–1919), prose writer, playwright, predecessor of expressionism in drama. The divertissement authors emphasized the modern world’s tendency to catastrophe that is typical of Andreev’s works. Andreev laid out his ideas on “theatre of panpsychism” in 1912–13 in “Pisma o teatre” and Literaturno-khudozhestvennye al’manakhi. Viktor Aleksandrovich Ryshkov (1862–1924), prose writer and playwright. Author of light comedies and domestic sketches. Meyerhold counted Ryshkov among playwrights who created second-rate “stage contrivances,” believing that his works “deal with temporary and insignificant ideas”; Vendrovskaia and Fevral’skii, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, 20–21. Ignatii Nikolaevich Potapenko (1856–1929), prose writer, playwright, journalist. Meyerhold staged Potapenko plays in 1903–6 in the Russian provinces. In 1910, the director called this author’s works “a reflection of a literary and artistic epoch that had already completed its circle” and was tied to “the traditions of the 60s and 70s” (Vendrovskaia and Fevral’skii, 21), and he counted Potapenko among the epigones of domestic theatre (Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 1:87). 5. V. N. Solov’ev, “Doklad v Gosudarstvennoi akademii iskusstvoznaniia ‘Iz istorii raboty nad commedia dell’arte v russkom teatre epokhi imperializma, v chastnosti v studii Meierkhol’da,’ February 1, 1934, Stenogramma,” Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music (hereafter SPbGMTiMI), Glavnaia inventarnaia kniga No. 7730/44, otdel rukopisei No. 3405 (hereafter GIK and OR). 6. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 232. Blok repeated this characterization in a letter to his wife; Lavrov, A. A. Blok—L. D. Mendeleeva-Blok, 459. See also Solov’ev, “Iz istorii,” 243. 7. Molodtsova, “Komedia del’arte,” 42.

From Divertissement to Opera  |  265 8. Fel’dman, Meierkhol’d i drugie, 365, 368, 374, 380–81, 443. 9. Meierkhol’d, Perepiska, 153–54. 10. Mikhail Ivanovich Tereshchenko (1886–1958), administrator at the Directorate of Imperial Theaters (1911–12), owner of the publishing house Sirin; in 1917, he became the Provisional Government’s Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs. 11. See Rykov, “Moi vstrechi,” 306. 12. Mantsenilov, “Printsessa afrikanskaia,” 523–31. 13. See Enukidze, “Russkie vampuki do i posle ‘Vampuki,’” 37–58. 14. September 22/October 5. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 2:175. Translation from Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 342. 15. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 2:175–76. Translation from Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 342. 16. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 2:146–47. Translation from Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 294. 17. Sergei Ernestovich Radlov (1892–1958), director, theorist, theatre historian. He grew close to Prokofiev in the 1910s thanks to a shared interest in chess. Radlov dedicates several articles to Prokofiev’s opera: Radlov, “Skazka nelepaia,” 6; “K postanovke”; “Shoking,” 4; “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam” (1934), 12–15; and “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam” (1929), 201–7. Nikolai Mikhailovich Foregger (Foregger von Greifenturn, 1892–1939), director, choreographer, designer. Founder of Foregger’s Workshop (MastFor), he developed a system of physical-dance training for actors aimed at developing expressive plasticity and perfect command of the body—skills that would have been useful in the staging of this movement-centric Three Oranges production. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dranishnikov (1893–1939), conductor. Prokofiev’s classmate at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory (in A. N. Esipova’s piano class and in N. N. Cherepnin’s conducting class). Starting in 1914, he worked at the Mariinsky Theatre. 18. Dramsoiuz (Union of Dramatic and Musical Writers) was created to protect authorial copyright. It was founded in 1874 as the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and renamed the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers in 1875. In 1904, it divided into two institutional structures: the Moscow Society of Dramatic and Musical Writers (MODPiK) and the Saint Petersburg division (Dramsoiuz), renamed the Leningrad Union of Dramatic Writers and Composers (LODPiK) in the 1920s. 19. Ivan Vasil’evich Ekskuzovich (1883–1942), manager of the state academic theatres in Moscow and Leningrad from 1924 to 1928. 20. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11287/9, OR 10423. 21. Boris Emilievich Ustinov (1884–1942), Meyerhold’s half-brother. 22. The only surviving letter from Arkady Nikolaevich Meshcheriakov to Meyerhold, dated February 17, 1926, does not mention the opera or divertissement; it focuses on the inheritance rights of Meyerhold’s wife, Zinaida Raikh, after the suicide of her first husband, Sergei Esenin, in December 1925; Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (hereafter RGALI), f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1993. 23. Attempts to unite the MODPiK with the LODPiK began in 1923; in 1925 a conference on merging the two was held, but the Leningrad union refused to merge, and the conference’s resolution was quashed. These actions provoked protest from many society members. See Plotnikov, “Istoriia literaturnoi organizatsii.” 24. Soloviev is referring to his fellow employees of the Theatre Department at the Russian (after 1924, State) Institute of Art History (the former Zubovsky Institute, hereafter RIII), where he worked from 1920 to 1929. Aleksei Aleksandrovich Gvozdev (1887–1939), critic, historian, theatre theorist. Worked at RIII beginning in 1920; from 1922 to 1930, he headed the theatre history department, the employees of which, in their development of theatre history as a discipline, relied heavily on Meyerhold’s theories and theatrical practice. Stefan Stefanovich

266  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Mokulskii (1896–1960), theatre historian and theatre critic. He began working at RIII in 1923. Starting in 1929, he was the institute’s Academic Secretary. 25. The divertissement’s cast of characters does not contain the “operetta fans,” “lyricals,” or “Eccentrics” that Soloviev mentions. Translator’s note: This second, separate group of “Eccentrics” (ektsentristy) were probably students from MastFor (Nikolai Foregger’s workshop), who participated in the opera production as extras. 26. At this time, Prokofiev was actively touring in Europe and America. 27. Glavrepertkom, Chief Committee for the Control of the Repertoire, the censorship bureau that implemented political control over the repertoire. 28. Varvara Nikolaevna Iakovleva (1884 [1885?]–1941), participant in the revolutionary movement; from 1924 to 1926, a leader of the Party’s “left opposition” to which L. D. Trotsky and N. I. Bukharin belonged; in 1926, she announced her break with Trotskyism. From 1922 to 1929, she was Deputy Commissar to A. V. Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment. From 1930 to 1937, she was the RSFSR Commissar of Finance. She was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1941. Iakovleva was politically rehabilitated in 1958. 29. RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 2382, ll. 16–17 verso. 30. Vladimir F. Romashkov (1862–1939), stage actor, member of the Leningrad Union of Dramatic and Musical Writers, film director, film actor. 31. Aki, academic theatres; in January 1920, this name was given to the former imperial theatres. Translator’s note: Academic theatres included the Bolshoi, the Maly, and the like, but also some newer theatres, such as the Moscow Art Theatre and the Moscow Kamerny Theatre. 32. RGALI, f. 998. op. 1, ed. khr. 2382, ll. 18–18 verso. 33. Prokofiev read the divertissement and pondered working on the opera during the journey from Moscow to Tokyo. He began composing it in December 1918 in the US; see Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 2:146–90. 34. Posters, playbills, and official sources, such as the Bol’shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia (vol. 27, Moscow, 2005) and Muzikal’naia entsiklopediia (vol. 7, col. 453, Moscow 1978) list Gozzi’s fiaba as Prokofiev’s source for Three Oranges; Meyerhold, Vogak, and Soloviev’s divertissement is not mentioned. 35. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11287/91, OR 10424. Partially published in Meierkhol’d, Perepiska, 1896–1939, 388. 36. The First Symphonic Ensemble (Persimfans, Moscow 1922–32): the first orchestra in [Western] music history that performed without a conductor. It was created under the influence of the concept of “collective creation” (choral singing, choral poetry recitation, etc.) that became widespread in Russia after the Revolution. 37. SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11278/94, OR 10427. 38. February 25, 1926. 39. For parallel descriptions of the stage configuration in the opera libretto and divertissement, see Prokof’ev, Liubov k trem apel’sinam libretto, 15 (hereafter Libretto); Oves, Nauchno isledovatel’skii proekt, 1:55; and the translations of the divertissement (chap. 7) and libretto (chap. 12) in this book. A similar stage configuration is described in Solov’ev, “Opyt razverstki,” 2:79, 2:86. 40. See Oves, Nauchno isledovatel’skii proekt, 1: 64–66; Prokof’ev, Libretto, 26–28. 41. Prokof’ev, Libretto, 39–40. 42. Prokof’ev, 30, 32. 43. Prokof’ev, 46. 44. Prokof’ev, 63. 45. Prokof’ev, 49. Prokofiev’s libretto text notes this as a “French exclamation.” Translator’s note: This exclamation appears both in the divertissement and in Gozzi’s fiaba, with a slightly different spelling in the latter.

From Divertissement to Opera  |  267 46. According to Soloviev’s notebook, he left for Moscow on Friday, April 23 (SPbGMTiMI, GIK 11291/ 17, OR 10780, l. 31). 47. Soloviev refers here to Prokofiev’s autobiographical notes, first published in the second issue of the magazine K novym beregam (Moscow, 1923: 15), republished identically in Glebov, Dranishnikov, and Radlov, Liubov’, 5. 48. RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 2382, ll. 14–15 verso. 49. See Stepanov, Teatr masok, 34–38. 50. Radlov, “Shoking,” 4. From 1920 to 1922, Radlov was the director of the Petrograd People’s Comedy Theatre, which included circus performers along with dramatic actors. 51. November 17/30, 1918. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2002), 1:751. Translation from Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 359. 52. The need to reform musical theatre was widely discussed in the 1920s Russian press. See, e.g., Miatezhnyi, “Omolozhenie,” 8–10. 53. Editor’s note: this is specific to the 1926 production. B. B., “Liubov’,” 9. 54. K-oi, “Liubov’,” 7. 55. Prokof’ev, Libretto, 63. 56. Valer’ianov, “Prokof’ev,” 6. 57. Glebov, Dranishnikov, and Radlov, Liubov’, 19. 58. The opera’s borrowing from the divertissement is vaguely alluded to by K. Tverskoi (K. K. Kuzmin-Karavaev, pseudonym K-oi); see K-oi, “Liubov’,” 8; Levinson, Stat’i o teatre, 137. 59. Gvozdev, “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam II,” 16. 60. “Leningradskoe obshchestvo dramaticheskikh i muzykal’nykh pisatelei. September 17, 1926–May 16, 1927.” Saint Petersburg State Central Archive (hereafter TsGA SPb), f. 2555, op. 1, ed. khr. 1099, ll. 71–5. 61. “Leningradskoe obshchestvo dramaticheskikh i muzykal’nykh pisatelei ‘Dramsoiuz.’ Godovoi otchet za 1926–27.” Saint Petersburg State Central Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI SPb), f. 367, op. 1, ed. khr. 1. 62. “Soiuz dramaticheskikh i muzykal’nykh pisatelei. 1922–26 gg.” TsGA SPb, f. 1001, op. 6, ed. khr. 181, ll. 237–53. 63. “Soiuz dramaticheskikh i muzykal’nykh pisatelei. Kantseliariia pravleniia. Perepiska Pravleniia s dramaturgami i kompozitorami o vstuplenie v obshchestvo. December 28, 1925–July 27, 1926.” RGALI, f. 675, op. 1, ed. khr. 34. 64. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik (2017), 3:53. In calling Meyerhold “an atheist,” Prokofiev refers ironically to the spread in the Soviet 1920s of atheist propaganda and to the “Union of Atheists,” established in 1925. 65. RGALI, f. 675, op. 1, ed. khr. 34, l. 626.

Bibliography Andreev, Leonid. “Pisma o teatre.” Literaturno-khudozhestvennye al’manakhi izdatel’stva Shipovnik. Vol. 22, 225–90. Saint Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1914. ———. “Pisma o teatre.” Maski 3 (1912–1913): 3–13. B. B. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam. K predstoiashchei postanovke v Ak-opere.” Rabochii i teatr, no. 5 (February 2, 1926): 9. Blok, A. A. Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, edited by V. N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov, and K. I. Chukovskii. Vol. 7. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960–63.

268  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Enukidze, Natela. “Russkie vampuki do i posle ‘Vampuki’: nekotorye nabliudeniia nad istoriei opernoi parodii.” Uchenye zapiski Rossiiskoi Akademii muzyki imeni Gnesinykh 1 (2012): 37–58. Fel’dman, O. M., ed. Meierkhol’d i drugie: dokumenty i materialy (Meierkhol’dovskii sbornik, issue 2). Moscow: O.G.I., 2000. Glebov, Igor, V. A. Dranishnikov, and Sergei Radlov, eds. Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam: k postanovke opery Sergeia Prokof ’eva: Avtograficheskie dannye i stat’i. Leningrad: Academiia, 1926. Gvozdev, A. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam II.” Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 9 (March 2, 1926): 16. K-oi (K. K. Kuz’min-Karavaev). “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Rabochii i teatr, no. 9 (March 2, 1926): 7. Lavrov, A. V., ed. A. A. Blok—L. D. Mendeleeva-Blok: Perepiska, 1901–1917. Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2017. Levinson, A. Stat’i o teatre: 1913–1930, edited by S. G. Sboeva. Moscow: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr, 2017. Mantsenilov, Anchar (M. N. Volkonskii). “Printsessa afrikanskaia. Obraztsovoe libretto dlia opery.” In Russkaia teatral’naia parodiia XIX–nachala XX veka: Sbornik, edited by M. Ia. Poliakov, 523–31. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976. Meierkhol’d, V. E. Perepiska: 1896–1939, edited by V. P. Korshunova and M. M. Sitkovetskaia. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976. ———. Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy. Vol. 1. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968. Miatezhnyi, S. “‘Omolozhenie’ opery i baleta (Dva ocherednykh subbotnika MODPIKa).” Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 6 (February 9, 1926): 8–10. Molodtsova, M. M. “Komedia del’ arte v teatral’noi mysli XX veka.” In Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam” (1914–1916), edited by L. S. Oves. Vol. 2, 24–42. Saint Petersburg: Rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv (RIII), 2014. Oves, L. C., ed., Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 1914–1916. 2 vols. Saint Petersburg: RIII, 2014. Plotnikov, K. N. “Istoriia literaturnoi organizatsii Vserosskomdram (po materialam Otdela rukopisei IMLI RAN).” PhD diss., A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Science, 2015. Prokof’ev, Sergei S. Dnevnik 1907–1933. 3 vols. Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2017. ———. Dnevnik: 1907–1933. 2 vols. Paris: Sprkfv, 2002. ———. “Gody stranstvii (Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala K novym beregam).” In Sergei Prokof ’ev. Stat’i i materialy, edited by I. V. Nest’ev and Georgii Edel’man, 355–58. Moscow: Muzyka 1965. ———. Liubov k trem apel’sinam. Libretto. Moscow: Muzyka, 1969. Prokofiev, Sergei. Diaries 1915–1923. Behind the Mask, edited and translated by Anthony Phillips. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Radlov, S. E. “K postanovke ‘Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.’” In Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam: k postanovke opery Sergeia Prokof ’eva: avtograficheskie dannye i stat’i, edited by Igor Glebov, V. A. Dranishnikov, and Sergei Radlov, 32–36. Leningrad: Academia, 1926. ———. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” In Sergei Radlov, Desiat’ let v teatre, 201–7. Leningrad: Priboi, 1929. ———. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” In Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam: opera S. S. Prokof ’eva, edited by B. V. Asaf’ev, V. A. Dranishnikov, and Sergei Radlov, 12–15. Leningrad: Len. gos. akad. teatra opery i baleta, 1934.

From Divertissement to Opera  |  269 ———. “Shoking.” Krasnaia gazeta (evening edition), no. 43 (February 18, 1926); 4. ———. “Skazka nelepaia i chudnaia.” Rabochii i teatr, no. 7 (February 16, 1926): 6. Rykov, A. V. “Moi vstrechi s Meierkhol’dom.” In Khudozhnik i zrelishche, edited by A. P. Vasil’ev and V. Kuleshova, 305–27. Мoscow: Sovietskii khudozhnik, 1990. Solov’ev, V. N. “Iz istorii liubitel’skogo teatra v Peterburge.” In Meierkhol’d i drugie: dokumenty i materialy (Meierkhol’dovskii sbornik, issue 2), edited by O. M. Fel’dman, 239–47. Moscow: O.G.I., 2000. ———. “Opyt razverstki ‘stseny nochi’ v traditsiiakh ital’ianskoi improvizovannoi komedii.” In Nauchno-issledovatel’skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol’da “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam” (1914–1916), edited by L. S. Oves. Vol. 2, 77–87. Saint Petersburg: Rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv (RIII), 2014. Stepanov, O. B. Teatr masok v opere S. Prokof ’eva “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Moscow: Muzyka, 1972. Valer’ianov, B. “Prokof’ev (K postanovke ‘Liubvi k trem apel’sinam’ v Ak-opere).” Rabochii i teatr, no. 7 (February 16, 1926), 6. Vendrovskaia, L. D., and A. V. Fevral’skii. Tvorcheskoe nasledie V. E. Meierkhol’da. Moscow: Vserossiiskoe teatral’noe obshchestvo, 1978.

Part III The Opera Brown: What greatness, what deep, vital life can be found in the fairy tales of Gozzi! Take, for instance, The Raven or The King Stag—and it is incomprehensible why these marvelous dramas, which contain situations that are far more vivid than those other, new, lauded tragedies, aren’t used successfully, at the very least, as opera librettos. .

—E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager

12 Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev Translated, introduced, and annotated by Kevin Bartig

Prokofiev’s “Effervescent” Libretto On April 21, 1918, eleven days before Sergei Prokofiev set out on his journey from Petrograd to New York, Vsevolod Meyerhold offered him a copy of the Love for Three Oranges divertissement, his answer to the composer’s request for “an effervescent subject for an opera.”1 Prokofiev found time to pore over the divertissement amid the bustle of last-minute travel preparations, noting in his journal that “something could really be done with it, except that the plot would need to be completely rewritten. The music should be clear, lively, and as simple as it can be made.”2 He began to tackle that challenge five months later and thousands of miles away, aboard a train racing from New York to Chicago. From that moment until the delivery of the full score almost a year later, Prokofiev worked independently, primarily from his base in New York. These circumstances would be unremarkable were it not to be the exception in his career. Other large dramatic works he composed later—ballets, operas, incidental music—almost always involved ready-made scenarios, collaboration, revisions, and, at times, heavy-handed bureaucratic intervention. In contrast, composing Three Oranges was an independent project, right down to the libretto that Prokofiev turned out piecemeal while working on the opera. He insisted in his journal that this was the only way: writing words inspired the musical ideas with which they would eventually be paired.3 Looking back on the opera some two decades later, Prokofiev credited the divertissement’s “mixture of fairy-tales, jokes, and satire” with firing his imagination.4 In the moment, he documented a more personal reaction—that

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the divertissement’s squabbling spectators reminded him of the real-life critics who found his music lacking “lyricism and sensuousness.”5 Even while considering an operatic satire of such critics, he worried they would condemn the subject’s lack of topicality when the world was “groaning under the yoke.” (The Treaty of Versailles had been signed only a week earlier, and Russia was facing a protracted civil war.)6 Three weeks later and already committed to a new opera based on the Oranges divertissement, Prokofiev recorded a more extensive rationale: Gozzi in his original play has too much that is personal and of purely topical interest. . . . Many of the attacks on his contemporaries are incomprehensible and irrelevant today, but some of them are not, such as the fight against bombast, triviality, and so on. I am removing local and topical elements and replacing them, at least that is my intention, with the universal and timeless. I know that when my opera is performed in Petrograd I shall be attacked by some who say that at a time of worldwide conflict and social convulsion one must be an insensible block of wood to alight on such a heedless, shallow subject (but might it not be that one is a person too much dedicated to pure art?! What say you Gentlemen Tragicals?). Others will see it as yet another example of my propensity for restless overactivity, rather than lyricism.7

This passage is thick with past critical wounds and anxiety over potential future ones, all incongruously mixed with remarkable self-assurance. As if convincing himself of his artistic independence and originality, Prokofiev wrote that Gozzi’s fiaba would eventually be but a “trunk on to which completely different foliage will have been grafted.”8 Prokofiev failed to grasp the extent of the “foliage” already grafted by Meyerhold, Vladimir Soloviev, and Konstantin Vogak. The playbill for the opera’s world premiere credited Carlo Gozzi as Prokofiev’s source, as did the piano-vocal score published the following year.9 It remains unclear, however, how intentional this was on Prokofiev’s part. He perused a copy of the fiaba given to him by Alexandre Benois and would have been aware at least of the major differences between it and the divertissement.10 His perusal may have been cursory enough that he failed to note that what became his opera’s most intriguing feature, namely, its cast of “spectators,” was Meyerhold’s innovation, not Gozzi’s (much to Meyerhold’s later consternation, as Julia Galanina reveals in her contribution to this volume). Many critics and scholars have written the divertissement out of the opera’s historiography, but even a cursory glance at the translations of the dramatic pieces in this book reveals Prokofiev’s debts to his Russian colleagues.11 The greatest of these is the opera’s Prologue, which is entirely unlike the opening of Gozzi’s fiaba. To Gozzi’s tale, Meyerhold and his collaborators

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Figure 12.1. Photo of Prince Tartaglia’s bedroom, act II, scene 1, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre (premiere: December 30, 1921). Historic Scenic Collection, Series IV, Box 3, Folder 17. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University.

added a “parade” in which actors make an appearance outside of the main plot as squabbling Commonplace Comedians and Extra-tragic Tragedians, a feature Prokofiev augmented. In the libretto, the Comedians and Tragedians remain—the former calling for laughter and the latter for murders—and are joined by Lyricals insisting on love and “Empty Heads” (pustogolovye) demanding mindless entertainment. Gozzi’s specific attack on local Venetian theatre rivals became, aided by Meyerhold’s intervening refraction, an assault not only on operatic genres but also on conventions, tastes, and traditions. Although Prokofiev’s spectators have the spotlight in the opera’s Prologue, they continually interrupt the ensuing four-act plot, reminding us of its artificiality, its stock tropes, and its hackneyed lines. These four choruses are kept in check by the Eccentrics (chudaki), a band of disgruntled commentators that originally stood in for the divertissement’s three creators. Prokofiev increased their number to ten and, in a brilliant, realism-smashing stroke that Meyerhold surely admired, empowered them to change the course of the fairy-tale plot. In act III, scene 3, they supply the Prince with a bucket of water, saving Ninetta from the fate of her two orange-hatched

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sisters. (No such Eccentric ex machina meddling occurs in scene 10 of the divertissement, where the Prince simply scoops up lake water with his shoe.) Prokofiev’s Eccentrics meddle in the fairy-tale plot a second time, kidnaping Fata Morgana in act IV before she can wreak further havoc. Prokofiev was clearly indulging in a bit of fun. But in the context of an opera about opera, these extradiegetic interventions introduced an artistic self-consciousness that became one of early Modernism’s hallmarks.12 Prokofiev’s other modifications were more routine. Streamlining the action, he cut two of the divertissement’s interludes (a play-within-a-play debate over theatrical genre and a scene in which Truffaldino is promoted to Head Chef), and he reduced Morgana’s and Celio’s virtuoso Martellian-verse battle in scene 11 to some prosaic name calling at the opening of act IV of the libretto. The divertissement’s scenes at Creonta’s castle (scenes 7 and 9) are simplified, eliminating Creonta herself along with the divertissement’s masks: a dog, a rope, and a gate. Prokofiev merged them all in the figure of the Cook (kukharka), the oranges’ terrifying female guard, comically sung by a “hoarse” bass (khriplyi bas) and preposterously distracted by a magic ribbon.13 Prokofiev similarly merges Brighella, who conspires with Leandro and Clarice in the divertissement, with the character of Smeraldina. As a libretto, the divertissement’s action became more efficient and terse. Prokofiev added very little, and only for effect, such as expanding Meyerhold’s forestage servants into a pack of howling devils that dress up both the card game in act I, scene 2, and Fata Morgana’s spell casting in act II, scene 2.14 The libretto’s final scene presents more unaccountable changes. The divertissement and the fiaba both conclude in the King’s kitchen, where it is discovered that Ninetta, the Prince’s fiancée, has been transformed into a dove. Once the spell is broken, all is righted, and the evil forces are either exiled or sent to death at the stake. In a brief epilogue, Truffaldino laments that the plot must conclude there—that is, in typical fairy-tale fashion—lest critics come out with “choice abuse” in their reviews. Prokofiev jettisoned both this concluding scene and the epilogue, replacing it with a rapid-fire finale of his own invention. Ninetta, transformed into a rat rather than a dove, is restored to human form by Celio the Wizard and takes her place on the royal throne. Fata Morgana, having escaped from her Eccentric-imposed imprisonment, escapes with her accomplices through a trap door following a slapstick chase scene that winds from wing to wing. Those who remain proclaim “Long live the King, Prince, and Princess!” as the curtain falls. The seemingly clumsy ending puzzled more than a few critics, and perhaps that was the goal, as Prokofiev seems to have parodied their expectation of operatic denouement.

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Figure 12.2. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Courtyard of the royal palace, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Gouache and watercolor, with pen and black ink, and gold metallic paint, and charcoal, over graphite, selectively varnished, on off-white laid paper. 556 × 773 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.79. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles ChatfieldTaylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

There is no tragedy—significant, if we think of the conclusions of Tosca, La Bohème, Aida, and similar repertory classics—evil forces go unpunished, and Truffaldino is denied his final oration. Easily missed among all these changes are the extensive stage directions that Prokofiev added to the libretto, which dictate everything from the singer’s mood to design details. Their density in the Three Oranges libretto is rivaled only by that of the score for Chout, a darkly comic ballet that Prokofiev wrote in 1915 for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.15 In Chout, the directions effect the tight, pantomime-like coordination of dance and music that Prokofiev had witnessed in earlier Ballets Russes productions. Such an aesthetic was not transferrable to opera, apart from brief moments like the card play of act I, scene 2, and Morgana’s fall in the following scene. Nevertheless, the directions in Three Oranges reveal a concern for visual impact that is atypical of most opera libretti. Prokofiev’s quip that he would have to “rewrite” the divertissement is, in one sense, true. Although Meyerhold and his colleagues transformed Gozzi’s

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reflective description into a workable scenario, the divertissement remained a script for improvisation. Transforming this open scenario into four acts of continuous dialogue, Prokofiev gave us one possible realization of the divertissement. He did so in his native language, although he knew from his earliest negotiations with Cleofante Campanini, the head of the Chicago Opera Association, that the premiere would be given in French translation to an English-speaking audience. The choice of French over Russian (or even English) came down to logistics and conventions. Campanini knew assembling a cast of Russian-proficient singers was beyond the company’s means and that his audiences were used to works in Italian and French. Many found the idea of opera in English suspiciously populist or even “absurd,” as one critic put it in 1921.16 These linguistic acrobatics and politics did not bother Prokofiev, apart from the expense of preparing a French translation. He entrusted the task to Aleksei Stahl, a Russian émigré lawyer he had met during his journey to the United States, and Stahl’s partner, the Brazilian soprano Vera Janacopulous.17 Linguistic politics did, however, give way to some later myths. One of Prokofiev’s first English-language biographers insisted that the world premiere of Three Oranges failed precisely because the composer had written in French rather than English—an assertion that is doubly false considering the premiere was hardly a failure and the original language was Russian.18 Curious inaccuracies such as these have been disseminated in program and liner notes and plague even recent scholarly literature (one recent study suggests Russian was “unacceptable” in American theatres, forcing Prokofiev to write in French because his English was too weak).19 In his lifetime, Prokofiev heard Three Oranges performed in French, German, and Russian; supported planned productions in English and Serbo-Croatian; and never expressed a linguistic preference.

Translation Note The following translation is based on the original Russian-language text as given in the 1922 Gutheil score, which includes Prokofiev’s extensive stage directions. Although the libretto has been translated many times over the opera’s one hundred–year history, the following translation is the first made in a comparative context. Dassia N. Posner and I developed our translations (of divertissement and libretto, respectively) simultaneously, allowing us to render passages that Prokofiev took verbatim from the divertissement identically. Given the stylistic differences between the two works, these passages are unsurprisingly few and, in the following text, appear in bold font. Far more

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common are passages that Prokofiev paraphrased. To facilitate comparison across the dramatic pieces, these passages are indicated with footnotes containing the corresponding divertissement text. Syllable count and stress is one of the most challenging aspects of libretto translation. For a translation to be useful in performance, it must match both the number of notes in a given phrase and the accentual pattern implied by the underlying meter. Because many excellent performance-minded translations already exist, I strove first and foremost to match the style and character of the libretto’s divertissement source. However, I remained sensitive to syllable count to preserve the characteristically brisk pace of Prokofiev’s dialogue, and the following translation could be adapted for performance with relatively few modifications.

Love for Three Oranges Opera in Four Acts (Ten Scenes) with Prologue by Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev Translated by Kevin Bartig

Dramatis Personae The King of Clubs (bass), the king of an imaginary kingdom, whose clothing is just like a playing-card king The Prince (tenor), his son Princess Clarice (contralto), the King’s niece Leandro (baritone), first minister, dressed as the King of Spades Truffaldino (tenor), a person who knows how to laugh Pantalone (baritone), attendant to the King Celio the Wizard (bass), who protects the King Fata Morgana (soprano), witch, who protects Leandro Princesses in oranges: •  Linetta (contralto)

•  Nicoletta (mezzo-soprano) •  Ninetta (soprano) Cook (hoarse bass) Farfarello (bass), a devil Smeraldina (mezzo-soprano), a Moorish girl20 Master of Ceremonies (tenor) Herald (bass) Trumpeter (bass trombone) Ten Eccentrics (five tenors, five basses) Tragedians (basses) Comedians (tenors) Lyricals (sopranos and tenors) Empty Heads (altos and baritones) Little Devils (basses) Medics (tenors and baritones) Courtiers (full chorus) Silent roles: Monsters, drunks, gluttons, guards, servants, four soldiers

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PROLOGUE Curtain down. A large forestage. At each side of the forestage stand two towers with little balconies and balustrades.* From stage right the Tragedians enter at a run with their heads down, furiously waving umbrellas.† TRAGEDIANS Tragedy! Tragedy! High tragedy! Philosophical solutions to the world’s problems! (The Comics run onto the forestage from stage left, brandishing whips.) COMEDIANS Comedy! Comedy! Life-giving laughter! TRAGEDIANS Sorrow! Murders! Suffering fathers! COMEDIANS Health-giving laughter! TRAGEDIANS (attacking the Comedians) No more laughter! COMEDIANS No more tragedy! TRAGEDIANS Give us something profound! (The Tragedians wave umbrellas and force the Comedians to the left.‡ The Comedians retreat to stage left. The Lyricals appear from stage right holding green branches. They move to the center of the forestage without attacking anyone. The Empty Heads enter from stage right carrying canes and immediately attack the Lyricals.) COMEDIANS Give us something joyful!

* In the divertissement: “Tall towers (with external spiral staircases, little balconies, and balustrades) are set up for the Fools at either side of an expansive forestage.” This book, 161. Further citations from the divertissement are given in parentheses. Libretto footnotes by Dassia N. Posner. † Divertissement: “Three Eccentrics enter at a run” (161). ‡ In the divertissement, the Comedians are also forced left (161).

282  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges TRAGEDIANS You scoffers, you! COMEDIANS You tormentors! COMEDIANS (falling back to stage left) Murderers! TRAGEDIANS Something tragic! Desperately sad! Something transcendental! COMEDIANS Be gone! Be gone! Be gone! Be gone! LYRICALS Drama, lyrical drama! Filled with romantic love! Flowers! The moon! Show us tender kisses! Give us lovelorn yearning! EMPTY HEADS Farces! Farces! Entertaining nonsense! Double entendres! (Having dispersed the Lyricals, they face off with the Tragedians) Elegant costumes! TRAGEDIANS (assailing the Empty Heads) Vulgar people! Vulgar! Philanderers! Good-for-nothings! Parasites! Parasites! Parasites! EMPTY HEADS (to the Tragedians) Melancholiacs be gone! Off with daft know-it-alls! We don’t want to think, we want to laugh, we want to laugh, we want to laugh! Give us healing laughter! Give us witty dialogue and clever plots! Comedy! Comedy! Give us, give us, give us, give us, give us comedy! TRAGEDIANS Tragedy, give us tragedy!

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  283 LYRICALS Gentle, dreamy lyricism! EMPTY HEADS Farces! Farces! (Ten Eccentrics enter at a run through the center curtain and disperse those fighting with gigantic shovels.)* ECCENTRICS Quiet! Quiet! TRAGEDIANS Tragedies! EMPTY HEADS Farces! ECCENTRICS Off with you all! COMEDIANS Comedies! ECCENTRICS Off to the hall! LYRICALS Love! ECCENTRICS Off now to the gallery! (They force the quarrelling groups offstage on both sides with their shovels.) We present to you! We have a show for you! This is real!† Incomparable! (In ecstasy) Love for three oranges! * Divertissement: “Three Eccentrics enter at a run through the center curtain and separate those fighting” (161). † Divertissement: “[T]hose actors will perform something real!” (161).

284  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Love for three oranges! (Having dispersed the crowd, the Eccentrics climb up to the towers, the tenors to one and the basses to the other.) Listen! Look! Look! Listen! (They shout from the towers toward the stage.) Curtain! Raise the curtain! (The center curtain parts slightly to admit the Herald and the Trumpeter.* The trumpeter plays a bass trombone.) HERALD (officiously) The King of Clubs is in despair because his son, the crown prince, is sick with a hypochondriacal illness.† (Both exit) ECCENTRICS (with joyful excitement) It’s beginning! It’s beginning! It’s beginning! (All together) It’s beginning!

ACT I SCENE 1

(The King’s palace. Beside him is Pantalone. In front of them are the medics with medical instruments.) KING (with feeling) My poor son! (to the medics) Well, tell me, tell me . . . MEDICS (reporting) Pain in the liver, pain in the kidneys, pain in the neck, pain in the temples, an excess of bile, indigestion, severe belching, an agonizing cough, a lack of sleep, a lack of appetite, heart palpitations, dizziness . . .

* Divertissement: “One of the curtain corners is lifted slightly” (161). † Divertissement: “Silvio, King of Cups . . . bemoans the misfortune of his only son, Tartaglia, the crown prince, who contracted an incurable illness ten years ago. The medics diagnosed it as a hopeless hypochondriacal condition” (162).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  285 KING (in horror) Enough! Enough! MEDICS Frequent fainting spells, gloomy thoughts, unpleasant premonitions, indifference to life, complete apathy, acute melancholy, dangerous melancholy, dark melancholy . . . KING (covering his ears) Enough! Enough! MEDICS (with authority, concluding) An incurable hypochondriacal condition. KING What? What? MEDICS An incurable hypochondriacal condition. KING And now what? MEDICS A hopeless case.* (With a tragic wave of his arm, the King dismisses the medics, who collect their instruments and leave.) KING (in despair) Poor, poor Prince! PANTALONE Poor, poor Prince! KING My poor, poor, son! PANTALONE Poor, poor Prince!

* Divertissement: “A hopeless hypochondriacal condition” (162).

286  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges PANTALONE, KING (repeating the medics’ diagnosis with horror) Incurable . . . hypochondriacal . . . condition . . . (The King collapses onto a chair and lists his son’s illnesses.) KING Pain in the liver, pain in the kidneys, pain in the nape of the neck, pain in the temples, an excess of bile, indigestion, palpitations, dizziness, frequent fainting spells, gloomy thoughts . . . PANTALONE (passionately) Ah, these useless medics! They do not know anything, they cannot cure anything! (Mimicking the medics)* “Pain in the liver!” They need to cure the pain in the liver! “Pain in the kidneys!” They need to cure the kidney pain! KING I am old now. Who will inherit my kingdom? Must it be my niece Clarice? Such a strange one? A cruel woman?† (Sobbing) Woe is me! PANTALONE Poor you! KING Oh, my poor son! PANTALONE Poor him! KING Oh, poor kingdom! (Sobs) PANTALONE Yes, poor! (Pantalone sobs, clinging to the king’s mantle. The Eccentrics observe the King with concern, fearing he will forget his station in front of the audience.) * Divertissement: “Pantalone dresses up as a charlatan and mimics the medics” (163). † Divertissement: “Princess Clarice—a bizarre, strange, cruel girl” (163).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  287 ECCENTRICS He’s forgetting his majesty! He’s forgetting his majesty! PANTALONE (calming the King) There now . . . there now . . . KING (calming down, musingly) Once the medics said that only laughter could perhaps cure him . . .* PANTALONE (with conviction) That’s what’s needed, he needs to laugh! KING It is hopeless. PANTALONE (more and more animated) It is crucial that he laugh! Why is our palace in mourning?† Why does everyone go about so downcast? If this goes on our Prince will never laugh. He needs merriness all around him. (having discovered a way to the Prince’s recovery, joyfully) Let’s have festivities, plan games, masquerades, put on brilliant performances, find people who know how to laugh.‡ KING The poor Prince will never laugh! PANTALONE (remembering the necessary name) Truffaldino! Truffaldino! Truffaldino! KING Games? Performances? (Waving his hand) It won’t help . . . PANTALONE Help or not, we have to try. (Calling backstage) Truffaldino! (Truffaldino runs headlong straight to Pantalone.) * Divertissement: “Only laughter will be the unmistakable sign of his recovery” (163). † Divertissement: “Pantalone reflects that if Prince Tartaglia’s recovery depends on him laughing, the court should not be kept in mourning” (163). ‡ Divertissement: “Festivities, games, masquerades, performances” (163).

288  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges TRUFFALDINO What can I do for you? PANTALONE (importantly) You can serve the King. (Truffaldino rushes to the King and falls to his knees.) KING (pensively) Truffaldino, look here: I want to declare festivities and try to get our Prince to laugh. TRUFFALDINO (pattering) Consider it done. The merriest festivities. (Truffaldino runs offstage. Angered by his behavior, the King stomps his foot.) KING Well what was that? PANTALONE (pleased) Truffaldino, a fine fellow! (To himself) A fine fellow. (The King claps his hands. Servants enter) KING Summon Leandro, our prime minister. PANTALONE (quietly and angrily) Oh, Leandro . . . he means ill . . . He wants the Prince to die. . . .* (Leandro enters and bows deeply and ceremoniously) KING Leandro, immediately announce merry games and festivals, clever performances, elaborate masquerades. (The Eccentrics, satisfied with the King’s decree, repeat after him)

* In the divertissement, Pantalone observes in an aside that Leandro has “a desire to destroy the prince” (164).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  289 ECCENTRICS Games! Festivals! Performances! Masquerades, masquerades, never enough masquerades! LEANDRO Oh King, our patient will not laugh. ECCENTRICS Bacchanals are needed! Bacchanals! Bacchanals! Bacchanals!21 LEANDRO. None of this can hope to help. PANTALONE (angrily) Ah! KING We need to try it all the same. (Decreeing) Games, festivals (emphasizing) and bacchanals! ECCENTRICS (satisfied) Ah! LEANDRO (hiding his anger with difficulty) Noise will be harmful to his health! KING (resignedly) Festivals and bacchanals! (Exits) PANTALONE (To Leandro, rabidly) Traitor!! (Follows the King) LEANDRO Buffoon!

SCENE 2

(It grows dark, and a cabbalistic curtain is lowered, leaving only a small part of the stage for the action. The whole scene is steeped in darkness. Fire and smoke burst forth from the ground. Celio the Wizard rises from below with thunder and lightning.)* * Divertissement: “Accompanied by thunder and lightning, sparklers, and the brilliant fireworks of a spectacular show, Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana rise up out of the ground” (164).

290  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges ECCENTRICS (amazed) Celio the Wizard! (Fire and smoke in another spot, near Celio the Wizard. Fata Morgana appears with thunder and lightning.) ECCENTRICS (even more astonished) Fata Morgana! (The stage is crawling with little devils. They place a table between Celio and Morgana. Playing cards bearing the images of the King of Clubs and the King of Spades are placed behind Celio and Morgana respectively.* Both images glow in the dark.) LITTLE DEVILS (howling) Eee! Eee! ECCENTRICS They are playing cards.† (The game begins. Celio deals cards of an unusually large size. The howling little devils begin a circle dance around Celio and Fata Morgana.) CELIO (losing, furiously) Оh! (The little devils fall to their knees.) FATA MORGANA (winning, triumphantly) Ha! (The little devils fall prostrate. The image of the King of Clubs fades. The image of the King of Spades becomes brighter.) ECCENTRICS The poor King! Luck is with Leandro! (Fata Morgana deals the cards; the little devils jump up and with a howl launch into their infernal dance.) * Divertissement: “Forestage servants bring onto the stage face cards from a card deck, including Silvio, King of Cups, and Leandro, Knight of Cups” (164). † Divertissement: “The Herald enters and announces: ‘Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana play cards’” (164).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  291 CELIO (losing again, furiously) Оh! (The little devils fall to their knees.) FATA MORGANA (triumphantly) Ha! (The little devils fall prostrate. The image of the King of Clubs fades even more. The King of Spades becomes even brighter.) ECCENTRICS Again Leandro! The poor King! (Celio plays a card. Howling, the little devils begin to dance even more furiously than before. Fata Morgana lifts the final card high in the air. Celio, finally losing, shakes his fists. Fata Morgana laughs triumphantly and wickedly.) CELIO Damn you! Damn you! FATA MORGANA Ha-ha-ha-ha! LITTLE DEVILS (obsequiously) Fata Morgana! Fata Morgana! FATA MORGANA Leandro! LITTLE DEVILS Eee! CELIO Be gone! (Fata Morgana sinks down, clutching the shining image of the King of Spades. Celio the Wizard sinks down as well, clutching the dark image of the King of Clubs.* The devils scatter, carrying away the table on which the game took place. The cabbalistic curtain rises. Light.) * Divertissement: “Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana begin fighting, to thunder and lightning. They sink down into the ground—Celio the Wizard clutching Silvio, and Fata Morgana clutching Leandro” (164).

292  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

SCENE 3

(The set as in scene 1. Leandro alone, in the same place as before, with his head bowed gloomily.) LEANDRO My wishes meet obstacles, annoying obstacles, malevolent obstacles. (Clarice enters, brusquely, decisively, extravagantly) CLARICE Leandro, remember: if the Prince dies, and I become heir to the throne, I will marry you and give you the crown.* You will remember this, right? LEANDRO (bowing low) Yes, princess. CLARICE Then what are you doing for the health of the Prince? After all, he will live forever with his hypochondriacal illness! To act with such phlegm as you, no, you are not truly worthy of my hand and the throne!† LEANDRO Though I may act a bit slowly, I act surely. CLARICE (contemptuously) Phlegmatic! LEANDRO (in a malevolent whisper, stretching his neck to reach Clarice’s ear) I feed him tragic prose, I nourish him with Martellian verses, with Martellian verses.‡ (The Eccentrics lean out and almost fall from the towers trying to hear to Leandro’s words.) CLARICE (To Leandro incredulously) Really now! * Divertissement: “Clarice . . . has made a deal with Leandro to marry him and raise him to the throne, should she become heir to the throne when her cousin Tartaglia dies” (165). † Divertissement: “Clarice . . . scolds Leandro for his phlegm, for waiting for her cousin to die from an illness as slow as hypochondria” (165). ‡ Divertissement: “Leandro cautiously defends himself, saying that he has put a few paper scraps in Martellian verse in Tartaglia’s bread, which should force him to die slowly from their hypochondriacal effects” (165).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  293 LEANDRO I stuff them in his bread, I crumble them in his soup, and he will die from hypochondriacal nightmares. (The Tragedians burst onto the forestage.) TRAGEDIANS Tragedy! Tragedy! High tragedy! ECCENTRICS (clutching their heads) Oh them again! (They jump down from the towers and drive the Tragedians back with shovels.) TRAGEDIANS Grief! Wailing! Murders! Suffering fathers! The profundity of existence! (The Eccentrics drive the Tragedians offstage. The Tragedians burst onto the stage again with unexpected force.) TRAGEDIANS Universal suffering! (The Eccentrics drive them back.) ECCENTRICS Oh how tiresome! (Irritated, they return to the towers.) CLARICE No, Leandro, I doubt your methods. Here we need to act quicker. The Prince needs opium or a bullet.* (Truffaldino crosses upstage, jumping, and with clownish props.† Behind him accoutrements for the festivities and masquerade are carried out, a whole procession.) CLARICE Who is that person?

* Divertissement: Clarice suggests “arsenic or a gunshot.” Leandro then suggests opium (165). † Divertissement: “Meanwhile, Truffaldino crosses upstage toward the curtain carrying clownish props” (165).

294  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges LEANDRO Truffaldino, a comical character. CLARICE Why is he here? LEANDRO He was summoned by the King to amuse the patient. The festivities are scheduled for tomorrow, and this man (angrily pointing in the direction where Truffaldino disappeared, sarcastically) would walk on his head if it made the Prince laugh! ECCENTRICS (merrily and lively) The Prince will be cured when he laughs. Everyone will laugh when he is cured. CLARICE, LEANDRO (gloomily, with evil premonition) The Prince will be cured when he laughs . . . CLARICE This fool is funny. LEANDRO Funny. CLARICE (reproaching Leandro energetically) There you see where your inexplicable slowness leads. The prince needs opium or a bullet. (A vase falls from the table. Leandro and Clarice recoil in fear.) LEANDRO What’s there? (Leandro kicks the table over. Smeraldina crouches under the table.) LEANDRO (threateningly) Stand! (Smeraldina stands.) You pathetic snake! You overheard a state secret, and I will execute you post haste. (Leandro is about to call the guards. Smeraldina runs up to him.) SMERALDINA (in a serious tone) Wait, Leandro! Don’t rush to execute. Misfortune threatens you: (quietly) behind the Prince stands Truffaldino, and behind Truffaldino stands Celio the Wizard.

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  295 LEANDRO Celio? SMERALDINA Look there! (Darkness. Celio, illuminated, crosses upstage.)* LEANDRO (impressed by the appearance) How strange!. . . . CLARICE (on whom the Wizard’s appearance made no impression) And here we have it Leandro. Tomorrow celebrations (dramatically) and the Prince will laugh! (Very energetically) Opium or a bullet! (Pointing to Smeraldina) And have her executed. SMERALDINA Princess, Princess, laughter can be avoided. Leandro, Fata Morgana is with you. She herself will come to the celebration, and the Prince will not laugh in her presence.† LEANDRO (shocked) Fata Morgana? CLARICE (shocked) Fata Morgana? LEANDRO You were sent by her? SMERALDINA Yes. (All three take a few steps forward and, reaching out, call out for Fata Morgana.) SMERALDINA, CLARICE, LEANDRO Fata Morgana! Fata Morgana! Come to the festivities! Make us festivities! Fata Morgana! * Divertissement: “At this, Celio the Wizard crosses the forestage” (165). † Divertissement: “Fata Morgana, who knows about the performances ordered to amuse the prince and make him laugh, has promised to come and counter his healing laughter with a curse that should kill him” (165–6).

296  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

ACT II SCENE 1

(The hypochondriac Prince’s bedroom. The Prince, sitting on a deep armchair, is dressed in caricatured clothing of an invalid.* A compress is on his head. Next to him is a table full of vials, ointments, spittoons, and other paraphernalia related to his condition. Truffaldino, gasping, is finishing a comic dance, which undoubtedly was very long.) TRUFFALDINO (out of breath but exulting) Funny? PRINCE (in a sick voice) Not at all. . . . TRUFFALDINO It really wasn’t funny? PRINCE Boring! My vision is fading, I have a headache, pains in the liver and pains in the kidneys! TRUFFALDINO (sympathetically) Oh, how frustrating! PRINCE Not only frustrating, but much, much worse . . . Oh! Oh! . . . TRUFFALDINO What to do with him? You dance – he doesn’t laugh, you tell a story – boring, you tell jokes – he cries. I am simply exhausted! (The Prince begins to cough from his sighing.) Do you want to cough, your highness? PRINCE Аh. . . . (Sticking out his lower jaw, which is full of saliva, he gestures with his hand, demanding the spittoon.)

* Divertissement: “The scene opens in the hypochondriac prince’s room. The comical Prince Tartaglia is dressed in most amusing invalid clothing. He sits in a large armchair” (166).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  297 TRUFFALDINO Do you want to spit, your highness? PRINCE (pointing with his finger) Аh! TRUFFALDINO (handing the spittoon) Spit. PRINCE (spitting)22 Tfu. Оh! Оh!.. (Truffaldino takes the spittoon and studies its contents; he sniffs.) TRUFFALDINO It stinks of old, rotten, and stinky rhymes.* ECCENTRICS There it is, the Martellian verse!† Leandro . . . The scoundrel! TRUFFALDINO Prince, your highness, a celebration has been prepared for you so that you, with luck, will laugh. Let’s get you dressed and set off presently. PRINCE Get dressed? You’re out of your mind! TRUFFALDINO It will be fun, with laughter, and plenty of entertainment! COMEDIANS (rushing to the forestage) Comedy! Comedy! Merry laughter! Healing laughter! ECCENTRICS Off with you! Off with you now!

* Divertissement: “He takes the spit, examines it, and finds rotten and stinky rhymes” (166). † In the divertissement: the Second Fool shouts this line (166).

298  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges ECCENTRICS Don’t bother Truffaldino. He can manage without you all! COMEDIANS Invigorating situations! ECCENTRICS Off with you! (With shovels they drive back the Comedians, who, struggling, disappear into the wings. The exhausted Eccentrics return to the towers.) PRINCE Оh! (From the wings the sounds of a merry march are heard.)* TRUFFALDINO Listen . . . Listen! They’ve already begun. Let’s go now quickly! PRINCE I’m not going. TRUFFALDINO Oh, now, now . . . PRINCE (interrupting) Give me that medicine! TRUFFALDINO Oh, it’s going to be so fun there! Here is your robe. Put it on over your nightshirt. PRINCE (yelling capriciously) Give me those drops! TRUFFALDINO (passionately) Drops will not help! PRINCE Drops! Twenty drops! * Divertissement: “Musical instruments play, announcing the merry performances taking place in the palace’s great courtyard” (166).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  299 TRUFFALDINO (growing angry, as if at a temperamental child) I’ll throw the drops out the window! (Begins throwing vials and spittoons out the window.)* PRINCE Drops! TRUFFALDINO (throwing flasks) Out the window! The window! The window! PRINCE (with a cry) How dare you! You monster! TRUFFALDINO Out the window! PRINCE You scoundrel! TRUFFALDINO Out the window! PRINCE You rascal! TRUFFALDINO Now let’s go! (Wrapping the Prince with a robe, he lifts him onto his shoulders.) PRINCE Oh! Oh! Oh! (Losing the compress, fighting, and crying) Let me go! Let me go! I’m dying! I’m dying! (Truffaldino carries him off. The Prince yells bloody murder.)†

SCENE 2

(The great courtyard of the royal palace. Seated on a covered terrace are the King, Clarice, and the Prince, wrapped in a robe and fur coats.‡ On the other terraces are ladies and gentlemen of the court, as well as Leandro and Pantalone.) * Divertissement: “Truffaldino flings the vials [and] cups . . . out the window” (166). † Divertissement: “Truffaldino forcibly carries the prince off on his shoulders to enjoy the performances; the prince howls as if he is being disemboweled” (166). ‡ Divertissement: “Palace wall with covered terrace” (167).

300  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges TRUFFALDINO (in the middle of the courtyard, announcing excitedly) Divertissement number one! (With a wave of his hand he orders gates on either side opened. Monsters with enormous heads appear.) COURTIERS Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! TRUFFALDINO (giving orders to the monsters) Forward! Forward! Forward! (A fight with cudgels ensues.* Truffaldino encourages them with funny gestures. One group of monsters attacks the other.) COURTIERS (applauding) Bravo, bravo, bravo! Very interesting! Wonderfully funny! Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! TRUFFALDINO (climbing the steps of the royal terrace) Did the Prince laugh? KING No. PRINCE (in a crying voice) The noise is making me deaf in the head! The air is bothering my lungs!† KING Continue! TRUFFALDINO (to the monsters) Off with you now! (Rushing around the stage, preparing the next divertissement) (Fata Morgana appears on the forestage dressed as a shabby old woman.‡ Leandro, seeing an appearance so unsuitable for the royal court, approaches her.)

* Divertissement: “a joust on horseback” (167). Prokofiev’s “monsters” are likely derived from the divertissement’s “gloomy masks.” † Divertissement: “The prince weeps, complaining that . . . that the air bothers him” (167). ‡ Divertissement: “Fata Morgana enters, transformed into a caricatural little old lady” (167).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  301 LEANDRO Who are you? What do you want? FATA MORGANA I’m Fata Morgana. As long as I’m here, the Prince will not laugh. (Goes over to the wings) LEANDRO (watching her depart with prayerfully folded hands) Benefactress! Queen of hypochondria! TRUFFALDINO (excitedly announcing) Divertissement number two! Turn on the fountains!* (They turn on the first fountain.) TRUFFALDINO (announcing ceremoniously) Oil flows! COURTIERS Оh!! (They open the second fountain.) TRUFFALDINO Wine flows! COURTIERS (applauding) Bravo! Very interesting! TRUFFALDINO (to the guard) Let the drunks and gluttons in! COURTIERS Exceptionally refined! (The guards open the gate. Drunks and gluttons with buckets and all sorts of vessels, pushing and hurrying, rush to the fountains.†)

* Divertissement: “Two fountains begin to flow, one with a stream of oil, the other with wine” (167). † Divertissement: “The people rush over to provision themselves. The most trivial, plebian arguments ensue” (167).

302  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges TRUFFALDINO Hey! Good people, fill up, fill up, fill up! (He laughs himself, enjoying their jostling and quarreling, and then climbs the stairs to the royal terrace.) Did the Prince laugh? KING No. PRINCE (crying) Oh, take me off to a warm bed!* KING Carry on! TRUFFALDINO Oh, what sadness! Guards! Get them out of here! Why are they crowding here! (The guards press the drunks and gluttons back through the gates.) TRUFFALDINO (frustrated, moving to the forestage) Well what can I do? He wants a warm bed! (Fata Morgana hobbles on from the wings. Truffaldino, frustrated by the lack of success, snaps at her.) And just who are you? FATA MORGANA What business is it of yours? TRUFFALDINO How dare you come here? FATA MORGANA How dare you harass me? TRUFFALDINO You do not belong here. * Divertissement: “The Prince . . . entreats His Fatherly Majesty to give the order for him to be carried away to his very warm bed” (167).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  303 FATA MORGANA Leave me alone! TRUFFALDINO Off with you at once! FATA MORGANA Get lost! TRUFFALDINO Such filth like you, and you dare to walk here! FATA MORGANA You scoundrel! Scoundrel! Scoundrel! Let go, let go! Don’t touch me! TRUFFALDINO Through the gate, through the gate! Hurry! Come on, hurry! (shoving Fata Morgana) Get out of here now! (With a shriek, Fata Morgana falls down, legs high in the air)* Ah, to hell with you! (The Prince rises from his chair and begins to laugh. The laughter grows louder and more joyful.†) PRINCE (sputtering) What . . . a funny . . . old woman! ECCENTRICS (in a half-whisper) He laughed . . . KING He laughed . . . COURTIERS He laughed! TRUFFALDINO, PANTALONE, KING, COURTIERS, AND ECCENTRICS He laughed! * Divertissement: “She falls down, legs up in the air” (167). † Divertissement: “Finally, when the little old lady falls, the prince bursts into prolonged, resonant laughter” (167–8).

304  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges (Everyone laughs and dances from joy. A huge weight is lifted from the palace.* The King dances about on his throne. Only Clarice and Leandro do not express joy. The dancing stops suddenly. Fata Morgana rises, menacingly and slowly. The light fades and the courtiers back away in fear.) FATA MORGANA (viciously, to the Prince) You barbarian! Listen! Listen to my curse! Barbarian! Listen!† (The little devils emerge from the cracks and from under the terrace steps and surround Fata Morgana. They howl. Fata Morgana casts her spell.) You will fall in love with three oranges!‡ You will fall in love with three oranges! You will fall in love with three oranges! Through threats through pleas and tears, day and night run, run, run to the three oranges! Run! Run!§ (Fata Morgana vanishes along with the little devils. The courtiers and guards scatter. The King, Prince, Pantalone, and Truffaldino remain. It gradually grows lighter.) ECCENTRICS Oh, what sadness! PRINCE Three oranges . . . Three oranges . . . (The Prince becomes indescribably agitated and, repeating “Three Oranges,” rushes headlong onto the forestage. Pantalone and Truffaldino try to catch him.¶) PANTALONE (catching the Prince) Ah!

* Divertissement: “The spectators laugh heartily, delivered from the oppression caused by the ill health of this unfortunate one” (168). † Divertissement: “Fata Morgana rises from the ground in a rage, emphatically rebukes the prince, and hurls at him the following, obviously charmed, curse: Open thine ears, barbarian: my voice shall assail your heart” (168). ‡ Divertissement: “I pray to dark Pluto and flying Pindar that you may fall in love with three oranges” (168). § Divertissement: “Threats, pleas, and tears—may they be empty spectres and senseless babble. Run to the terrible acquisition of the three oranges!” (168). ¶ Divertissement: “Tartaglia is seized by а violent frenzy of love for the three oranges and rushes headlong onto the forestage, where he is caught” (168).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  305 TRUFFALDINO (catching the Prince) Prince! PANTALONE Prince! TRUFFALDINO Ah . . . Ah . . . PANTALONE Ah, what happened? TRUFFALDINO Prince! PANTALONE Ah! Ah! PRINCE (caught, trying to escape) Three oranges! Creonta has them, I know! ECCENTRICS (with horror) Creonta has them?! The sorceress?* Frightening . . . PRINCE My armor! Breastplate, helmets, swords!† PANTALONE Prince . . . Prince . . . Ah! PRINCE (energetically) Truffaldino, you’ll set off with me. TRUFFALDINO Frightening . . . PRINCE Hurry! * Divertissement: “The Fools in the towers shout: First: It’s not so easy to get the oranges! / Second: Creonta has them! / First: The sorceress!” (169). † Divertissement: “The prince calls for his armor. . . . They arm themselves with breastplates and helmets and choose long, large swords.” (169).

306  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges TRUFFALDINO Oh, how frightening! PRINCE Hurry! KING (approaching the Prince) Whereto, my son?* PRINCE (passionately) To find three oranges, my happiness, my love!† KING Stop, my son . . . PRINCE They languish at Creonta’s, at Creonta’s . . . I need to save them! KING Think, my son! Surely dreadful downfall and death await you! TRUFFALDINO (tragically) And death . . . PANTALONE (tragically) And death . . . PRINCE (rapturously) I love, I love, I love, three oranges! KING (with a more forceful voice) I will not let you go: you are my heir and need to think of the state. PRINCE Hurry! Hurry! PRINCE I love! I love! I don’t need the state! * Divertissement: “Oh, my beloved son, whither goest thou?” (169). † Divertissement: “I know not whither I go. I go to acquire the three oranges. My heart burns with love” (169).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  307 KING You will not go! I command you to stay! PRINCE No, I will not. KING I command you! PRINCE (waving his arms around) No! No! KING (amazed) You’re raising your hand against your father?* PRINCE Hurry, Truffaldino! (He dons the breastplate.) KING (mournfully) Son against father . . . son against father?† Where’d this come from? Surely from vulgar farces! PANTALONE (passionately) Vulgar farces! EMPTY HEADS (rushing in) Farces! Farces! Entertaining nonsense! Double entendres! KING (nervously stamping his foot) Out! EMPTY HEADS Elegant costumes! KING. Get out of here now! ECCENTRICS (jumping down from the towers) Off with you!

* Divertissement: “First [Fool]: The son has raised his hand against his father!” (169). † Divertissement: “He goes so far as to make violent threats against his father. The king . . . reflects that his son’s lack of respect is due to the example set by the new comedies” (169).

308  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges EMPTY HEADS We don’t want to think, we want to laugh. ECCENTRICS Off with you! It’s difficult enough here. (They drive them out with shovels) EMPTY HEADS (retreating) Farces! Farces! (The Eccentrics, having driven out the Empty Heads, return to the towers.) PRINCE (ready to go) Farewell, father. After all, if I were to stay, I would again succumb to melancholy.* KING (frightened) Go then, go now! Go now quickly! TRUFFALDINO Oh how frightening! How frightening! (The devil Farfarello, with a bellows, leaps out and, jumping, blows the Prince and Truffaldino from behind. The Prince and Truffaldino fly away like an arrow.† Farfarello follows them.) KING (in complete despair) All is lost! (He faints and falls to the ground.) PANTALONE (in genuine grief ) Dreadful for the family and dreadful for the state! (Falls down beside the King)

ACT III SCENE 1

(A Desert. Celio the Wizard is making circles, summoning Farfarello.‡)

* Divertissement: “The possessed prince insists. He will succumb to hypochondria again if they don’t let him go” (169). † Divertissement: “Behind them, the Devil with the bellows blows them from behind and forces them into a headlong run” (173). ‡ Divertissement: “The scene opens in the desert. We see Celio the Wizard, Prince Tartaglia’s protector, making circles. He summons the devil Farfarello” (172).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  309 CELIO (summoning) Farfarello! Farfarello! (He repeats many times) (Farfarello appears.) FARFARELLO Hola! Who calls me forth out of the darkness and dread? Are you a real wizard? A theatrical wizard?* CELIO (guardedly) I am a theatrical and a real wizard. (Raising his voice) And very frightening and awe-inspiring. Be careful, be obedient. Answer me! FARFARELLO Ask me. CELIO Answer me. Where are they? FARFARELLO Lying down. CELIO Why are they lying down? FARFARELLO (a bit ironically) I blew at them (blows the bellows), but I was needed in hell, so I left them. CELIO Where are you blowing them? FARFARELLO To Creonta’s castle. CELIO And do you know that they will be killed there? FARFARELLO That is why I am blowing them there. * Divertissement: “Holá, who calls me forth from the center of darkness and dread? Are you a real wizard or a theatrical one?” (172).

310  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges CELIO (making magical gestures, commandingly) I implore you—stop! Stop! Stop! I implore! FARFARELLO Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! (archly) Remember, wizard: you lost them at cards, and therefore your curses won’t help. Farewell. (Farfarello disappears. Celio’s impotent anger. The Prince and Truffaldino enter cheerfully.) PRINCE The wind has stopped: that means the oranges are close. TRUFFALDINO I do believe that was a cyclone. PRINCE No matter. TRUFFALDINO Or perhaps it was trade winds. PRINCE No matter. CELIO (stopping them) Where are you going, crazy ones?! PRINCE To find the three oranges. CELIO (with horror) But they are in Creonta’s castle! PRINCE I do not fear Creonta. CELIO But a monstrous cook lives there! PRINCE I do not fear the cook. Hurry, Truffaldino!

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  311 CELIO (wide-eyed from horror) But the cook will surely kill you with her soup ladle! PRINCE I love, I love, I love the three oranges! CELIO (making scary gestures) With a big copper ladle! PRINCE I must get the three oranges. CELIO With a ladle to the brow, right there! TRUFFALDINO Oh, how frightening, so frightening! CELIO You cannot fathom what kind of ladle! PRINCE (decisively) I do not fear the ladle. Hurry, Truffaldino! CELIO (seeing that it is impossible to hold the Prince back) Listen now, Truffaldino . . . (Mysteriously) Here is a magic ribbon. I can’t be sure, but perhaps it will distract the cook. Then quickly grab the oranges! TRUFFALDINO (fastening the ribbon) Thank you, kind wizard. PRINCE (losing patience) Hurry, Truffaldino! CELIO But remember, crazy children: if you manage to get the three oranges, open them only near water, otherwise there will be sorrow.* * Divertissement: “But during the journey, / It is dangerous to open the oranges: / They may be opened, remember well, / Only by a source of water” (174).

312  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges PRINCE Oh delightful oranges! TRUFFALDINO Thank you, kind wizard! PRINCE Farewell! (Farfarello leaps out with the bellows. The Prince and Truffaldino fly forward like an arrow. Farfarello follows after them.) CELIO (conjuring them forward) May the horrible ladle spare you!

SCENE 2 (The courtyard of Creonta’s castle. Farfarello blows in the Prince and Truffaldino, who are running headlong and at last collapse. Farfarello disappears.) PRINCE (rising slightly) Where are we? TRUFFALDINO I shudder to think. . . . (They see a large sign on the castle and read one syllable at a time.) TRUFFALDINO Cre . . . on . . . ta. . . . (They leap up in mad fear) Ah! What horrors! TRUFFALDINO We will meet our deaths! PRINCE It’s so frightening! TRUFFALDINO Let us go, Prince . . .

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  313 PRINCE Hold on. TRUFFALDINO Let us go quickly. PRINCE No, no. We must get the three oranges. TRUFFALDINO Oh, how frightening! PRINCE Frightening . . . TRUFFALDINO Frightening. . . . PRINCE Listen, Truffaldino, didn’t the wizard say we must look for them in the kitchen? TRUFFALDINO The kitchen. PRINCE The kitchen? TRUFFALDINO The kitchen. PRINCE Here’s the kitchen (Sneaking into the kitchen.) TRUFFALDINO Prince, beware of the cook! PRINCE Oh, delightful oranges!

314  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges TRUFFALDINO Prince . . . Prince . . . there is the monstrous cook! PRINCE (rapturously) Oranges! TRUFFALDINO She will kill us with her ladle! PRINCE Oranges! (The cook shakes the door noisily from the inside. The Prince and Truffaldino leap back with a cry. The cook shakes the door again.) TRUFFALDINO This is our end! PRINCE Our death! (They run headlong from the kitchen and hide in different corners. The door is wide open and the cook appears carrying a massive ladle.) COOK (with a hoarse bass) Who’s whining here? (Looking around. Louder.) I said, who is whining here? (Not receiving an answer, she moves forward, looking from side to side.) I’ll get you, I’ll get you. I’m going to get you. I’m going to get you. (She finds Truffaldino. He is out of his mind with fear.) COOK Oh you, rascal! TRUFFALDINO (groaning) Ah! Ah! Oh! COOK (angrily) You rascal, look where you got to! TRUFFALDINO Ah . . . I . . . cook . . . dear cook. . . .

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  315 COOK I’ll grab your legs and throw you in the oven!* TRUFFALDINO Please don’t . . . dear cook . . . COOK With a ladle to the brow, and off to the slop pail! TRUFFALDINO I’m here by mis . . . by mistake . . . by mistake . . . (Truffaldino tries to escape. The cook waves her ladle and, catching him by the collar, shakes him mercilessly.) COOK Running off now? I’ll shake the life from you. (angrily) Off to the kitchen! (Suddenly she notices the magic ribbon and is immediately interested.) What’s this you have here? TRUFFALDINO (still not coming around) A ribbon . . . COOK Ribbon? What a wonderful ribbon! TRUFFALDINO (tentatively) Really . . . wonderful? COOK A wonderfully beautiful ribbon. Where did you get it? TRUFFALDINO (beginning to grow bolder) Well you see . . . cook . . . it’s a . . . secret . . . COOK What now? A secret! * Divertissement: “Oh baker-woman, baker-woman, endure not my shame: seize them by the legs and throw them in the oven” (175).

316  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges (The Prince disappears into the kitchen with exaggerated, silent steps.) Ah the ribbon is indeed very, very nice. Would you give it to me as a gift? Ah? (Coquettishly) A keepsake . . . A keepsake . . . (The Prince emerges from the kitchen with three huge oranges the size of a man’s head.* He retreats beyond the castle gate with exaggerated steps.) TRUFFALDINO (To the cook) You want to have this to remember me by? COOK Yes, yes, very much so. PRINCE (sticking his head out from behind the gate) Truffaldino . . . Truffaldino . . . (Truffaldino hands the ribbon to the cook ceremoniously.) TRUFFALDINO Here, take it as a keepsake. COOK (holding the ribbon in front of her, excitedly) A fine ribbon, beyond compare! (Truffaldino runs out. The cook, not taking her eyes from the ribbon, waves her hand where Truffaldino stood.) Where did you go? Where are you? (Tenderly) Little rascal . . .

SCENE 3 (A desert. The set from the first scene of the third act. Evening. The Prince and Truffaldino slowly enter from the opposite side as the first scene, dragging behind them on a rope the three oranges, which have grown to such a size that a person can be placed inside of each.†)

* Divertissement: “The prince goes into the castle and comes back out merrily with the three enormous stolen oranges” (175). † Divertissement: “The prince turns to the third orange. To his astonishment, it has miraculously grown to the size of a gigantic pumpkin” (177).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  317 PRINCE It’s impossible to make progress without a wind at our backs! TRUFFALDINO And when the oranges have grown so large! PRINCE I want to sleep! TRUFFALDINO I want to drink! PRINCE I’m so tired! TRUFFALDINO I’m so thirsty!* PRINCE I’ll sleep just a little, Truffaldino . . . TRUFFALDINO (anxiously) But Prince, while you sleep I will die of thirst! PRINCE Nonsense, we’ll rest, and then go on refreshed. Go to sleep, Truffaldino. (Lies down and falls asleep.) TRUFFALDINO How can I sleep, when thirst burns me? And not a drop of water around. Give me something to drink! Give me some water! Some water now, quickly! Prince! Prince! Wake up now! Wake up now! He sleeps as if deaf. (Pausing in front of the oranges) The oranges? . . . What if I opened one of them . . . it will be so juicy!† (He takes up the sword, but straightaway backs away from the orange.) No! What did the Prince say? But if I’m dying? Dying now of this thirst? The Prince won’t manage to carry one of them. And all will be lost: the oranges, the Prince, myself. No, better if I eat one. (Embracing the orange in delight)

* Divertissement: “A prodigious hunger and thirst possess him” (176). † Divertissement: “He decides to eat one of the three oranges. . . . He cuts open an orange” (176).

318  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Such a juicy orange! A ripe, juicy orange! (He cuts open an orange with the sword. Out of the orange comes a maiden dressed in white—the Princess.* Truffaldino is amazed.) A maiden in white? LINETTA (beaming) I am princess Linetta. TRUFFALDINO A princess . . . instead of . . . orange juice? LINETTA Give me a drink! Quickly, let me drink, or I shall die of thirst, from cruel thirst, from deathly thirst!† TRUFFALDINO (perplexedly) Oh princess . . . oh princess . . . where will we find water? Desert surrounds us . . . Oh dear princess . . . LINETTA Hurry now, hurry! Let me drink, you cold-hearted tyrant! TRUFFALDINO (unsuccessfully trying to wake the Prince) Prince, wake up! LINETTA Give me just one drop . . . TRUFFALDINO Oh princess . . . now then . . . I will open another orange. LINETTA Just a drop . . . Only a drop. . . . (Truffaldino cuts open the orange with a sword. A second maiden dressed in white— Princess Nicoletta—emerges from the orange.)

* Divertissement: “He cuts open an orange. O wonder! Out of it comes a maiden, dressed in white” (176). † Divertissement: “Give me a drink, O, I am unfortunate! I shall die, unfeeling idol! I am dying of thirst, O, unfortunate! Quickly, cruel one! O God!” (177).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  319 TRUFFALDINO What now, yet another princess? LINETTE Just a drop . . . NICOLETTA (beaming) I am princess Nicoletta. TRUFFALDINO How strange! (Truffaldino, in distress, backs away from the Princesses, who reach out toward him like ghosts.) NICOLETTA Let me drink! Quickly, let me drink, or I will perish from thirst, from cruel thirst, from deathly thirst! Everything’s growing faint . . . * LINETTA Only one drop, please! Everything’s growing faint. Save me! TRUFFALDINO Princesses . . . be patient . . . be patient just for a day . . . just for a day . . . Oh it pains me to see them! (Linetta falls to the ground, still reaching out toward Truffaldino.†) LINETTA Have pity . . . Have pity . . . Have pity . . . NICOLETTA Please save me. . . . (Linetta dies.) TRUFFALDINO Died?! NICOLETTA (falling to the ground) Save . . . a drop. . . . (in a whisper) * Divertissement: “Alas, I am dying of thirst! O let me drink, fine tyrant . . . I am bursting with thirst, O God! I will die of sorrow” (177). † Divertissement: “She falls to the ground in the throes of death” (177).

320  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Have pity. . . . (She dies) TRUFFALDINO What now? (In superstitious fear) I’m off as fast as I can! (Runs out) PRINCE (in his sleep) Eh . . . Truffaldino . . . Truffaldino . . . (Rising up) Truffaldino . . . Let’s get going! Where is he? Always a loafer . . . (Seeing the dead princesses) What is this now? Two maidens dressed in white? Dead maidens? All alone in the desert. What a fate . . . (Four soldiers march across the stage in an exaggerated military manner.) Halt! (The soldiers stop in their tracks.) Take these maidens and bury them.* (The soldiers march up to the princesses with brisk steps and pick them up, carrying them off to the opposite wing.) Orange? I’m glad that at last we are just two, you and I. It’s time for me to learn what hides inside. I know my happiness is hidden inside. Oh orange! Oh orange! Give me my happiness! (He slices open the orange with a swing of the sword. The third woman dressed in white—Princess Ninetta—appears.†) A princess? NINETTA Yes, I am princess Ninetta! PRINCE (falling to his knees) Oh princess, princess, I’ve searched the world for you. Princess, Princess, I love you more than the whole world! NINETTA Prince, I’ve long waited for you. * Divertissement: “Tartaglia sees two soldiers passing by, and he orders them to bury the two maidens with honor” (177). † Divertissement: “He opens it with his sword, and out of it comes a tall, beautiful maiden” (177).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  321 (In ecstasy, the Prince embraces her legs.) PRINCE Oh my happiness! NINETTA Let me drink! Quickly, let me drink, or I will perish from thirst, from cruel thirst, from deathly thirst!* PRINCE Princess, wait just a bit! We’re in a cruel desert. But now we will set off for the town. NINETTA Just a drop . . . Everything’s growing faint . . . I’m growing weak . . . PRINCE Let us go quickly. NINETTA I am dying . . . (With a moan she falls into the Prince’s arms) ECCENTRICS (among themselves) Hey, listen, don’t you have some water? It seems we have some. Then give it to her. Let her drink it. Let her. (They carry a bucket of water from the tower and, placing it in the middle of the stage, return to the tower.) NINETTA Have pity . . . Have pity . . . PRINCE What sorrow! (Seeing the bucket) Here’s water! Drink, my princess! As much as you want. (He helps her drink from the bucket.) * Divertissement: “O God, I will perish from thirst! Quickly now, give me to drink, or you will mourn me in vain!” (177).

322  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges NINETTA Thank you, Prince . . . You saved me from death. You rescued me from captivity. I’ve been searching for you my entire life. PRINCE Nothing could keep me from my pursuit of you. I wasn’t scared by horrible Creonta, I outsmarted the monstrous cook, I avoided the huge copper ladle, I braved the scorching kitchen. No, no, my love is stronger than Creonta, hotter than the kitchen. Before it the cook blanched and let her ladle fall. NINETTA (simply) Oh kind Prince, how I’ve waited for you, how I love you, how happy I am with you! LYRICALS (cautiously appearing on stage) Drama, lyric drama! Give us romantic love! Flowers! The moon! Show us tender kisses! ECCENTRICS (from the towers, with their fingers to their lips) Quiet . . . go away . . . If it’s love you adore . . . Then don’t hinder their loving. Quiet . . . we implore you . . . (The Lyricals quietly disappear.) PRINCE (ceremoniously) Let’s go, Princess, to the palace. NINETTA No, Prince, in these clothes?* The King would never receive me! PRINCE (decisively) But he must receive you! NINETTA No, Prince, you go ahead, prepare your father and bring me royal clothing! I will wait here.†

* Divertissement: “The city is nearby, but the princess has no appropriate attire” (178). † Divertissement: “The prince asks her to wait, to sit on the stone in the shade of the tree. He will return with rich clothing and the entire court to retrieve her” (178).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  323 PRINCE All right, I submit to you. The King himself will come to meet you. NINETTA Farewell, return quickly! PRINCE (tenderly) Farewell, my Princess . . . (The Prince leaves. Ninetta sits on a bench in thought.) NINETTA (dreamily) Oh, how happy I am! . . . (It is almost nighttime on stage. Smeraldina’s silhouette is seen creeping toward Ninetta. Behind Smeraldina is Fata Morgana’s silhouette.) ECCENTRICS (talking among themselves restlessly) Smeraldina . . . With a pin. Fata Morgana . . . (All together) There will be trouble! (The Eccentrics’ agitation grows until they leave the towers and tip-toe up to Ninetta to see what is happening. Smeraldina, stealing up to Ninetta from behind, plunges a big magic pin into her head.* Ninetta, with a cry of dismay, vanishes, having turned into a rat. The small rat runs all over, trying to get offstage.) ECCENTRICS Ah! A rat! A rat! A rat! (Terrified by the rat, they rush back to the towers.) Oh, how revolting! A Rat! Oh poor Ninetta! She’s turned into a rat! FATA MORGANA (to Smeraldina) Now sit in the Princess’s place and say that you are the Princess. (Fata Morgana disappears. The sounds of a march are heard. A solemn procession with torches and lanterns appears: the King, the Prince, Clarice, Leandro, Pantalone, courtiers, guard.†)

* Divertissement: “[Smeraldina] moves closer to [the princess] and betrays her: she weaves one of the two magical hairpins into her head” (178). † Divertissement: “To the sounds of a march, the King of Cups, the prince, Leandro, Clarice, Pantalone, Brighella, and the entire court appear ceremonially to retrieve the princess-bride” (178).

324  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges PRINCE (joyfully) There’s she! There’s my Princess! KING This is the princess? PRINCE It’s not her! SMERALDINA It is I. Princess Ninetta! PRINCE No, no! Evil deception! SMERALDINA Prince, you promised to marry me! PRINCE Marry you? Not a chance! KING My son . . . PRINCE I will not marry her! KING My son . . . PRINCE I am repelled by her! KING (firmly) Prince, you cannot go back on your royal word.* Prince, you promised to marry her (very decisively) and therefore you’ll marry! COURTIERS (in horror and surprise) Ah! PRINCE The Moorish girl? * Divertissement: “The King of Cups grows serious, obliges the prince to keep his princely word and marry the Moorish girl” (178).

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  325 KING (threateningly) I command you! PRINCE (perplexedly) How terrible! KING I command you! Give her your hand. Procession, forward! (The procession heads back. The Prince, who is in despair, is compelled to give his hand to Smeraldina.* Leandro and Clarice remain behind the procession.) LEANDRO (venomously) His orange is rotten, and his Princess turned out to be wicked. (He gives his hand to Clarice and they follow the procession.)

ACT IV SCENE 1

(When the curtain rises, the second, cabalistic curtain is seen instead of a set, as in the second scene of the first act. Celio the Wizard and Fata Morgana, hostile and furious, rush up to each other from opposite wings and speak, interrupting each other.) CELIO Oh, you good-for-nothing witch, you good-for-nothing witch, second-rate enchantress, second-rate enchantress, you wretched incarnation of hell, incarnation of hell, incarnation of hell, incarnation of hell!† FATA MORGANA Oh you, pretentious wizard, pretentious wizard, puffed-up wizard, puffed-up wizard, wizard, whom nobody obeys!‡ CELIO Shame, shame, shame on you, fallen witch, fallen witch, who resorts to hair pins, hideous pins, poisoned pins! FATA MORGANA And you . . . and you . . . and you, shameful wizard, funny you are, funny, funny, with your little ribbons! * Divertissement: “The prince, with a few clownish jokes, agrees, all sadness” (178). † Divertissement: “Accursed sorceress, I know about all your trickery! But Pluto will help me. Dishonest witch, accursed witch!” (178). ‡ Divertissement: “Worthless wizard!” (179).

326  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges CELIO Shame! FATA MORGANA Ha-ha-ha-ha! With your ribbons! CELIO Second-rate . . . FATA MORGANA Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! CELIO Stabbing with a pin! FATA MORGANA Ribbon conjurer! CELIO Shameful! FATA MORGANA All you’re good for is entertaining young girls! (Celio calls forth lightning and thunder with a wave of his hand.) CELIO You old shrew, you didn’t even bother to carry out things yourself! (Fata Morgana calls forth lightning and thunder with a wave of her hand.) FATA MORGANA Dishonest enchanter! CELIO You send a Moorish girl (Celio calls forth lightning and thunder with a wave of his hand) a deceitful Moorish girl! FATA MORGANA Did you forget that you lost the fate of your beloved ones to me in cards? (Fata Morgana pushes Celio. Lightning flashes and thunder rumbles from the waves of her hand.) They’re mine! They’re mine! In saving them you’re picking my pocket! A thief! A thief!

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  327 (The Eccentrics, climbing down from the towers and forming two lines, approach Fata Morgana with playful importance.) ECCENTRICS Fata Morgana, we come to you on business. Fata Morgana, listen to what we say now. We will whisper to you, we will whisper a bit, just a little bit, just a few brief words. Come a little closer, come a little closer, listen to what we say, listen to what we say. Fata Morgana, Fata Morgana, Hup!23 (They unexpectedly push her into one of the towers and lock it up. Fire and smoke come from the tower.) ECCENTRICS (To Celio) Now quickly save your beloved ones! (Celio makes grotesque magic gestures toward the tower in which Fata Morgana is locked.) CELIO Remember, witch, fearsome Celio the Wizard! (He disappears in fire and smoke.) (The Eccentrics return to the towers.) ECCENTRICS (amiably) Well, well . . . – fearsome!.. (The cabalistic curtain rises.)

SCENE 2 (The brightly lit throne room of the royal palace. To the left, at a great elevation, the King’s throne. Nearby are two thrones for the Prince and future Princess. Above the three thrones is a velvet marquee that can be closed. The Master of Ceremonies, servants. The hall gradually fills with courtiers.) LEANDRO (entering in a hurry) Is the throne ready? MASTER OF CEREMONIES Completely. LEANDRO Everything dusted? MASTER OF CEREMONIES Spotless.

328  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges LEANDRO Lower the canopy. The procession nears. (The canopy of the marquee is lowered. The procession appears to the sound of the march. The King leads. Behind him are The Prince and Smeraldina. Further behind are Pantalone, Clarice, Courtiers, and the Guards.) COURTIERS Glory to the King! The King of Clubs is great! Glorious Prince! Charming Prince! Throne eternal! And mighty is our kingdom! (The procession stops before the concealed thrones.) MASTER OF CEREMONIES (ceremoniously) Open the canopy! (The canopy is raised. On the Princess’s throne sits a huge, larger-than-human rat, wiggling its whiskers. It is Ninetta, turned into a rat, occupying her place on the throne. All take a step back in confusion. Some of the courtiers grab their weapons, and all are frightened.) EVERYONE A rat! Ah! A rat! KING (perplexedly) Guards! Guards! SMERALDINA, THE MASTER OF CEREMONIES, COURTIERS Ah, frightening! PANTALONE Hurry with the guards! (Celio the Wizard, illuminated, appears and, with frantic gestures, casts a spell on the rat.) CELIO You rat, you rat, turn back, turn back into the Princess! KING Guards! CELIO Turn into the Princess! KING Shoot it now!

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  329 CELIO I compel you! KING Shoot it now! CELIO I compel you! (The guards burst in noisily and shoot. The rat turns into Princess Ninetta. Celio the Wizard disappears.) ECCENTRICS (with joyful surprise) Princess Ninetta?! MASTER OF CEREMONIES, PANTALONE, KING, AND COURTIERS A miracle! PRINCE (throwing himself before Ninetta) It’s her, it’s her, my Princess! (On his knees before Ninetta and grasping her hands) You are my love! You are my orange! COURTIERS What a beautiful Princess she is! KING I’m astonished, and the Princess is quite pretty. PRINCE (growing tender) Ninetta . . . KING (gesturing toward Smeraldina) But who is that there? TRUFFALDINO (appearing from somewhere) That’s Smeraldina! CLARICE AND LEANDRO Smeraldina? KING Smeraldina? Leandro’s secret accomplice? LEANDRO (taking a step forward) King . . .

330  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges KING (not hearing Leandro) I’m beginning to understand. LEANDRO King . . . KING (angrily and with contempt) Quiet! You’re a traitor! COURTIERS A traitor . . . CLARICE (agitatedly) Uncle . . . KING Get out now! Your hands are stained with poison. COURTIERS Poison . . . Poison . . . (The king ascends to the throne in anger. All tremble before him.) A terrible moment . . . He will decide . . . KING (majestically) I sentence the Moorish girl Smeraldina (Smeraldina steps back in horror) minister Leandro (Leandro steps back) and my niece Clarice (Clarice steps back) to be hanged. (Pantalone, Truffaldino, the Master of Ceremonies, the Courtiers, and the guards all fall to their knees. They echo the King in a tragic whisper.) Hanged . . . TRUFFALDINO (on his knees, beseechingly) Dear King, please spare them! PANTALONE (elbowing him) Quiet! KING (in a tragic whisper, affirmatively) Hanged . . .

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  331 ECCENTRICS (deeply affected) Hanged . . . KING (energetically) Guards, bring the rope! (The guards head toward him. Smeraldina rushes to escape. Clarice follows her. Leandro follows Clarice. The guards rush in pursuit. Pantalone, Truffaldino, the Master of Ceremonies, and all the Courtiers rush after the guards. The King remains on the steps of the throne, Ninetta on her own throne, and Prince embracing her knees.) TRUFFALDINO, THE MASTER OF CEREMONIES, AND PANTALONE Seize them! COURTIERS Seize them! Seize them! (From the forestage they all run in a long line offstage left. Then they appear upstage from stage left and in the same order run across the entire stage and offstage right. Fata Morgana breaks down the tower door.) FATA MORGANA Damnation! (She bursts onto center stage.) Hurry! To me! Hurry to me into my arms! (Those running again appear on stage from offstage right and rush toward Fata Morgana. A trap door opens before her. Smeraldina, followed by Clarice and Leandro, jumps through the hatch, from which fire and smoke rise. Fata Morgana disappears after them. The guards and courtiers in pursuit surround an empty and flat space.) TRUFFALDINO, MASTER OF CEREMONIES, PANTALONE, AND THE COURTIERS Where are the traitors? ECCENTRICS (proclaiming) Long live the King! KING Long live the Prince and Princess! TRUFFALDINO, MASTER OF CEREMONIES, PANTALONE, COURTIERS, AND ECCENTRICS Long live the King, Prince, and Princess!

THE END

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Notes Epigraph: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strange Sorrows of a Theatre Manager (1818). Translated by Dassia N. Posner, from E. T. A Hoffmann, Sobranie sochinenie vol. 1. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991. http://lib.ru/GOFMAN/dirteatr.txt. Accessed December 23, 2005. 1. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 271 (entry of April 8/21, 1918). 2. Prokofiev, 273 (entry of April 13/26, 1918). 3. Prokofiev, 364 (entry of November 25/December 8, 1918). 4. Prokof’ev, “Avtobiografiia,” 164. 5. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 359 (entry of November 17/30, 1918). 6. Prokofiev, 359 (entry of November 17/30, 1918). 7. Prokofiev, 369–70 (entry of December 9/22, 1918). 8. Prokofiev, 366 (entry of November 30/December 13, 1918). For a detailed comparison of Gozzi’s fiaba, Meyerhold’s divertissement, and Prokofiev’s libretto, see Robinson, “Operas,” 70–113. See also Taruskin, “From Fairy Tale.” 9. Prokof’ev, Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam. 10. As noted in the introduction to this book, confusion over the opera’s source was compounded by Prokofiev’s later autobiography, in which the composer credits Gozzi as the source; Prokof’ev, “Avtobiografiia,” 164. On Benois and the fiaba, see Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 294 (entry of June 3/16, 1918). 11. For example, one critic reviewing the 1956 English premiere assumed that Prokofiev had invented the spectators to dress up an otherwise banal fairytale. Mitchell, “Prokofieff’s ‘Three Oranges,’” 23. For similar claims, see Martin, Twentieth Century Opera, 59–60. 12. As Taruskin points out, this self-consciousness was in 1921 hardly the Modernist cliché it would later become; “From Fairy Tale,” 221. 13. The Cook perhaps recalled the similar cook-in-drag of Humperdinck’s 1893 opera Hänsel und Gretel; see Taruskin, “From Fairy Tale,” 220. 14. Several of the characters’ names underwent minor changes; e.g., the King and the Prince lose their proper names given to them by Meyerhold (Silvo and Tartaglia, respectively). The first princess-in-an-orange, initially called “Violetta,” later became “Linetta” after Prokofiev’s current romantic interest (and later wife), Lina Codina. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 618 (entry of October 30, 1921). 15. On this similarity, see Dolinskaia, Teatr Prokof ’eva, 94. Various logistical hurdles delayed Chout’s premiere. When Diaghilev finally staged the work, it was in a version completely overhauled by Prokofiev during 1920–21, immediately after he finished the full score of Three Oranges. 16. Borowski, “Operatic Buffoonery.” Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 921. 17. Stahl and Janacopulos agreed to translate the libretto for $300 in early 1919; Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 388 (entry of February 14, 1919). Prokofiev described their progress several weeks later in his journal: “I went to see Stahl and looked at the translation of the first scene. It’s phenomenally accurate, but not quite vivid enough in places. I told him in recitative passages he could add or take away as many notes as he likes. As long as the piece is still fresh it is easy for me to make changes. What is vital is for the phrase to correspond to the idea of the musical phrase, not to be needlessly welded to it” (397; entry of March 9, 1919). After a subsequent consultation, Prokofiev wrote, “I spent the evening with Stahl going through his and Verochka’s [Janacopulos’s] translation of Oranges. They have got the measure of it now and are doing pretty

Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev  |  333 well; I am happy about them adding crochets, i.e. to put in extra notes because the French language has more syllables and always needs more notes than Russian. All the same, I am insisting strictly on the text conforming exactly to the musical sense of the phrase” (404–5; entry of March 27, 1919). 18. Seroff, Sergei Prokofiev, 142. Seroff likely sought to legitimize his own 1949 English translation, which departs from the original Russian significantly, at times approaching paraphrase rather than translation. It was published in conjunction with a 1949 production of the opera in New York; Prokofieff, Love for Three Oranges. 19. Mazzoni, Golden Fruit, 161n22. 20. On Smeraldina’s ethnicity and race, see chap. 1, n. 27. 21. In the divertissement, Meyerhold and his collaborators used “bacchanalia” to denote an orgiastic celebration, rather than “bacchanals” in the sense of a follower of Bacchus. Although Prokofiev ostensibly had the same intent, “bacchanals” is used here to preserve syllable count. 22. The house director of the Chicago production, Jaques Coini, objected to spitting onstage and insisted the Prince instead sneeze. He and Prokofiev argued bitterly over this and other production details; see, e.g., Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 641 (entry of December 9, 1921). According to Muriel Draper, who reviewed the production for Vogue, the spittoon—despite upsetting Coini (and, apparently, a stage hand)—was indeed used in the end. Draper, “Makers of Music,” 88. 23. An exclamation that coincides with the Eccentrics’ seizure of Fata Morgana.

Bibliography Borowski, Felix. “Operatic Buffoonery. Fantastical Music-Drama for Laughter.” Boston Evening Transcript, January 11, 1922. Dolinskaia, Elena. Teatr Prokof ’eva. Moscow: Kompozitor, 2012. Draper, Muriel. “Makers of Music.” Vogue, November 15, 1921. Martin, George. Twentieth Century Opera: A Guide. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999. Mazzoni, Christina. Golden Fruit: A Cultural History of Oranges in Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Mitchell, Donald. “Prokofieff’s ‘Three Oranges’: A Note on Its Musical-Dramatic Organisation.” Tempo 41 (1956): 20–25. Prokof’ev, S. S. “Avtobiografiia.” In S. S. Prokof ’ev: Materialy, dokumenty, vospominaniia, edited by S. I. Shlifshtein, 13–196. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1961. Prokof’ev, Sergei. Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam: Opera v 4 aktakh i 10 kartinakh s prologom. Moscow: A. Gutheil, 1922. Prokofieff, Serge. The Love for Three Oranges: After Carlo Gozzi’s Comedy, translated by Victor Seroff. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1949. Prokofiev, Sergei. Diaries 1915–1923. Behind the Mask, edited and translated by Anthony Phillips. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Robinson, Harlow. “The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev and Their Russian Literary Sources.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980. Seroff, Victor. Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet Tragedy. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. Taruskin, Richard. “From Fairy Tale to Opera in Four Moves.” In On Russian Music, 214–22. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

13 Tsardom and Buttocks From Empress Anna to Prokofiev’s Fata Morgana Inna Naroditskaya

Preamble A duel of wits between two young men: one employs slapstick tricks, jokes, and punches to bait the other into laughter; the other does not give in. Instead he, an incurable hypochondriac poisoned by old poetic verses, spills out endless sighs and melancholy—Pierrot on steroids. Musically, the first, Truffaldino, is clearly identified with an energetic staccato-laughing vocal part. His partner in the scene, Prince Tartaglia, spills out endless downward monosyllabic runs and stretched repetitious sighs (ex. 13.1). Another duo, a witch (Fata Morgana) and a wizard (Celio), neither of them particularly appealing, plays cards, gambling on the fate of the kingdom, political intrigues, and affairs of the heart. Cards were not a novelty on the Russian operatic stage, and neither were the clashing witch and wizard, who might remind a Russian literature and opera connoisseur of Naina and Chernomor from Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila, based on Pushkin’s poem of the same name.1 Orchestrating the actions of all other characters, the powerful pair in turn gets tricked in this grotesque “fairytale adapted to drama” adapted to opera. The diverse crowd of animated cards, commedia dell’arte masks, semireal and semimagical characters, and onstage spectators is that of Love for Three Oranges, an opera based on Meyerhold’s Russian adaptation (1913) of an Italian fairy-tale comedy by Carlo Gozzi (1761), composed by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev with his own libretto, commissioned by Italian American opera director Cleofonte Campanini (“Gozzi! . . . Our dear Gozzi! But that is wonderful!”2), and premiered in French at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre on December 30, 1921.

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4 4

f

4 4 4 4 4 4

p

f

Example 13.1. Sergei Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act II, scene 1.

In 1761, Gozzi handed his newly created scenario for L’amore delle tre melarance to Antonio Sacchi (also Sacco), whose troupe had frequented the Russian court during the reigns of two empresses, Anna (1730–40) and Elizabeth (1741–62).3 A century and a half later, L’amore served as an engine of experimentation for the champion of Modernist theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold. Although commedia dell’arte had energized and inspired prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg, Prokofiev presented the “Modernist premiere” of his Les oranges to Chicagoans. According to Richard Taruskin, Prokofiev’s opera “deserves recognition as one of the first harbingers of a true twentieth-century aesthetic.”4 Racing across continents, working simultaneously in a variety of genres and styles, the composer seemed to be reaching out to world audiences to match and rival the raging success of his fellow Russian Modernists. But while Prokofiev devised this opera as a Modernist spectacle for a foreign audience, I argue in this chapter that his use of gestures, techniques, and musical and dramatic elements also befits commedia, as long-established conventions of Russian opera, literature, and theatre.

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Tracing intertextual and intergeneric references in L’amore, I employ the lens of inoskazanie, a specifically Russian type of allegoric allusion permeating Russian poetry and prose, music, and theatre. As I have described elsewhere, “inoskazanie implies the coexistence of several texts in one.” Freely navigating between many texts and diverse contexts, inoskazanie creates a dense artistic web woven of bits and pieces of allusions to different times, genres, and authors, “superimposed one above the other.”5 Functioning as a masquerade, as ironic intellectual exchange, and as hermeneutic riddle between creator and audience, inoskazanie, expanding during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—navigating between Russian and non-Russian, old (not old) and new (nothing is new)—fueled Russian Modernism. Meyerhold and his collaborators, Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev, playfully engaged with their eighteenth-century colleague by situating and reimagining his fiaba in a Russian Modernist context.6 Soloviev cited the Italian playwright on the genre of comedy: “the essence of ‘commedia dell’arte,’ this amazing marvel coming out of nearly 300 awful scenarios (bezobraznykh siuzhetov), which absorb a selection of the strongest theatrical situations, the tricks most tested, refined and polished by repeated trials of time and endless repetitions.”7 In Gozzi’s fiaba, Meyerhold and his collaborators found a kind of comedy that could be used, as Martin Green and John Swan describe, “not only as raw material for new images and angles, but as a gaudy store-house of techniques for movement and acrobatics and of plots and characters.”8 How were the tricks, the cross-textual allusions most tested and polished by trials of time and repetition, realized in Three Oranges? For Meyerhold, the theatre of masks became a laboratory for bold staging experiments. Meyerhold’s influence on Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky shaped Modernist musical theatre. However, drawing simultaneously on early Italian commedia and on Meyerhold’s Modernist theatrical vision, Prokofiev also evoked a myriad of conventions developed and appreciated in Russian operas. Unfolding the ties between Three Oranges and Russian canonical repertoire, this chapter ends by moving backward to the eighteenth-century imperial theatre, posing the question of the connection between the roots of Russian opera and commedia.

Commedia in Russia The advent of commedia dell’arte in Moscow marked the beginning of Russian professional court theatre. Some twenty days after her 1730 coronation, Russian Empress Anna initiated correspondence with Augustus the

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Strong of Saxony and Poland, seeking his help in securing a professional theatre for her court. Italian commedia troupes were not strangers to Eastern Europe. In 1699, after Augustus became king of Poland, he brought to his new Warsaw court the troupe of Gennaro Sacchi, already successful in Venice, Genova, Parma, Modena, and Brunswick.9 In 1716, Sacchi’s troupe was replaced by that of Tommaso Ristori, with an accompanying orchestra directed by Tommaso’s son, Kapellmeister Giovanni Alberto Ristori (1692– 1753), who was known in Russia after the Warsaw premiere of the cantata he wrote in honor of Anna’s coronation.10 It was this “Polish capella” headed by two generations of Ristoris that Augustus directed to his imperial neighbor, Empress Anna. After the theatrical seasons of 1731–33, Ristori’s troupe left Russia, replaced with the company of Gaetano Sacchi, Genarro Sacchi’s brother, who had entertained the Polish capital. Gaetano, known as “ottimo Truffaldino,” arrived for the 1733–34 season with a troupe that included his children and their spouses. He later passed the role of Truffaldino and the directorship of the troupe to his son, Antonio Sacchi, whose troupe frequented Russian courts.11 Gozzi referred to Antonio as “the best improvisatory actor then alive.” When waging war against rival playwrights Carlo Goldoni and Pietro Chiari, Gozzi put “an old wives’ fairy-story on the boards,” and he entrusted his L’amore delle tre melarance to the Sacchi company.12 The first appearance of Italian commedia in Russia during Anna’s tenyear reign took place in a “grand masquerade” in Moscow, February 1731.13 Ever since, commedia has been wedded to masquerades and fairground festivals. Anna endorsed other foreign troupes, but it was puppet theatre that attained the most popularity among courtiers and street crowds.14 Converging commedia masks and puppet characters permeated folk festivals and theatres in Russia during the following centuries. No longer viewed by Russians of different social strata as an import, the genres and character types became joined with Russian themes.

Russian Carnival and Inoskazanie By the end of the nineteenth century the puppet booth and comedy of masks were well familiar to the public at Saint Petersburg’s fairground celebrations of Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) and Verbnaia (Palm Week) that included “commedia dell’arte, pantomime, circus acts, and puppet shows.”15 These performances inspired Russian artists, including Konstantin Makovsky and Boris Kustodiev (fig. 13.1). Both genres shared ties with the culture of carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin viewed as “the suspension of all hierarchical ranks,

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Figure 13.1. Boris Kustodiev (1878-1927). Balagany (fairground booths), 1917. Oil on canvas, 80 × 93 cm., Ж-4357, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

privileges, norms, and prohibitions” and as “the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.” He wrote about “the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ or ‘the turnabout’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies, and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings, and uncrownings. A second life, a second world of folk culture . . . is to a certain extent a parody of the extracarnival life, a ‘world inside out.’”16 It is within this inside-out world that commedia took root in Russia. Puppets found a home in the fairground booth, dreamy Pierrot merged with folksy Petrushka, and an eighteenth-century allegory could comment on fin de siècle Russia. Multilayered meanings, veiled cross-references, and allegory surfaced as defining factors of Russian literary and theatrical traditions, primarily necessitated by political censorship. Literature, theatre, and state censorship were born at the same time and have been inextricably linked ever since. Well known to Russians, inoskazanie, literally translated as “saying other than it says,” implies

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cross-references “triggering in readers textual and extratextual associations.”17 While masking a text’s meaning from censors on one hand, inoskazanie, on the other, implies and celebrates special bonds and, to some extent, a creative game between artist and audience based on spectators’ recognition of small bits of texts and allusions; these bits are concealed and deduced from something other than what was said or from something that was not said but understood.18 Relying on the familiarity of stories and stylized characters, both commedia and puppetry are natural media for inoskazanie. At the fin de siècle, Russian artists were indeed influenced by the renewed infatuation of European artists with commedia. But in Russia, the old commedia, fused with and itself fueling the advent of Russian Modernism, moved beyond Romanticism and critical realism, reaching its height in the stormy years between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

Commedia and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Modernism Commedia captured the minds of leading poets, artists, composers, and playwrights. The familiar masks danced on the ballet stage; showed up in puppet shows, dramas, and comedies; and surfaced in Modernist paintings, decorated books, and whispered new poetry. Whether or not Prokofiev was familiar with all of these works, the allusions and cross-references shared among artists and audiences defined his composition of Three Oranges. Some connections are obvious; others are fleeting hints and fugitive visions that can be understood only when listening to, reading, or looking through the pile of multiple literary works and productions. Alexander Blok included verses about Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine in his cycle Verses about the Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame). In 1906, he wedded masks and the puppet booth with symbolism in his play, The Little Fairground Booth (Balaganchik). Konstantin Somov drew a cover for Blok’s Liricheskie dramy, a collection of plays that included Balaganchik, as well as illustrations, costume designs, and paintings of commedia masks (1909–10). Meyerhold staged Blok’s Balaganchik and himself played Pierrot, showing up on the stage in “white overalls with long sleeves: a sad marionette with angular movements, emitting pathetic moans from time to time” (see fig. 9.3).19 Meyerhold played, danced, staged, conducted, wrote about, and taught commedia. He performed Pierrot in a variety of productions.20 Mikhail Fokine, a leading choreographer of the Ballets Russes, was invited to produce a ballet for a charity ball in February 1910. For this ball, which took place half a year before choreographing the Stravinsky-Benois Petrushka

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(1911; see fig. 9.1), Fokine staged a ballet on Schumann’s Carnival with Pierrot as the lead. In the cast of professional dancers, the role of Pierrot was played and danced by Meyerhold. This one-time production proved successful, and the dancers were engaged to perform in the Imperial Theatre. Afterward, Sergei Diaghilev, the visionary director of the Ballets Russes, took Carnival to Berlin with Meyerhold as Pierrot and ballerina Tamara Karsavina as Columbine.21 Thus Diaghilev’s European enterprise with Petrushka began with Meyerhold dancing Pierrot; both ballets were choreographed by Fokine. Young Bronislava Nijinska, a sister of the legendary performer of Petrushka, wrote that Meyerhold inspired the Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s ballet. Dancing Papillion in Carnival, Bronislava described Meyerhold’s Pierrot in her Early Memoires: “Each of his appearances onstage produced an effect. First, only his leg would appear through the slit of the drape in a grand developpe, then slowly the whole white body would emerge, the long arms made even longer by long, hanging, white sleeves. Walking cautiously on tiptоes, flapping his long white armlike wings high above his head, he held his little white hat with which he hoped to catch the butterfly, me.”22 According to Solomon Volkov, “Meyerhold’s Pierrot was the direct predecessor of Nizhinsky’s Petroushka.”23 And it was Meyerhold who handed his “refraction” of Gozzi’s time-tested fiaba to Prokofiev as he departed Russia.24 Meyerhold was not the only one magnetized by commedia and its masks and the spirit of carnival. Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953), another champion of experimental theatre, also a playwright, director, actor, musician and painter, formed the Antique Theatre (Starinnyi Teatr), aiming to resurrect medieval farce and morality plays. In his first season, 1907–8, Evreinov worked with artist Alexandre Benois on his dramatic suite, entitled Street Theatre (Ulichnyi teatr; ultimately not produced). For the famous Saint Petersburg theatrical cabaret Crooked Mirror (Krivoe zerkalo), Evreinov penned fourteen harlequinades in which he himself acted. In one of these harlequinades, A Merry Death (Veselaia smert’)—featuring the familiar quartet of Pierrot, Harlequin, Columbine, and Doctor—Evreinov announced, “I am Harlequin, and I shall die Harlequin.”25 In the Crooked Mirror, Evreinov brought spectators into the play. In the four-act farce-drama The Main Thing (Samoe glavnoe), which premiered in the same year as Prokofiev’s Three Oranges, Evreinov reversed this paradigm by sending the actors playing Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin to intervene in the lives of “real people.” The flow of events and situations in Evreinov’s Main Thing are unpredictable; the actors seemingly improvise their interac­ tions with everyday characters. Everything and everyone turns out not the way they look. The show is about theatre and actors whose roles are constantly

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shifting according to the will of the director, who is also a character in the play. The traditional masks play ordinary characters, who in turn become recognizable literary prototypes or impersonate known contemporaries. For example, the list of characters includes the Lady with the Dog, from Anton Chekhov’s eponymous short story, and Dr. Fregoli, a comedian active around the turn of the twentieth century whose quick changes on the stage “dazzled audiences.”26 And Fregoli champions metamorphosis in Evreinov’s The Main Thing. The card-reading fortune teller, an old woman (crooked nose, ragged caftan, rotten teeth stained by tobacco—a twin of Fata Morgana) is first revealed to be Doctor Fregoli, then another Italian Doctor, then turns into a monk, a theatrical entrepreneur, and Paraclete (Holy Spirit). After multiple disguises, he finally reveals himself in the finale as Harlequin, proclaiming, “We are all here . . . Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine, and the Doctor from Bologna—the beloved characters of merry harlequinade. We are resurrected, my friends, not only for a theater, but for life itself. We rise anew!”27 Evreinov and Prokofiev share the mix of actors and spectators shifting their roles, the interplay of cards and masks, all swirling in a seemingly uncontrolled chain of events. The artists and actors draw on each other’s work, using a plethora of allusions, hints, telling without saying, playing with irony and self-referentiality—inoskazanie. Evreinov’s Harlequin salutes Meyerhold’s Pierrot; the Doctor from Main Thing echoes Doctor Dapertutto, Meyerhold’s pseudonym, inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s sinister magician collecting shadows.28 The name of Dapertutto was suggested by poet, playwright, and composer Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936), who created music for Blok’s Balaganchik. He too, was attracted to commedia and experimented with images, structures, and masks in a number of poetic verses and in three “commedia-influenced plays full of aesthetic ambitions and homoerotic desires.”29 Later, in 1950s America, Vladimir Nabokov made the protagonist of his novel Pnin utter a curious statement: “I am so constituted that I absolutely must gulp down the juice of three oranges.”30 Inoskazanie links the artists with his audiences, creating the most intimate bonds between them. Nabokov’s multiple oranges, familiar to his initiated reader, unveil layer after layer in the kaleidoscope of allusions, associations, and meanings.

Three Ps in a Pod Pierrot became fully assimilated to Russian culture when he converged with Petrushka, a distant cousin of Pulchinello. Meanwhile, Petrushka, the puppet from the balagan (fairground booth), having lost his crooked nose, his red

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cap, and hunchback and having cleansed his language of street vulgarities, came to symbolize refined experimental theatre, salon culture, and Modernist aspirations. Indeed, the Petrushka play also had, as Douglas Clayton describes, “its root in foreign importation,” particularly in harlequinades shown by Italian troupes touring Russia in the eighteenth century.31 The Prince from Three Oranges reveals the traits of Pierrot: his tears, his mourning, his fatal sadness, and his readiness to love. According to Tatiana Korneeva, in Gozzi’s “overtly allegorical and self-reflexive dimension of the play, the melancholy prince represents the Venetian audience, which is increasingly bored with the reformed plays of Goldoni and Chiari. . . . The prince’s quest for the enchanted oranges allegorizes both Gozzi’s resuscitation of the commedia dell’arte tradition . . . and Tartaglia’s evolution as a spectator from passive observer to critically productive audience member.”32 In the Russian context, the melancholic passive Prince-Pierrot is a veiled allusion to a quintessentially passive male archetype formulated in literature, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. This type is often associated with Ivan Goncharov’s famous character Oblomov, an educated but phlegmatic man who, unable even to move, dreams his fairytale dreams.33 He knows that “there are no milk and honey rivers and no good fairies, . . . but takes a deep sigh, saddened that a tale is not real, and life is not a tale.”34 The new century, speeding toward Modernism, fostered a protagonist that moved from dreamy inertia and painful apathy to all-consuming action (in pursuit of oranges). Echoing a Russian literary and social prototype of past decades, Prokofiev’s Prince—mirroring tearful Pierrot and yet matching the resilience and endurance of a slapstick Petrushka—is rejuvenated by laughter, grotesquely impassioned. However vast the world of Russian theatre was, and however grand the scene of Russian Modernism, a close-knit group of artists was engaged in similar collaborative experiments with theatre. Stravinsky created Petrushka with Benois, who had collaborated two years earlier with Evreinov on Street Theatre, a play that aimed to depict a medieval festival (1907).35 The set designs and costumes for Three Oranges in Chicago were prepared by Boris Anisfeld, who worked with both Meyerhold and Diaghilev.36 With the advent of the revolution, Prokofiev and Stravinsky became the two major Russian immigrant composers in the West. Nine years Prokofiev’s senior, Stravinsky reaped the laurels of collaboration with Diaghilev. Petrushka was “one of the greatest of all Diaghilev’s triumphs.”37 Prokofiev, after Diaghilev’s dismissal of his first ballet Ala i Lolli (1914), tried to carefully assure his success by drawing on elements that had proved efficacious.

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Musical Craft: Following the Path A year before the premiere of Three Oranges, Diaghilev’s troupe premiered Prokofiev’s ballet The Buffoon (Chout, 1920), which can be linked to Stravinsky’s two ballets, The Firebird (L’Oiseau de feu, 1910) and Petrushka.38 As Stephen Press argues, “both Chout and L’Oiseau are based on Russian fairy tales, and both rely heavily on conventions of the Russian theater.”39 Whereas the graceful Firebird is imbued with magic and symbolism, in Chout, Prokofiev features a gallery of lubok-like (woodcut) Russian jesters evoking Stravinsky’s puppet entertainers. Stravinsky’s Petrushka is an animated puppet with a soul; Prokofiev’s Chout is a two-dimensional, highly stylized, puppet-like prankster who fools everyone around him. From the opening scene, the Chout and his papier-mâché wife launch a grotesque, tricky game for gain. When Prokofiev’s Prince/Pierrot/Petrushka, observing the buttocks of Fata Morgana, suddenly breaks into a giggle; extending into laughter; expanding into a “veritable, almost scientific approximation of real life laughter,” he is healed, reminding one of a healthy, tricky Chout.40 And after disposing of seven wives of seven clowns in Chout, Prokofiev easily and creatively discards the two orange princesses in his L’amore. Prokofiev’s Prince, a close cousin of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, thrown into head-spinning adventures, ends up luckier than his puppet counterpart. Although Petrushka is repeatedly beaten up by the Moor/Harlequin, rejected by the Ballerina, and finished off by the Puppeteer, Prokofiev’s Prince receives assistance from the best of Harlequins—Truffaldino—and is helped by Celio.41 The only surviving orange princess, unnerved by the double metamorphosis—to an orange and to a rat—is happy to become his bride. Stravinsky in both Firebird and Petrushka quotes folk tunes, often from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Collection of One Hundred Russian Folksongs (1875–76) and also invents folk types of his own. Musical allusions to the folk follow nineteenth-century tradition and situate these ballets in a nationalist tradition. Prokofiev’s Chout is based on a single, well-known tune, “Vo pole berezinka stoiala” (“In the field stood a little birch tree”), that the composer spins in multiple ways, reversing, reverting, fragmenting, and deconstructing. The ballet echoes the monothematic opera Mlada by Rimsky-Korsakov. Creating L’amore, Prokofiev, I propose, envisioned and aimed to appeal to global spectatorship by drawing on a plethora of musical and dramatic techniques and conventions while gravitating to the tropes of Russian music and theatre. The pairing of two Ts, for example—Truffaldino and Tartaglia—originates in Gozzi (although Prokofiev drops the Prince’s proper name in the

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opera). An unusually friendly combination of two contrasting and typically conflicting masks is elaborated in Prokofiev’s spectacle. Truffaldino completes and, at times, complicates Tartaglia’s tasks. Distracting the Cook and helping Tartaglia escape, Truffaldino cuts open the two oranges while his master sleeps, saving the last—the prize orange—for the Prince. Moreover, the two Ts rarely sing together, as if they represent different aspects of the same image or play contrasting doubles. Russian operas feature a gallery of doubles, typically female leads that, like Tartaglia and Truffaldino, either complete or contrast with each other. Among these pairs are Tchaikovsky’s sisters Tatiana and Olga Larina in Eugene Onegin, the Countess and Liza in Queen of Spades, Rimsky’s Sea Princess and Liubava from Sadko, and Voeslava and Lada in Mlada. Russians have had special appreciation of operatic female doubles, but there are also male examples, such as Ruslan with his competitor-turnedfriend Ratmir in Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila. Despite the apparent disparity between the heroic Ruslan and the sickfrom-gloom-and-cured-by-laughter Prince, Three Oranges reveals particular closeness to Ruslan. Both operas depict young protagonists who take up challenging journeys and overcome obstacles, rewarded by a bride and a kingdom. Devoted teams support and enable their victories—Ruslan assisted by Ratmir and the wizard Finn, and Tartaglia by Truffaldino and Celio. Glinka’s Gigantic Head (without a body) is voiced by the choir, the gigantic cross-dressed Cook in Oranges by a hoarse bass. As in Three Oranges, the plotlines of Ruslan unfold as contests between a witch and a wizard. And finally, there are two marches, one from Oranges and the other Chernomor’s March from Ruslan. Similarities between them are obvious: bombastic sound, hollow orchestration (contrasting high and low range), the prominence of piccolo and high woodwinds, dotted rhythms, and a certain, nearly hidden, melodic contour. The grotesque in Ruslan—the battle with a dwarf, whose power is in his beard, Naina with her Persian beauties—is overshadowed by the magnitude of this grand opera and by its established nationalistic historical interpretations. Prokofiev in Three Oranges magnifies the grotesque of Gozzi’s original. Neither Gozzi nor Meyerhold has the extensive crowd that Prokofiev—like Glinka—brings to the stage. Taruskin finds the most noteworthy divergence of the opera from Meyerhold’s divertissement in the role Prokofiev attributed to the “Greek chorus.” He points out that while Meyerhold and his colleagues had already significantly expanded Gozzi’s little “‘quarrel trio’ . . . Prokofiev added groups of ‘Lyricals’, forever demanding ‘romantic love, moons, tender kisses’, and ‘Empty Heads’, bent on ‘entertaining nonsense, witty doubleentendres, fine costumes.’”42 The five groups of operatic onstage spectators

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break the course of events, intrude upon the actions and plot, and comment on and debate about Modernist theatre. This convening crowd also comes in handy when reciting, at the end of Three Oranges, the grotesque “Slava/ Glory,” evoking and mocking the well-established tradition of final “Slavas” in Russian operas.43

Naina/Morena/Morgana Gozzi’s fiaba and its Russian refractions bear other similarities to formulas tested, tried, and proven successful in Russian operatic theatre: the domain of princes and princesses, the grotesque, and magic echoes the fairytale operas created by Rimsky-Korsakov, doyen of Russian opera and teacher of both Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The opera’s cast of characters includes playing cards—the King of Clubs and Jack of Spades. Cards and gambling surfaced prominently in Russian literature and theatre from Nikolai Karamzin to Alexander Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, and Boris Pasternak. Prokofiev’s Three Oranges came out three decades after the Saint Petersburg premiere of the most daunting of Tchaikovsky’s operas, The Queen of Spades. Prokofiev’s own early opera The Gambler was based on the short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866). A game of cards, mentioned only briefly in Gozzi, becomes the first of three interludes in Meyerhold’s Three Oranges; Prokofiev expands it to the entire second scene of his opera. The winner in this game is Fata Morgana. The whole gambling scene is drenched in whole-tone scales, the traditional marker of the supernatural in nineteenth-century Russian opera. In the second act, after revealing her rear, then fixing her skirt, Morgana wields all her vengeful powers. Anna Nisnevich writes, “When Fata Morgana commands the Prince to fall in love with three oranges, chances are that her spell will impel . . . because it harks back to a specific musico-dramatic model, another example of coercion. A triple triadic iteration rounded off with a strong cadential formula, it apes the famous prohibition from Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (‘Nie sollst du mich befragen’).”44 It is hard to disagree with Nisnevich, who argues that Three Oranges “contains some of the bluntest Wagnerian spoof.”45 At the same time, Fata Morgana, in a gallery of older operatic women possessing magical or mystical power, echoes Glinka’s Naina and Tchaikovsky’s Queen, also continuing the line of the witch Morena from Korsakov’s Mlada and demonic Soloha teaming up with a fiend in the same composer’s Christmas Eve. A diligent student of Korsakov, Prokofiev employed his teacher’s scalar definition of characters. He reserves octatonism (harmonies based on a

346  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges

3 4 3 4 3 4

sf

sf

p

sf

p

sf

p

p

Example 13.2. Mikhail Glinka, Ruslan and Liudmila, act II, scene and rondo of Farlaf.

4 4 4 4 4 4

p

sf

Example 13.3. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mlada, act I, scene 2 (Sviatokha turning into Morena).

scale alternating whole and half steps) primarily for Morgana’s rival, Celio. A whole-tone scale marks Fata Morgana’s card victory. Vocal images of Glinka’s Naina and Rimksy-Korskov’s Morena are associated with the stupefying vocal banging of a single note with orchestral tremolos and with an octave leap downward (exx. 13.2–13.4). Musical gestures and the compositional devices create another web of association and cues that link different operas, characters, and situations into an exciting game of recognition.

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2 4 2 4 2 4 Example 13.4. Rimsky-Korsakov, Mlada (Sviatokha/Morena).

Like Morena, Fata Morgana enters the stage with an octave vocal leap, which also marks the card victory of Fata Morgana and Morena’s manifesto of power in Mlada. In addition, when the malign trio of Smeraldina, Clarice, and Leandro calls out to Fata Morgana, they too bellow out a single note crescendo with orchestral tremolos and then fall an octave down. Leaping down an octave, the shriek (an octave and a fifth) also becomes a musical expression of Fata Morgana’s embarrassing bottoms-up fall on the stage (exx. 13.5–13.7). At the moment of her most vengeful curse for Tartaglia, the very theme that Nisnevich associates with Wagner is also restricted to the Naina/ Morena-like reiteration of a single tone, mechanical to the point of meaningless repetition of this triadic move accompanied by rushing, racing scales (ex. 13.8).46 But there is another intriguing association. The triadic vocal contour of Morgana’s curse—F#-B-D—has already been introduced in the same key by Truffaldino in the previous scene (ex. 13.9). Thus Morgana’s threatening command in fact fulfills Truffaldino’s call for action that perhaps aims to shake and shape the Prince. Different triadic vocal moves also define the frightening Cook. With rolling octatonic scales doubled in strings and winds, and with harp glissandi, the Prince and Truffaldino walk into the chateau of the Cook, who appears on stage reciting first a descending tritone and then a falling augmented triad. A diminished triadic vocal oscillation signals the moment when the giant falls for the ribbon, crowing “a fine ribbon, beyond compare! Where did you go? Where are you? . . . Little rascal” (316, this book) (ex. 13.10). The grand Cook, armed with her gigantic spoon, seems musically disoriented. His fractured vocal line slides between chromatic and enharmonic gestures that are stuck on tritones, the interval that also identifies the

4 4

f

ff

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 Example 13.5. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act I, scene 2.

4 4

p

4 4

p

4 4

p

ff

ff

ff

4 4 4 4

p

fff

Example 13.6. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act I, scene 3.

4 4

ff

Example 13.7. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act II, scene 2 (Fata Morgana falling, legs up).

4 4

f

4 4

mf

4 4

mf

5

5

4 4 ff

4 4

5

5

5

3

3

Example 13.8. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act II, scene 2 (Fata Morgana’s curse).

3 4 3 4 3 4

p

mf

Example 13.9. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act II, scene 2.

Tsardom and Buttocks  |  351

4 4 4 4 4 4

p

p

Example 13.10. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act III, scene 2.

generally negative crew in Three Oranges. The tritone as the foundation of the diminished triad falls within an octatonic scale; the augmented triad signals a whole-tone collection. The two scales are quite static—the octatonic creates tension but lacks the possibility of resolution; the whole-tone scale is detached from any harmonic relations within. In Russian operas, both scale collections have been associated with magic otherness.

History Is a Tricky Thing: Going Forward, Going Backward Returning to the Prince, that grotesque heir to the throne can be aligned with a gallery of young princes from Glinka’s Ruslan to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan. Although quite different from Prokofiev’s sickly melancholic hero, these earlier princes must overcome a series of challenges to be inaugurated as tsars; their weddings, typically in the operatic finales, secure royal procreation, and thus the continuity of tsardom. The canvas of Three Oranges also invokes a striking parallel to the libretti of five operas penned by Empress Catherine the Great: Fevey, Novgorodian Champion Boeslavich, Bold and Brave Akhrideich, The Early Reign of Oleg, and especially Woebegone Champion. In each opera, a teenage prince and heir to the throne craves and must endure a dangerous journey, during which he makes alliances, overcomes challenges, and comes home to be married, blessed by parents, and to inherit the kingdom. In Fevey (music by Vasili Pashkevich), a lethargic prince falls in love in his sleep. The image of an illusory ballerina he sees in his dreams compels him to undertake dangerous travel. The perfectly healthy prince Ivan in Catherine’s fairytale Bold and Brave Akhrideich (music by Ernest Vanzura) encounters supernatural creatures and accomplishes heroic missions. His prize

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is an enchantress princess-bride. Although physically contrasting with Prokofiev’s Prince, the burly title character of Novgorodian Champion Boeslavich (music by Evstignei Fomin)—a rough champion of old Novgorodian epics whom the empress softened to suit her enlightened theatre—like the Prince is plagued by mood swings and obsessions. Battling an army of city leaders, Boeslavich, like other princes, proves himself worthy to be married and to rule Novgorodians. In the satirical Woebegone Champion (music by Vincente Martín y Soler), the capricious protagonist—perhaps the closest counterpart to Prokofiev’s teen—decides to endure a whimsical journey, requesting an old hefty helmet, shield, and weaponry, unsuccessfully trying out the gear in a long comical scene. Obsessed by oranges, Gozzi’s Prince Tartaglia jumps and screams, likewise demanding from his father “a pair of iron boots,” a heavy helmet, and a long sword.47 The scene from Woebegone, similar to Gozzi’s Three Oranges and preserved in Meyerhold’s version, is shortened by Prokofiev, who retains the humor another way. Interrupting the panicky pianissimo chorus, the Prince, accentuating every note, ascends to a sustained G. Neither of the teens can wear or carry what they ask for.48 Elsewhere I have argued that the origins of Russian national opera, traditionally traced to Glinka and his two operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Liudmila, needs to be extended back to the last decades of the eighteenth century, particularly to the operas created and staged by the empress.49 It was she who devised the formulaic path for operatic champions and the powerful yet defeated counterparts found in canonical nineteenth-century operas. But if Catherine’s operas laid out conventional formulas for the Russian opera of following generations, she herself modeled her operas on commedia, which was introduced in the Russian capital eleven years before her arrival in Saint Petersburg. By employing Gozzi’s oranges, Prokofiev and Meyerhold—embracing and championing Modernism—drew on the very root of the Russian operatic tradition, borrowing from the abundant basket of conventions, the “tricks most tested, refined and polished by repeated trials of time and endless repetitions.”50

Conclusions Exiting her theatre after enjoying a play—according to an official document of 1731—Her Majesty Anna, “squeezed from both sides” by Pantalone and Harlequin, “smacked them in the face, and when they did not leave . . . she found nothing better to frighten them with than lifting her skirts.51 Such an encounter

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between an audience (the absolute monarch) and the two masks could have been dreamt up by Meyerhold. Prokofiev captured the improvisational character of this commedia in which buttocks serve as the turning point. These two buttocks episodes marked, in the spirit of inoskazanie, two hundred years of commedia dell’arte in Russia. They also identify the beginning of the Enlightenment in the Russian eighteenth-century empire and the end of the Russian empire in the early twentieth century. It is ironic that while Prokofiev’s teacher Rimsky-Korsakov featured a grotesque tsar and the end of the tsardom in Golden Cockerel, the global wanderer Prokofiev, escaping revolutionary Russia, restored the king’s dynastic line, ending his opera with a choral glory—however teasing—to the Royal Heir. Moreover, Prokofiev’s operatic fiaba invites one to revisit commedia’s role in the origins of Russian musical theatre. The “anti-psychological and absurdist approach” blossoming in this spectacle led Marina Frolova-Walker to view L’amore as “anti-opera.”52 I see Three Oranges as a super-opera that drew on the full storage bin of Russian and non-Russian, operatic and nonoperatic tricks, techniques, and conventions that, tried by time, had proven successful.

Notes 1. The most obvious example is Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama, 1890) but also Prokofiev’s first completed opera, The Gambler (Igrok, 1915). This essay situates Prokofiev’s Three Oranges within Russian canonical musical repertoire that includes Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn’ za tsaria, 1836) and Ruslan and Liudmila (1842) and Nikolai RimskyKorsakov’s Mlada (1889–90), Christmas Eve, (Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom, 1894–5), Sadko (1896), Tale of Tsar Saltan (Skazka o tsare Saltane, 1900), and Golden Cockerel (Zolotoi petushok, 1907). Three Oranges also evokes the discussion of five operas penned by Empress Catherine the Great: Fevey (1786), Novgorodian Champion Boeslavich (Novgorodskii bogatyr’ Boeslavich, 1786), Bold and Brave Akhrideich (Khrabryi i smelyi vitiaz’ Akhrideich, 1788), Woebegone Champion (Gorebogatyr’ Kosmetovich, 1788), and The Early Reign of Oleg (Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega, 1790). English titles are used in the main text. 2. Prokofiev, Autobiography, 53. 3. In his essay on Prokofiev’s Three Oranges, Richard Taruskin writes that Gozzi “has derived his fiaba . . . by conflating two stories in Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1634).” Taruskin, “Love for Three Oranges,” Grove Music Online. 4. Taruskin, On Russian Music, 221. 5. Naroditskaya, Bewitching Russian Opera, 152–55. 6. Posner, “Baring the Frame,” 370. See also chap. 7 in this book. 7. Solov’ev, “K istorii,” 14. 8. Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, 79.

354  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 9. Witkowska, Muzyka, 153–6. 10. Findeizen, History of Music in Russia. See also Ferrazzi, Komediia del’ arte. 11. Beniscelli, “Carlo Gozzi.” 12. While Gozzi created both Three Oranges and Turandot for Sacchi’s company, Goldoni devised for Antonio Sacchi his Il bugiardo (1750). Beniscelli notes that Sacchi was not only “the celebrated capocomico (actor-manager), but also co-author and actor in La Serva padrona by Gozzi’s rival.” Beniscelli, “Carlo Gozzi,” 177. 13. Starikova, Teatral’naia zhizn’, 20. 14. Starikova, 61, 440; Peretts, “Kukol’nyi teatr.” 15. Senderovich and Shvarts, “Juice,” 77. 16. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 10–11. 17. Naroditskaya, Bewitching Russian Opera, 153. 18. Wachtel refers to this game of recognition as “a large field of expectations”; Plays of Expectations, 72. 19. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 265. 20. Wachtel, “Ballet’s Libretto,” 24. 21. Tibbetts, Schumann, 396. 22. Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, 85. 23. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 265. 24. For a definition of refraction, a simultaneous process of adaptation and creative engagement, see Posner, Director’s Prism, 26–29. 25. Evreinov et al., Five Russian Plays, 28. 26. While Fregoli as a successful actor of musical theatre is largely forgotten, his name is remembered in neuropsychiatry. See Weinstein, “Reduplicative Misidentification Syndromes.” 27. Evreinov, Samoe glavnoe, 136. 28. Clayton discusses Hoffmann’s Doctor in relation to Meyerhold’s Dapertutto; Pierrot in Petrograd, 59. See also McManus, No Kidding, 39. 29. O’Malley, “Masks,” 136. 30. Nabokov, Pnin, 190. 31. Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd, 127–28. 32. Korneeva, “Entertainment for Melancholics,” 7. 33. Ivan Goncharov (1812–91) was a Russian novelist. Oblomov appeared in the eponymous 1859 novel. 34. Goncharov, Oblomov, 158. Translated by this chapter’s author. 35. See Podobedova, Evgenii Evgen’evich Lansere, 254; Solterer, Medieval Roles, 36. 36. Anisfeld, e.g., designed the set for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes productions of Les Sylphides, both scenery and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko choreographed by Fokine, and Boris Godunov. See Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. See also, Press, “‘I Came Too Soon,’” 360. 37. Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, 66. 38. Chout, based on a folk tale documented by Alexander Afanasev, is a grotesque tale of seven buffoons tricked into murdering their wives by the ballet’s title character. When the eighth buffoon fails to resurrect the murdered wives with a magic whip as he promised, the remaining buffoons seek revenge. 39. Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets, 126. Prokofiev adapted the tale from a well-known collection by Afanasev. 40. Nisnevich, “Laughter at the Opera House,” 109. 41. Nicoll writes that in Goldoni and Gozzi, Harlequin appears as Truffaldino. See Nicoll, World of Harlequin, 74.

Tsardom and Buttocks  |  355 42. Taruskin, “Love for Three Oranges.” 43. Slava, the Russian word for “glory,” figures into the conclusions of a number of Russian operas. Most notable is Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which ends with a rousing chorus praising the newly crowned tsar (“Slavs’ia, slavs’ia ty Rus’ moia!”). 44. Nisnevich, “Laughter at the Opera House,” 103–4. 45. Nisnevich, 103–4. 46. Nisnevich, 103–4. 47. Gozzi, Carlo Gozzi, 17. In the divertissement, Tartaglia demands “iron shoes so he can travel the world until he finds the fateful oranges.” This book, 168. 48. It is unclear whether Meyerhold, the creator of Russian Modernist theatre, knew or had an interest in Catherine II’s operas. 49. Naroditskaya, Bewitching Russian Opera. 50. Solov’iev, “K istorii,” 114. 51. Starikova, Teatral’naia zhizn’, 189. 52. Frolova-Walker, “Russian Opera,” 181–82.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Beniscelli, Alberto. “Carlo Gozzi.” In A History of Italian Theatre, edited by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, 177–86. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Clayton, Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theater and Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Evreinov, Nikolai, Denis Fonvizin, Anton Chekhov, Lesia Ukraiinka, and C. E. Bechhofer Roberts. Five Russian Plays, with One from the Ukrainian. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1916. ———. Samoe Glavnoe. Petrograd: Ardis, 1921. Ferrazzi, Marialuisa. Komediia del’ arte i ee ispolniteli pri dvore Anny Ioannovny, 1731–1738. Moscow: Nauka, 2008. Findeizen, Nikolai. History of Music in Russia from Antiquity to 1800. Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Frolova-Walker, Marina. “Russian Opera: Between Modernism and Romanticism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, edited by Mervyn Cooke, 181–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka-Klassika, 2008. Gozzi, Carlo. Carlo Gozzi e le sue fiabe teatrali. Bologna: Tipi di Nicola Zanichelli, 1884. Green, Martin, and John Swan. Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and the Modern Imagination. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. Korneeva, Tatiana. “Entertainment for Melancholics: The Public and the Public Stage in Carlo Gozzi’s L’Amore delle tre melarance.” In The Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s), edited by Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat, 141–71. Leiden: Brill, 2017. McManus, Donald. No Kidding!: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theatre. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

356  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Naroditskaya, Inna F. Bewitching Russian Opera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nicoll, Allardyce. The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell’Arte. London: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Nisnevich, Anna. “Laughter at the Opera House: The Case of Prokof’ev’s The Love for Three Oranges.” Russian Literature 74 (2013): 99–117. O’Malley, Lurana. “Masks, Pierrots, and Puppet Shows: Commedia dell’Arte and Experimentation on the Early Twentieth-Century Russian Stage.” PhD diss., University of Texas, 1991. Peretts, V. N. “Kukol’nyi teatr na Rusi.” Accessed March 10, 2019. http://tnu.podelise.ru/docs /index-293525.html?page=2. Podobedova, Olga. Evgenii Evgen’evich Lansere. Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1961. Posner, Dassia N. “Baring the Frame: Meyerhold’s Refraction of Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges.” Theater Survey 56:3 (2015): 362–88. ———. The Director’s Prism: E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Press, Stephen D. “‘I Came Too Soon’: Prokofiev’s Early Career in America.” In Sergei Prokofiev and His World, edited by Simon Morrison, 334–75. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. ———. Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Prokofiev, Sergei. Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences, edited by S. Shlifstein and translated by Rose Prokofieva. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2000. Senderovich, Savely, and Yelena Shvarts. “The Juice of Three Oranges: An Exploration in Nabokov’s Language and World.” Nabokov Studies 6 (2000): 75–124. Solov’ev, Vladimir. “K istorii stsenicheskoi tekhniki commedia dell’arte.” Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam. Zhurnal doktora Dapertutto 1 (1914): 110–14. Solterer, Helen. Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010. Starikova, Liudmila. Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhu Anny Ioannovny. Moscow: Radiks, 1996. Taruskin, Richard. “Love for Three Oranges,” Grove Music Online. Accessed November 28, 2018. ———. On Russian Music. Berkeley: California University Press, 2009. Tibbetts, John C. Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. New York: Amadeus, 2010. Volkov, Solomon. St. Petersburg: A Cultural History. New York: Free, 1995. Wachtel, Andrew. “The Ballet’s Libretto. In Petrushka: Sources and Contexts, edited by Andrew Wachtel, 11–41. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. ———. Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-Century Drama. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Weinstein, Edwin A. “Reduplicative Misidentification Syndromes.” In Method in Madness: Case Study in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, edited by Peter W. Halligan and John C. Marshall, 13–36. Oxford: Psychology, 1996. Witkowska, Alina. Muzyka na dworze Augusta II w Warszawie. Warsaw: Arx Regia, 1997.

14 Notes on the Musical Parody in Prokofiev’s Three Oranges Natalia Savkina Translated by Kevin Bartig

A

merry manifestation of anima allegra—a joyful soul—Sergei Prokofiev’s 1919 opera Love for Three Oranges presents a world of wonders, with its noisemakers, fireworks, and pugnacious actors flying through the air. Three Oranges appeared at the right place and time, a Russian impulse realized on American soil. At the root of the opera’s fairground spirit is rich, vivid theatrical illusion. What is it, if not illusion, to fall in love with three oranges or to entertain the absurd hope that the tiniest of ribbons can melt the heart of a monster? In this chapter, I survey Three Oranges as a counterpoint of Prokofiev’s musical and theatrical ideas, focusing on comic techniques, improvisation, parody, paradox, and Prokofiev’s orchestra musicians themselves as operatic characters. Like Carlo Gozzi in his fiaba and Vsevolod Meyerhold and coauthors Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev in their Three Oranges divertissement, Prokofiev uses exaggerated techniques and parodies genre and stylistic sources, yielding a kind of hyperbolizing that calls to mind Lev Tolstoy’s famous barb aimed at fellow writer Leonid Andreev: “He’s trying to scare me, but I am not scared.” Parody was also the favored means of Gozzi in his fiaba and Meyerhold and his coauthors in their divertissement. In the latter’s initial “parade,” three Eccentrics mock the works of “despicable play hacks” (161, this book), and the piece’s second interlude hinges on the search for the best theatrical genre (commedia, of course). The harmful Martellian verse of “extra-tragic tragedies”—the main weapon of Fata Morgana and the Prince’s

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other enemies—was Meyerhold’s contemporary reimagining of Gozzi’s theatrical polemic. Prokofiev refers to Martellian verse only fleetingly in the opera, and its nature was surely unknown to a twentieth-century audience. The composer, however, left the references in place, perhaps hoping they would call to mind parodic tactics and encourage laughter at his other targets in the opera. Indeed, parody is a nuanced device that encompasses characters, staging techniques, dramaturgical principles, and musical styles alike.1 The basis of parody is intertextuality, ranging in Three Oranges from stylistic allusion to precise quotation. The former transforms the opera into a world of witty intellectual play. Celio the Wizard, for example, summons Farfarello from hell as if calling on a Mephistopheles-corrupted Faust. Celio and Fata Morgana are akin to the benevolent Finn and evil Naina, sorcerers in Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila. The card game in act I, scene 2, recalls those in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama). Just as the title character of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo braves Hades to rescue his beloved, so the Prince and Truffaldino brave the terrible kitchen of Creonta’s castle. Nevertheless, these congruences of plot and character do not always involve musical congruence. The Prince and Truffaldino may recall Tamino and Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but the similarity is one of plot, not music. The reverse is also true: musical associations and parodic stylizations arise without any justification or explanation in the plot.2 The narrative is further complicated by the interaction of the plot’s three planes—the fairy-tale world, the world of the Eccentrics and their fellow spectators, and the infernal world. The starkest contrast is the infernal world’s intrusion into the kingdom of the King of Cups, and much of the opera’s comic import involves the ease with which the infernal world transforms into prosaic, everyday life. In this fashion, Prokofiev continues the traditions of earlier Russian composers, including Glinka, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Anatoly Lyadov. The intrusions of the Eccentrics and the other choruses are sudden, even abrupt, as Comedians, Tragedians, Lyricals, and Empty Heads assert their favored genres. Prokofiev juxtaposes different manners of speech and psychological nuances embodied in various intonational formulas. The Lyricals remain sweet-voiced; the Tragedians assert their views with harsh, discontinuous phrases; and the Comedians are, in a word, silly. The Eccentrics, who sympathize with the Prince, are more varied, their recitative more developed, and they not only respond to but intervene in the plot. At

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one point, adopting Fata Morgana’s style, they even interfere in the infernal world when they entrap Fata Morgana in a tower (act IV, scene 1, rehearsal nos. 482–88). The opera’s harmonic language is typical of the young Prokofiev. In combination with the opera’s slapstick nature, it exaggerates and sharpens all contrasts. Dissonances and consonant triads are juxtaposed, becoming a defining feature of the opera’s overall construction, in which the simple exists alongside the complex, vulgar roughness alongside exquisite refinement. Such oppositions are common in Prokofiev’s early music, where extremes of grandiosity and refinement abound. Prokofiev realized these oppositions in various ways. In the music, large dissonant sonorities—almost clusters—alternate with transparent, delicate sounds in which each pitch plays a crucial role. Surprises and deceptive maneuvers give the music cheerfulness and its particular Prokofievian élan. At the beginning of the March (act II, scene 1), for example, an assertive ostinato suggests C major, but at the last moment the composer introduces A major. Only in the conclusion does he finally fulfill his promise and modulate to C major. Beneath the four-square rhythms of the March, Prokofiev prolongs the home key by alternating tonic chords with discordant sonorities, approximating something like the great tonic plateaus of the opere buffe of Giacomo Rossini. (C major is also used to more deplorable ends: Smeraldina tries to impersonate the Princess—“I am Princess Ninetta!” [rehearsal no. 460]—by donning her musical C-major “clothes”; however, this key does not tolerate hypocrisy and immediately modulates.) Chain-like chromatic passages (e.g., those at rehearsal no. 68, which visually resemble chains in the score) are uncomplicated but reliable and, in the 1910s, were not yet overused. In Prokofiev’s hands, even basic parallel fifths become a sophisticated artistic device. He creates a grotesque atmosphere by pairing sharply dissonant, cluster-like chords with flashes of melody and angular rhythms (e.g., in the act II divertissements, where the style is something between the Scythian Suite and the Second Symphony). Three Oranges mocks all clichés, including the libretto’s. Overused techniques appear in all of their decrepitude and absurdity, with Prokofiev nevertheless showing they can still move a listener. The music accompanying Truffaldino’s exclamation “Juicy orange!” in act III, scene 3, for example, is so rapturous, so pleasing to the ear, that there is no doubt the composer is mocking the saccharine sweetness of variety ditties. The phrase is an elaboration of a seventh chord, to which a ninth is eventually added. As Prokofiev joked in a letter to his friend Nikolai Miaskovsky, “I don’t have anything against ninth

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chords in harmonic progressions. But one doesn’t kiss them passionately, dying of bliss.”3 The choir and orchestra play significant roles in debates of transcendental significance. Prokofiev presents them grotesquely, often using the extremes of their expressive ranges in such overblown fashion that the sincerity of their histrionics is called into question. At times, the orchestra seems like a piano on which Prokofiev tries out etude- or toccata-like figurations. The orchestra howls, squeals, and rumbles with the roar of drums (the choir indulges in extremes, uttering declarations, sometimes almost chanting). The multifaceted orchestra, mocking the opera’s action, is one of the work’s main jokesters. Take, for example, the muted trumpet in the March, the trumpet and high winds in the scene with Truffaldino and the Cook, the rapid bassoon figures accompanying the rat in the finale, and the sad violin solo paired with the Prince’s Hamlet-like posture over the two dead princesses.4

The Prologue Prokofiev’s opera brought the fighting spirit of Gozzi’s and Meyerhold’s reforms to the operatic disputes of the early twentieth century. The nervous excitement of the opera’s Prologue captured the disquiet of Russian culture, the irreconcilable confrontation of ideas that, although not always realized artistically, added to the overall din in the form of manifestos and pamphlets. In the Three Oranges Prologue, Prokofiev introduces groups of Lyricals, Comedians, Tragedians, and Empty Heads—choruses that represent audience tastes, the peculiarities of the theatre, and the creative tendencies of the era. The carefully planned prologue quickly devolves into a scandal of opposing viewpoints struggling for domination, one well suited to Prokofiev’s propensity for grotesquery. The music’s “deceptive” techniques and comic details forge an atmosphere of play acting and practical joking. We hear a buoyant tarantella, a trumpet salvo, the snide laughter of musicians, and, at times, the composer’s voice, which seems to be hidden in the orchestra pit. In Meyerhold’s divertissement, actors battle exaggeratedly with quills, but Prokofiev truly animates them, characterizing them musically. Brief episodes interrupt each other, demanding attention, breaking apart and uniting again. Dissonance—in the form of grating seconds—imparts energetic variety and festivity, whereas tritones underscore more significant plot moments.5 Augmented triads accompanying the Tragedians suddenly collapse into an innocent C major without resolving properly.

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Act I The traditional theatrical image of the suffering king shapes our perception of the King of Cups’s travails in act I. The underlying situation and the parodic style—not to mention the opening brass chorale—recall Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and its suffering King Amfortas. However, the musical associations point more directly to Tsar Dodon and King René.6 The monarch’s gloomy mood changes slowly, depicting a state of paralyzing grief in which a person becomes scattered and indecisive, speaking slowly and repetitively—represented musically as a chain of interruptions, inconsistencies, and impulses that convey the difficulty of the impasse. The same scene features one of Prokofiev’s comic masterpieces, perhaps inspired by the often-satirized image of the verbose commedia Dottore. The act I chorus of medics is both a collective caricature and a comic use of heightened, musical speech, with their monotonous murmur only confusing the King. The medics’ metrical asymmetry and rhythmic ostinatos are undoubtedly connected to the character of their professional work and its alchemy. They breathlessly catalogue the Prince’s illnesses as if reciting a medical encyclopedia. Infernal forces appear early in the opera. Celio and Fata Morgana play cards in act I, scene 2, gambling on the fate of the kingdom.7 In theatre, gambling traditionally evokes the infernal; through it, Celio and Morgana manipulate, if not outright distort, the course of an honest battle. For his part, Meyerhold gave the infernal elements a comical nature, as we see in the divertissement’s first interlude, in which underworld visitors appear accompanied not only by thunder and lightning but also by sparklers and “brilliant fireworks” (164, this book). Yet the curses and spells in Prokofiev’s opera are both farcical and real, as “the theatrical battles between Signor Goldoni and Chiari are allegorically depicted in the feud between Fata Morgana and Celio the Wizard.”8 This parodic card-playing scene contains stylized elements, including brass clusters and horn triplets, as well as Fata Morgana’s Mephistophelian laughter and little devils howling in two voices, predictably separated by a tritone. The demonic gambling entertained Vasily Morolev, Prokofiev’s friend from childhood, who wrote after seeing the 1927 Bolshoi Theatre production that he “enjoy[ed] the scene where the devils play cards in hell. . . . In general, when things concern unholy forces, you are inimitable and unsurpassed. One wonders where you acquired such an understanding of the life and pastimes of devils. Were you perhaps there in hell?”9 Celio and Fata Morgana meet again at the beginning of act IV in similar musical fashion, albeit even more

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ferociously. Here Prokofiev takes his cue from the squabbling servants of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opere buffe of Giovanni Paisiello, Domenico Cimarosa, and Rossini. Leandro and Clarice, the evil duo who first enter in act I, scene 3, may recall Wagner’s Telramund and Ortrud, but their presentation in Three Oranges confirms that these roles are for Russian singers, a pair of political schemers akin to Marina Mniszech and the False Dmitri.10 Prokofiev suggests this Polish connection through stylized dance, using a mazurka, unusually cast in common (4/4) time. Prokofiev skillfully depicts these characters, evoking gait, habits, and manner of movement. Leandro is portrayed with particular care. A courtier, bureaucrat, and clerk, he is the sum of his years of service, lacking anything on the inside except Izora’s gift.11 Predictably, he hardly develops musically. But when his anger and envy occasionally boil over, he begins to choke, his lines recalling those of Naina or perhaps Bomelius and Morena, who also have dealings with poisons.12

Act II Act II opens with Prince Tartaglia, the hero, paired with Truffaldino, the traditional commedia Zanni, recalling the popular Enlightenment-era coupling of a master and his more intelligent and energetic servant. Initially, the Prince terrorizes everything about him, clinging to his suffering. The parodied style expresses the kind of genuine suffering Modest Musorgsky portrayed in Eremushka’s Lullaby (Kolybel’naia Eremushki) and the third movement (“Trepak”) of the Songs and Dances of Death (Pesni i pliaski smerti). But when the Prince’s moans begin to warble, he begins singing something that resembles a Hanon piano etude, the distance between the actor and his role yielding a moment of grotesque estrangement. The orchestra drives this scene. The instrumentalists gossip and maliciously comment on the tragic situation. Constantly coming to the foreground, they betray their desire to seize power. Thus, there is much jubilation in the March, which enters at a moment of confusion and aggravation onstage. The Prince’s hysterical cries and Truffaldino’s decisiveness against the background of the approaching March is one of Prokofiev’s most effective foreshadowings. Truffaldino drags the Prince to the celebrations, a fiaba and divertissement moment that is fully realized in the opera. The March is a magnificent circus entrée, a puppet procession consisting of aggressively percussive motion. It is persistent, full of hooliganism, unexpected exchanges of major and minor, the juxtaposition of tonics and secondary dominants

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(which often denotes tragedy in Tchaikovsky’s music), a solo trumpet show, and a vibrant xylophone. The festivities (act II, scene 2) are the opera’s center. Various theatrical genres and styles interact, including divertissements, buffoonery, lazzi, magical spells, and a cheerful concluding imbroglio. As fountains begin to spew free wine and oil, the Prince continues his suffering lackadaisically, luxuriating in his own pianissimos. Meanwhile, Truffaldino, master of ceremonies, nearly misses the other contender for the spotlight, Fata Morgana, who arrives disguised as an old woman. With her unsteady gait and random chromaticism, this experienced comedian tries to pass herself off as the fifth grandmother from Prokofiev’s Tales of an Old Grandmother (Skazki staroi babushki), a set of four pieces for solo piano. But those piano grandmothers derive from nostalgic memories, not Morgana’s fantasy world. When Morgana falls, a very different musical allusion is heard, this time to the wicked fairy godmother Carabosse in Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty (Spiashchaia krasavitsa). Following Morgana’s comical fall, the Prince catches the bug of common cheerfulness. An innovator, almost a futurist, Prokofiev did in 1919 what other composers had not attempted: he composed a magnificent, broadly developed lazzo of laughter.13 The music involves perpetuum mobile figurations paired with accumulating ostinatos, accommodating the violins’ dactyls and the Prince’s persistently iambic line. Fata Morgana’s response to the Prince’s laughter is predictably volatile. An evil sorceress who throws off the mask of innocence to reveal something terrible, she recalls similar folk-tale characters. In the opera, she suddenly approaches the onstage crowd with her encore number, the curse. Here Prokofiev deployed spectacularly infernal means suited to Nina Koshetz, who premiered the role in the 1921 Chicago production. “I wrote you a wonderful curse (anatema) for Fata Morgana using your finest notes—F, G, and A in the second octave. You’ll see, it will be very effective.”14 Beginning with this scene, what was a divertissement of attractions and circus numbers becomes one of laughter, evil, and love.

Act III As the start of act III, Farfarello is summoned from hell (scene 1), and in his ensuing conversation with Celio, his routineness contrasts the wizard’s amateurishness. Farfarello is businesslike, unscrupulous, and speaks disrespectfully, discrediting Celio in the process. In this scene, the buildup of anxieties leads to the second intermezzo’s instrumental music, akin to a long,

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free exhalation. Prokofiev miraculously turns the tricks of an unholy power into divine breath, the trombone glissandi into the sound of an aeolian harp. The orchestra is light and full of subtle romantic colors. The tarantella, which has been lurking, finally emerges fully. Prokofiev goes beyond the boundaries of the plot and the limits of experience, even approaching the playful spirit of Scriabin, linking the happy sensation of freedom with awareness of the divine creative act in a Symbolist openness to the infinite. As the curtain rises on act III, scene 2, the flying heroes, pushed by the wind of the devil’s bellows, crash against the reality of the hellish kitchen, with trombone glissandi marking their abrupt landing. The upper and lower strings jostle against one another in a two-against-three pattern. Truffaldino, with his lazzo of fear, recalls Mozart’s Leporello, Glinka’s Farlaf, and other theatrical cowards. Prokofiev also evokes the cemetery scenes of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and of Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest (Kammenyi gost’); the rumbling tuba and the Cook’s broad, stark opening phrases even seem to reference specific lines from the latter opera (“What shoulders! What a Hercules!”). Likewise, the cowardly Truffaldino’s lines flutter “like a dragonfly on a pin.”15 But it is the Cook, sung by a “hoarse bass,” who is one of the opera’s best-conceived characters. This pugnacious giantess is the eternal stock character of eighteenth-century comedies and opere buffe, her haggard exterior concealing a tender heart. However, Prokofiev’s Cook—who perhaps recalls the master of the comic grotesque Eric Campbell in Charlie Chaplin’s films of the 1910s—terrifies with unique expressive devices, including col legno strings, a rumbling tuba, rhythmic convulsions, and tutti fortissimos. The orchestra mimics the onstage action, erupting in chords of horror (rehearsal no. 328) and rapid scales that suggest a doomed attempt to flee (rehearsal no. 337). The desert scene (act III, scene 3) contains much that is unexplained. One can only guess where the Eccentrics, who save the last princess with a bucket of water, have been for almost three scenes and why they have returned with such humaneness. By this point, there have been many attempts to illuminate the world with love: the scheming faux love of Leandro and Clarice; the farcical situation with the Cook; and the passionate, unquenchable thirst of Truffaldino and the two girls brought to ruin by it. But only one love will succeed. Romantic mystery surrounds the princesses, forged with lyricism that recalls Rimsky-Korsakov and, at the moment of the princesses’ melodramatic deaths, the delicacy of Claude Debussy.16 Moreover, those deaths call to mind the Snow Maiden–like sacrifice that inspired Prokofiev’s predecessors.17 But the Eccentrics, speaking in a stage whisper, quietly interfere to save the third princess.

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Of Three Oranges’s many transformations, the most important is that of the Prince himself. He changes both the story and the genre when his marchlike proclamation of love rises to the level of an emotional Italian cabaletta, almost in the manner of Giuseppe Verdi’s heroes and nearly that of Genaro’s ecstasy in the love duet of Prokofiev’s own Maddalena. In contrast, Truffaldino flees in superstitious horror. Initially overconfident, he suffers just like his operatic predecessor, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Grishka Kuterma, who escapes into the wilderness.18

Act IV Prokofiev indulges in stylistic extravagance in the motley bustle of the opera’s final scene (act IV, scene 2). The hectic running of the concluding chase is a finale straight from opere buffe. A tune reminiscent of the skomorokhi (medieval Russian minstrels) winds among etudelike figures. The fast-paced finale leads to an abbreviated final scene. Time is adjusted, compacted, compressed, and made to accommodate as much as possible. The conclusion of Three Oranges is not meant to be satisfying but rather a point where everything is said and done. The ending passes in an instant, as if the actors have already called for and paid their driver. * * * Prokofiev wrote Love for Three Oranges at a time of paradigm shifts, when the foundations of life were changing, when old masks were being discarded for new ones. Theatre offered a range of interpretations of reality; music was swept up in colliding styles, aesthetics, models, and polemical proclamations. Like Meyerhold’s divertissement, Prokofiev’s opera revived the time-honored fairground theatre, with its demonstrative acting and playfulness. The composer’s characters, all evoking commedia masks, were obsessed with an external presentational style. Three Oranges abolished realism but spoke only the truth about human psychology. The variety of speech, the merry marches, the exquisite scherzos, the masquerades and powerful spells—for which the composer felt a clear weakness—all live on in this now-classic of the twentieth-century canon.

Notes 1. See Enukidze, “Russkie vampuki.” 2. Occasionally the music has direct subject associations, such as Truffaldino and the Cook being akin to the Commander and Don Juan in Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest (1869). 3. Letter dated October 5, 1923, Prokof ’ev i Miaskovskii, 172. 4. See Radlov, “Opera,” 201.

366  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 5. The grating dissonance of the tritone, an interval comprising six half-steps, made it a traditional means of evoking the infernal. 6. Dodon is the inept tsar of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel (1907). King René is the long-suffering father of Tchaikovsky’s last opera, Iolanta (1892), who has hidden his daughter’s blindness from her. 7. Lotman, “‘Pikovaia dama,’” 793. 8. Gotstsi, Skazki, 2. 9. Letter from V. M. Morolev to Prokofiev dated September 4, 1927 (received September 11). Sergei Prokofiev Archive, ID SPA_5041. 10. Count Friedrich von Telramund and his wife Ortrud, characters in Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (1850), who vie for control of the Duchy of Brabant. The similarity to Mniszech was noted by Boris Asafiev. Marina Mniszech was the wife of Tsar Dmitri I, the illegitimate ruler installed on the Russian throne by the Polish King Sigismund III during the so-called Times of Trouble. 11. Izora’s gift is the poison that Antonio Salieri possesses in Pushkin’s tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830). 12. Bomelius appears in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov (1873/1901) and The Tsar’s Bride (1899); Morena appears in Korsakov’s Mlada (1892). 13. Prokofiev was frequently called a futurist in the Russian press during the 1910s. He did not object, although futurist composers inspired only mild curiosity in him. 14. Koshits, “Moi vstrechi,” 138. 15. Both phrases are from the recounting of Don Juan’s duel with the Commendatore in Pushkin’s Stone Guest, set to music by Dargomyzhky in his opera of the same name. 16. Debussy had chosen Mary Garden, the director of the Chicago Opera during the Three Oranges premiere, to play Mélisande in the 1902 premiere of his opera Pelléas and Mélisande. 17. Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Snow Maiden—for which Tchaikovsky composed incidental music (1873) and on which Rimsky-Korsakov composed an opera (1880–81)—involves a maiden made of snow who melts when given the ability to love a human. 18. A character in The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniia (1904) who reveals Kitezh’s location to invading Tatars and, tormented by guilt, flees into the “wilderness.”

Bibliography Enukidze, N. “Russkie vampuki do i posle ‘Vampuki’: nekotorye nabliudeniia nad istoriei opernoi parodii.” Uchenye zapiski Rossiiskoi akademii muzyki imeni Gnesinykh 1 (2012): 37–58. Gotstsi, K. Skazki. Translated by M. Lozinskii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1983. Koshits, N. “Moi vstrechi s Prokof’evym.” In Sergei Prokof ’ev: K 110-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia. Pis’ma, Vospominaniia, Stat’i, edited by M. P. Rakhmanova, 110–47. Moscow: GTsMMK, 2007. Lotman, Iu. M. “‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart i kartochnoi igry v russkoi literature nachala XIX veka.” In Pushkin: biografiia pisatelia, stat’i i zametki—1960-1990, “Evgenii Onegin”— kommentarii, 786–814. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB, 1995. Prokof’ev, S. S. and N. Ia. Miaskovskii. S. S. Prokof ’ev i N. Ia. Miaskovskii: Perepiska, edited by M. G. Kozlova and N. R. Iastenko. Moscow: Sovietskii kompozitor, 1977. Radlov, Sergei. “Opera S. S. Prokof’eva ‘Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam’.” In Desiat’ let v teatre, 201–6. Leningrad: Priboi, 1929.

15 Notes on the Notes Simon A. Morrison

A

composer of impish reputation offers a slapstick version of a grand opera—a buoyant, slightly bonkers send-up that skewers the clichés of the genre along with the behavior of its audiences. Sergei Prokofiev’s music is full of humor and wit, trafficking in quickness and sharpness and ironic inversions. The musical language of Love for Three Oranges functions like a joke: There’s a set-up, then a punch line. The listener expects a phrase to reach a certain harmonic or tonal outcome, but at the last second something else entirely appears. Such quicksilver substitutions are the source of the caprice. Because this is an opera about opera, Prokofiev piles on the references and allusions to the canon. Celio, the protagonist’s unhelpful magical helper, tries to summon Farfarello, one of the goblins in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to his aid with a command that, in its frustrated repetition, imitates the patter of Italian opera buffa—Rossinian cadences. The Prince’s father, the King of Clubs, echoes Tsar Dodon from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel (Zolotoi petushok)—one parodic opera thus inspires another—with the basso profundo cook (guardian of the oranges) modeled on the witch in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Prokofiev’s metatheatrical, play-insidea-play conceit also draws on Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. There’s a card game tucked inside the plot of Three Oranges, and the protagonists repeated “three oranges” recalls the “three cards” mantra in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (Pikovaia Dama). Prokofiev’s predecessors are parodied but also glorified, at least for those literate enough to recognize the references.

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Much of the action in Three Oranges is pantomimed and takes as its cue a commedia dell’arte–inspired ballet, Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka. The “nub and essence” of Three Oranges, Richard Taruskin explains, “is the [Stravinsky-like] exploitation of a tritone-related harmonic polarity as a cadential succession (as in the opening announcement, in the prologue, of the start of the show), as a vertical ‘polychord’ (at moments of horror: e.g. the curse music in act II, scene 2) or as the governor of a bipolar tonal plan (as in the act III scherzo).”1 The major third is no less important, and within the score is a whiplash push and pull between F♯ , C, and an intervening D. Consider the scherzo, which in act III, scene 2, represents the Prince’s wanderings in the desert. The underlying rhythm evokes a tarantella, a dance pattern associated with the delirium caused by spider bites or curses from witches—just like the one placed on the Prince by Fata Morgana, the source of trouble in plot but also the literal butt of the jokes. The most famous music of the opera, the march heard at the end of act II, scene 1, stands as a superb example of Prokofiev’s affection for abstractly artificial tritone relationships over natural fifths and his commitment to chromatic displacement coupled with harmonic quick-change effects. The first phrase of the march slips from A ♭ major to G minor (rehearsal no. 166) (ex. 15.1). The progression through the opening four measures in A ♭ major is analyzed by Konrad Harley as follows: I, ♭ VI9, I, ♭ VI7, i, ♭ VI7, I, ♭ VI7, I, ♭ VI7, I, ♭ VI7, I, ♭ VI7, capped by the minor dominant, v, which is suddenly (here’s the punch line) understood as ♭ v i of G minor. The next measure, however, gives us an E ♭ major chord, followed by B minor, which is (enharmonically) ♭ v i of E ♭ , after which we are given a G major triad. One harmonic outcome is supplanted by another—and yet another, because the following two measures give us belated proof of G minor in the form of a half-cadential progression: ♭II, VI9, and V. Such is the consequence of what Harley (following Richard Bass) calls Prokofiev’s “downward chromatic displacement.”2 Eventually, the march ends up in C major, one of the two overall tonal poles of the opera, along with F♯ . The most important characters in Three Oranges—to the plot, the concept, and the musical syntax—are the outside-the-plot, then inside-the-plot group called the Eccentrics. The name cannot be taken too seriously. Far from oddball—in Russian, they are the chudaki, and chudak (oddball) comes from the wholly serious word chudo (miracle)—the group holds the score together. They do indeed accomplish miracles, reining in the chaos, keeping the volume down, and adopting the music of the baddies, making it good. Two of the baddies, Leandro and Clarice, have their motif—a hopping bass

Notes on the Notes  |  369

4 4 4 4

ff

3

f

3

Example 15.1. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act II, scene 1.

line and a chromatic motif moving from E ♭ down to C in dotted rhythms— stolen by the Eccentrics, leaving them unable to complete their scheming. The ultimate baddie, Fata Morgana, is also robbed by the Eccentrics. They take away her tritone, the source of her supernatural malfeasance, in the final scene. The music that the Eccentrics sing at the start is a stout march, banal because no one listens to critics anymore, at least not the hyperbolic ones. Their response is to shape the object of their criticism (the show) to their liking, becoming—like the chudaki in Meyerhold’s divertissement—authorial and directorial: they provide the lines that the actors in the plot either blow or forget. The Eccentrics are one of five groups of theatre devotees that make their presence known in the prologue after the opening fanfare. Their appearance follows that of the Tragedians, Comedians, Lyricals, and Empty Heads. The fanfare involves, of course, brass and percussion. The trumpets hammer away at B ♭ , A ♭ , C ♭ , and D, and every other pitch except the one that matters most in the opera: C, as in the vitamin. Single pitches become dyads and

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triads in root position and second inversion, racing up and down semitonetone, tone-semitone, and semitone-alone scales. The fanfare is an exercise in forced forcefulness, laughing because, frankly, there is no alternative. Most of the characters are introduced by fanfares and sound like fanfares themselves, singing in fifths and octaves; the stark outlines of melodies lack the filler that makes music endure beyond the opening moments of selfpromotion. Phrases pause on nonharmonic pitches, the raggedness of the endings leaving the ear constantly off-balance and dissatisfied. The tragic and comic theatre fans proclaim their presence on E, C, and A ♭; the fans of romance have a more lyrical line in C, rising by fourths (B to E, E to A) and descending by steps from the mediant to the tonic via the leading tone. The Empty Heads are assigned angular nothingness, unmemorable music of blank affect. The convoluted 68 quarrel involving the four groups terminates at rehearsal number 10 of the prologue with a cut to 4 and the uninterrupted recitation of the Eccentrics, who shout “Silence!” on E and G before and announcing, in a boringly, boorishly marchlike rhythm, the title of the show and the raising of the curtain. A herald and a trumpeter reannounce the announcement. This is not a cabaret show, everyone overinsists; there is a tale to be told about a sickly prince and his cure through laughter and love—just hang in there, we’ll get to it. The cause of the Prince’s malaise is monotonous enlightenment-era verse drama, which can be dense, compressed, and wholly predictable. There is little action; the focus is, instead, on what people say and how they say it, and the few words spoken cannot be taken back. No wonder the Prince, having been stuffed full of this material, takes sick with melancholia. The reaction is natural. Prokofiev’s (and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s and Carlo Gozzi’s) riposte is rapid-fire merriment—a drama of action for the sake of action, purposefully lacking cohesion, psychology, and lyricism, along with sentiment. At the end of the act II card game and bacchanalia, Fata Morgana bares her bloomers. The Prince laughs at her, causing her to curse him. He also laughs at Beethoven, parroting the famous motto opening of the Fifth Symphony: ha ha ha HAH (down a major third), ha ha ha HAH (down a minor third). Fata Morgana adopts the line as her own but drops the HAH down a tritone. The curse is recited on a single pitch, D, which serves as the mediant of a minor scale heard in the strings. The accompaniment rages like a tempest, but the music merely recalls the “cartwheeling orchestral triplet figures” assigned to the jester Truffaldino.3 Because this is a work of upside-down logic, it falls to the jester to get serious. Truffaldino has an important moment of earnestness in the climactic

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scene of the opera: act III, scene 3. Lost in the desert, utterly parched from lugging around all that oversized fruit, Truffaldino envies the Prince’s ability to sleep and sings of his desire to open the oranges to alleviate his thirst. He is desperate, insistent, and the music builds up suspense with repeated single notes that expand to arpeggiated figures. Truffaldino cuts through the peels, and the princesses emerge with music that recalls the poésie mélique of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Linetta, Nicoletta, and Ninetta intone a lament—clean and bright but built over an anxious tremolo in the strings and woodwinds. The anxiousness stems from the fact that their throats dry up as the opening fifth of the phrase is filled in, then elaborated, dissolved, and turned to dust. At rehearsal number 384 and Linetta’s entrance, the harmony sinks from F minor to E ♭ minor; at rehearsal numbers 391 + 2 and Nicoletta’s entrance, the slip is from G minor down to F minor. Ninetta revives between rehearsal numbers 424 and 425 in an implied C♯  minor, a semitone below the D minor that ushered in the orange-encased concerto delle donne (ex. 15.2). She stays alive through the intervention of the Eccentrics, authentic miracle workers, who lower a pail of water down to her from a turret. She picks up the pieces left behind by her sisters and salves the line. The Prince croons his affection for her in E minor, which, as Bethany McNeil comments in her technical study of the opera, “is not reinforced through traditional cadential means, but through the neighboring chords of D, D♯ 7, and F♯  minor. The melody adopts b minor rather than B major as its dominant, which is arrived at through gradual progression upwards through C, G, G7, and A ♭ chords in the orchestra.”4 Nonharmonic pitches lend luster and luxuriousness to the Prince’s effusions, which reach a high point atop a fivepitch cluster: A, B, D, E, and F♯ . The entire passage recalls, parodically, the masculine heroism of Siegfried’s sword-forging scene in Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. The opera might not have a heart, but it ends up in a healthy place. The fruitless quest becomes fruitful, the Prince finds his main squeeze, and the tone shifts, becoming briefly tender and heroic. The mood does not last, but it counters the harshness of the first two acts, suggesting that Prokofiev’s wellknown fulminations against Debussy and Wagner concealed some admiration. In act IV, the doddering king sees his son in a happier place, and the witch is packed off to mess up the lives of other characters in other operas. Had the oranges been void, had Ninetta not returned to human form after her stint as a rat, the absurdism of Fata Morgana and her minions would have won the day. But the Prince and Princess embrace at the end, and an opera committed to representing the emptiness of everything achieves a kind of true fulfillment.

p

6 8 6 8

pp

p

6 8

p

pp

Example 15.2. Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, act III, scene 3.

Notes on the Notes  |  373

Notes 1. Taruskin, On Russian Music, 221. 2. Harley, “Harmonic Function,” 212, 218–19. 3. McNeil, “Modernism Meets the Midwest,” 57. 4. McNeil, 56.

Bibliography Harley, Konrad. “Harmonic Function in the Music of Sergei Prokofiev.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2014. McNeil, Bethany Marie. “Modernism Meets the Midwest: Prokofiev’s A Love for Three Oranges.” MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2007. Taruskin, Richard. On Russian Music. Oakland: University of California Press, 2010.

16 Boris Anisfeld, an Alchemist of Color John E. Bowlt

I

t is entirely appropriate that Chicago should celebrate the theatrical engagement of Boris Izrailevich Anisfeld (1879–1973) (fig. 16.1). Not only did he design the sets and costumes for the world premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera Love for Three Oranges for the Civic Opera Company at the Chicago Auditorium on December 30, 1921, but he also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for almost thirty years.1 Thanks to his pedagogical capacity and his fundamental maxim, “I paint what I feel, not what I see . . . my scenery comes from the feelings aroused,” numerous students were inspired to pursue their artistic careers, long remembering his command, “Don’t let the mind loaf behind the hand, or forget that painting belongs to the sensory world of sight.”2 Anisfeld’s success in America was immediate and meteoric. He arrived in New York from revolutionary Russia on January 10, 1918, armed with a letter of introduction from Vladimir Nabokov, prominent political activist and newspaper editor and, incidentally, father of the celebrated writer Vladimir and the musician Nicolas. Immediately, he established contact with leading figures in the art world such as impresario Max Rabinoff, managing director of the Boston Grand Opera Company, and William H. Fox, director of the Brooklyn Art Museum. In June 1918, on a recommendation by art historian Christian Brinton, Anisfeld was granted a one-man exhibition of 120 works at the Brooklyn Museum, eliciting reviews that ranged from laudatory to condemnatory and that, as a succès de scandale, then traveled to six other venues.3 In a polemical exchange of letters with Brinton, Leila Mechlin, Secretary of the American Federation of Arts, remarked in 1918 that Anisfeld’s paintings

Boris Anisfeld, an Alchemist of Color   |  375

Figure 16.1. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Self-Portrait, 1910. Oil on canvas, 61.9 × 39.7 cm (24 3/8 × 15 5/8 in.). Wentworth Greene Field Fund. 1958.293 The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles Chatfield-Taylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

“are without the element of beauty; in some instances even unsightly and incomprehensible. They are ill-drawn, showing the human form distorted, and one, The Crucifixion, is little short of blasphemous—horrifying to one who reveres Christ.”4 The public success of the Brooklyn Museum show was ample proof of the rashness of Mechlin’s statement. Six years later, the Henry Reinhardt Gallery in New York, Chicago, and Boston also granted Anisfeld a retrospective of ninety works. Already known in New York as a stage designer from his collaborations on Anna Pavlova’s productions of Les Préludes and The Seven Daughters of the Mountain King for her American tour in 1914–15 and with his own studio near Carnegie Hall, Anisfeld was ready to savor the American dream. He signed a contract to

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design Love for Three Oranges with the Chicago Opera Association on June 30, 1919, for consignment in November—but the premiere was postponed repeatedly. Until 1926, Anisfeld contributed designs to numerous operas and ballets in Chicago and New York, including Xavier Leroux’s La Reine Fiammette and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka). Perhaps his primary American success was the decorative interpretation of Albert Wolff’s opera The Blue Bird (L’Oiseau Bleu) based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1919, at which the author himself was present. The production was put on as a gala party supporting various charities, and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., patroness of the socalled Bluebird Campaign for Happiness, dressed in blue, had a blue flyer printed, and even demanded that New York should be painted blue. Here was a latter-day Symbolist gesture that might have been more appropriate to the ambience of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the early 1900s, when Maeterlinck’s play had enjoyed particular success, especially in its interpretation at the Moscow Art Theatre. One reviewer said of the New York production, “It was the artist rather than the composer who was the star. . . . Boris Anisfeld is the alchemist in color who has provided these magnificent settings.”5 Anisfeld followed with The Snow Maiden for the Metropolitan Opera in 1922; Jules Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore, also at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1924; and then Aziade for Mikhail Mordkin’s ballet company in Philadelphia in 1926. Anisfeld’s last theatrical commission, also in 1926, was for a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera, but his designs were not accepted. Strange as it may seem, Anisfeld’s assertion that feeling—or perhaps, we should say, intuition—was of primary importance to the creative process was a radical statement in an America of pot-boiler movies, automobiles, and apple pie—almost a transformative one, as a reviewer observed in 1958.6 Indeed, in hindsight, after the Ash Can School, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art, it is hard to grasp America’s artistic naïveté in the 1920s or, conversely, to give full credence to such assumptions as, “The influence of [Anisfeld’s] creativity in the USA was vast. He personally brought an aesthetic revolution to that country.”7 However, the more assiduously we study Anisfeld’s work—especially the stage designs—in the context of early Modernism, the more we realize that he was highly innovative, if not avant-garde. Even his use of the so-called Continental Method of scene painting (whereby the canvas to be painted is placed on the floor and not hung) was new to the American theatre, causing much commentary among stage technicians, even if Anisfeld did join their Scene Painters Union in 1923.8

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Alexandre Benois, painter, book illustrator, and art critic, once remarked of Anisfeld the stage designer that he “senses the stage and its optical effect at a distance.”9 For any artist who has been commissioned to compose the sets and costumes for a drama, opera, or ballet, this is an essential prerogative, as it should be for the architect, even if it is often overlooked or compromised. By felicitous destiny, the ability to imagine the initial, planar sketch within the three-dimensional space of the proscenium and auditorium was bestowed on many of Russia’s key stage designers in the early twentieth century, such as Léon Bakst, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko, and Georgii Yakulov, contributing immediately to a scenic revolution just before and after the Great War. Russia’s key regisseurs and directors such as Sergei Diaghilev, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov recognized the crucial importance of this condition and were swift to promote it within their own companies. This is the primary reason why Diaghilev engaged Anisfeld as both scene painter and stage designer between 1907 and 1913. True, Diaghilev was not always content with Anisfeld’s designs, even if viewers of “The Underwater Kingdom” from Sadko (Paris, 1911) spoke of Anisfeld as the “real magician behind these animated visions” and praised the artist for his “tumbling tresses of aquatic vegetation, his horizons of blue, luminous and fairy-like waves.”10 Diaghilev, in a rare lapse of good taste, brought from the Lido an “entire trunk of live crabs and all kinds of garbage for the underwater kingdom. . . . He did not sense how unsuitable these really were to Anisfeld’s decorations and costumes, even if he had bought them in Venice.”11 To see in both two and three dimensions is an innate, rather than acquired, quality, and the fact that Anisfeld never trained as a theatre technician but came to the stage after studying easel painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts is ample testimony to this condition (which, incidentally, distinguished most designers who worked for the Ballets Russes). Consequently, Anisfeld conceived of the stage as an architectonic exercise that, when viewed close up, may seem disjointed but that crystallizes when seen from afar (e.g., from the auditorium), and the sets for Three Oranges would seem to bear witness to this. Judging from the visual evidence and critical laudations, Anisfeld’s ensemble for the production demonstrated the ease and alacrity with which he could move from composition to construction. In addition, evidence suggests that Anisfeld’s designs were malleable and that the artist was fully aware of the accidentality of theatre that, suddenly, at any moment during rehearsals, may suggest a different visual resolution and physical juxtaposition. True, the vintage, black-and-white scene photographs of the Chicago production (figs. 16.2–16.4; see also, figs. 7.3 and 12.1) cannot disclose the effect

Figure 16.2. Photo of the royal palace interior, act I, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre (premiere: December 30, 1921). Historic Scenic Collection, Series IV, Box 3, Folder 17. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University.

Figure 16.3. Photo of Creonta's castle courtyard, act III, scene 2, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre (premiere: December 30, 1921). Historic Scenic Collection, Series IV, Box 3, Folder 17. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University.

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Figure 16.4. Photo of the desert, act III, scene 3, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, designed by Boris Anisfeld. Chicago Opera Company, Auditorium Theatre (premiere: December 30, 1921). Historic Scenic Collection, Series IV, Box 3, Folder 17. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University.

or suitability of the color harmonies, which were fundamental to Anisfeld’s designs as a whole. As critic Janet Fairbank asserted after the premiere, “No black and white reproductions can adequately portray the blaze of color as revealed on the stage. Rose and scarlet, orange and purple, backgrounds of wild, scarlet skies. . . . Mr. Anisfeld’s imagination runs gladly along with Mr. Prokofiev’s.”12 Still, the photographs do tell us a lot about equilibrium, configuration, and the interrelationship of performer and backdrop, backdrop to wings, and geometric form to libretto. At the same time, in his Love for Three Oranges, Anisfeld seems to have observed a sense of measure and formal discipline that organized and enhanced the exuberance of his projects for both sets and costumes. In other words, Anisfeld tamed a riotous imagination that, if left unrestrained, might have hindered the action and purpose of the spectacle itself. As Edward Moore wrote in his review, entitled, “‘Love for Three Oranges’: Color Marvel, but Enigmatic Noise,” for the Chicago Daily Tribune, “The music, I fear, is too much for this generation. . . . Mr. Prokofiev might

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Figure 16.5. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Pantalone, the King, and the doctors, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Gouache, with watercolor, gold leaf, gold metallic paint, and touches of graphite, selectively varnished, on off-white laid paper, 540 × 743 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.85. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles ChatfieldTaylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

well have loaded up a shotgun with several thousand notes of verying [sic] lengths and discharged them against the side of a blank wall. . . . [But] never was paint applied to scene cloth more lavishly or gorgeously.”13 The documentary photographs of Three Oranges demonstrate the fairness of this assumption. Importing the signal elements of a towering medieval castle in act III with its “Gothic” interiors exposed in acts II and IV, Anisfeld provided the audience with the material environment—points of time and space—wherein the action unfolds. Simultaneously, through his application of deep blue, emerald green, pink, and crimson, Anisfeld tailored this forensic identity with imaginary forces, a combination that further attracted the eye without undermining historical verisimilitude (figs. 16.5 and 16.6). As Ben

Boris Anisfeld, an Alchemist of Color   |  381

Figure 16.6. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Truffaldino and Tartaglia in the room of the sick Prince, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Watercolor and gouache, with brush and black ink, gold metallic paint, pen and black ink, and touches of graphite, selectively varnished, on off-white laid paper. 545 × 490 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.83. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

Hecht wrote in his sketch, “Fantastic Lollipops,” “Mr. Anisfeld’s scenery explodes like a succession of medieval skyrockets.”14 This is to say that Anisfeld avoided encyclopedic pedantry, understanding that play—an artful game of give and take—always lies at the basis of successful theatre. His gouaches and watercolors for the Royal Palace and the Castle of the Sorceress in Three Oranges, for example, contain all these

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Figure 16.7. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Inside the royal palace, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Gouache with brush and black ink, watercolor, pen and black ink, and touches of gold metallic paint, selectively varnished on off-white laid paper, 545 × 761 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.81. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles Chatfield-Taylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

qualities, seeming to grow out of the stage itself rather than be superimposed as extraneous bodies (figs. 16.7 and 16.8). Anisfeld followed a similar approach to the costumes (fig. 16.9), all of which alluded to their dramatis personae (the Cook, the King, Princess Clarice, the Prince, the little devils, courtiers, Leandro, the witch Fata Morgana, Ninetta, Celio the Wizard, Truffaldino, etc.) rather than portraying them illusionistically. Whereas another designer such as Benois might try to transmit the status of a character by resorting to documentary precision, Anisfeld kept ethnographic detail to a minimum, as if to encourage the milliner or the seamstress to let the imagination interplay as she selects and measures the materials, stitches, and sews, contributing to an “emotional unity between music and color.”15 Like his mentor Bakst, Anisfeld was extremely attentive to the choice of material, and many of his designs carry indications as to hue, dimension, and type of cloth, proving that he was well aware of the tension between the body and its “investment.”

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Figure 16.8. Boris Anisfeld (1879-1973). Prince Tartaglia and Truffaldino (center) in Creonta’s castle courtyard, with the Cook in the castle doorway (right). The castle of the sorceress, design for Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (world premiere: December 30, 1921). Gouache, with watercolor, graphite, gold metallic paint, brush and black ink and touches of charcoal, selectively varnished, on off-white laid paper, 558 × 635 mm. Friends of American Art Collection. 1922.80. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Courtesy of Charles Chatfield-Taylor. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

Anisfeld was well versed in the dress code, sartorial cut, and particular fabric peculiar to the dramatis personae within a particular era, but he never forgot that the characters moved, gesticulated, and interacted onstage. To this end, he applied glitter, veils, collages, bubbly beads, and frothy lace to the costumes, creating as much of a kinetic installation as a character identity. That is why Anisfeld, as scene painter, executed the spirited designs of Bakst, Benois, and Alexander Golovin for Diaghilev’s enterprise—that is, as blueprints for individual interpretation that, in most cases, resulted in a vi­ sual triumph.16 Benois recalled how “Anisfeld used to stand on top of the huge canvas [on the floor] as if in a puddle of paint, gold in some places, blood red in others.”17 Perhaps Anisfeld was simply regarding the sheet of canvas as a magnified sheet of paper and the same kind of empty space that confronted him when he illustrated satirical magazines such as Zhupel (Bugbear) and Adskaia pochta (Hellish Post) in 1906 onward. After all, the book—with

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Figure 16.9. Boris Anisfeld, costume design for the Cook, Love for Three Oranges (1921). Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University. Courtesy of Charles Chatfield-Taylor.

its contained space, plot, characters, decorations, and audience—is in many ways a kind of miniature theatre. Anisfeld’s full immersion provided him with invaluable practical experience of the theatre in general and of the personal styles of individual artists in particular. As late as Love for Three Oranges, for example, there are immediate traces in color and form of Bakst’s honeyed Orient, Anisfeld’s Royal Palace being very close to Bakst’s set for Les Orientales of 1910 (in any case, Anisfeld served as chief scene painter for Bakst’s Schéhérazade, also in 1910). A Bessarabian Jew, Anisfeld seems to have been drawn instinctively to the East, gratifying the senses by creating rich and dazzling designs for exotic ballets such as The Marriage of Zobeide, Islamey, Le Roi de Lahore, Egyptian Night, and Aziade. Here was a fascination with what Brinton described as an “oriental decorative synthesis,” which, with its nocturnal delights and femmes fatales, was also a natural extension of Anisfeld’s Symbolist stance.18

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Indeed, Anisfeld himself was part and parcel of the phantasmagoric world, so dear to the Russian Symbolists, which he also expressed in enigmatic pictures of the 1900s and 1910s such as Prayer, Blue Statue, and Garden of the Hesperides. The themes of the occult and the mystical—and of theatricality—already intertwined in those early years, resulting in bizarre and histrionic pictures such as Masks and Dolls (1910) and Ballerina (1910s), and then later on in Mystics (1953–54) after Alexander Blok’s poem, “Unknown Woman” (Neznakomka, 1906). In any case, Anisfeld was one of several Saint Petersburg artists who brought a strong appreciation of the style moderne to stage design. Although overshadowed by Bakst, artists such as Boris Grigoriev, Nikolai Kalmakov, Sergei Sudeikin, and, of course, Anisfeld constituted a second generation of Symbolists in Russia, contrasting sharply with the more abstract trends of the Cubo-Futurists and Suprematists during the 1910s and 1920s. On many occasions, Anisfeld was praised for the “painted prism” of his “lavish” and “gorgeous” designs, vermilion and gold, ultramarine and emerald, and Three Oranges was no exception.19 Indeed, his bold and exhilarating color orchestration must have impressed—if not shocked—his audiences, eliciting concepts such as rhythm, vibration, and syncopation and reaffirming the artist’s belief that “when I begin work upon the scenery for a ballet or an opera, I pay scarcely any attention to the plot. I listen over and over to the score, for it is from the music that I derive my most valuable suggestions.”20 Indeed, what one critic wrote of the decorations for La Reine Fiammette at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918—“his colors and compositions sing”—is perhaps endemic to all of Anisfeld’s stage designs, especially for Three Oranges.21 When Three Oranges premiered in December 1921, the Chicago critics praised Anisfeld’s designs, even as they remained divided on the merits of Prokofiev’s score. Anisfeld’s daughter, Mara Otis Chatfield-Taylor, recalled: Prokofiev . . . lived very near us in New York. He wrote part of the score of Love of Three Oranges in my father’s studio. From what my father said, he wrote it all in three weeks. They would collaborate about the sets and costumes and how to arrange it all. My father loved the music the minute he heard it—so did I—but when it opened in Chicago, every critic was in a panic because they all hated the music. At the opening everyone yelled only for the artist, because my father’s scenery and costumes were absolutely glorious. When people would ask him about the music, he said, “Wait twenty years and you’ll like it.”22

Guided by Prokofiev’s musical arrangement of Meyerhold’s divertissement, Anisfeld brought to life witches and wizards, devils and jesters, hoping that

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the performance would become “simple and as easy as the sleep of a child.”23 But in spite of Anisfeld’s propitious decorations and costumes, reactions to Three Oranges were mixed, and Anisfeld’s and Prokofiev’s collaboration left Chicago audiences both “puzzled” and “overwhelmed.”24 However uncertain the American response to Three Oranges, the opera received particular attention and acclaim thereafter in the new Russia—for example, Sergei Radlov’s staging it at the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Leningrad (now the Mariinsky Theatre) with designs by Vladimir Dmitriev in 1926. Fascinated by the commedia dell’arte and the circus, thanks in part to his proximity to Meyerhold, Dmitriev accepted the commission, and although remote from the Chicago production, his sets and costumes for Three Oranges (see chap. 17) were expressive and effective, invoking comparison with Exter’s constructivism: “Dmitriev used a painterlyvolumetrical system of decorations. . . . Two exquisite, spiraling, white ladders disappearing into the depths on either side of the stage, a platform in the background and painted backdrops ‘inserted’ into the general blue ground of the spectacle were what defined the artist’s general spatial composition.”25 No doubt, remembering the Chicago episode, Prokofiev noted that “in comparison to what I’ve seen hitherto, this is the best production. The brilliance and lightness of the Prologue, the running tables, flying Truffaldino, the trapezes, the head-spinning tempos—all these things were accomplished . . . thanks to the talent of those who created the spectacle.”26 Given twenty-six times, the Radlov/Dmitriev production was the most attended opera in Leningrad in 1926, thanks not only to the music and the scenery but also to the cast, which included the celebrated singers Mariia Maksakova and Ivan Ershov. True, not all were satisfied with this “light, merry, and jocular” ensemble. The critic Aleksei Gvozdev, for example, complained that Dmitriev was too close to the “luxurious decorativeness of the old operatic theatre . . . which Prokofiev is ridiculing.”27 Perhaps Gvozdev would have been happier with Alexander Khvostenko-Khvostov’s avant-garde designs for the unrealized version of Three Oranges that Ukrainian director Les Kurbas prepared for the Berezil Theatre in Kharkiv in 1926–27 (fig. 16.10). According to his method, any spectacle should “transform” the psyche via the narrative, the music, and the décor, and with his highly geometrized, abstract, Constructivist forms, Khvostenko-Khvostov might well have shocked the audience “rhythmically, symbolically, metaphysically.”28 But if the Kurbas and Khvostenko-Khvostov version of Three Oranges did not come to fruition, the production of the same opera with designs by Isaak Rabinovich at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1927 marked a milestone

Boris Anisfeld, an Alchemist of Color   |  387

Figure 16.10. Alexander Khvostenko-Khvostov, costume design for Fata Morgana. Love for Three Oranges (1926, production unrealized). The Museum of Theatre, Music, and Cinema Arts of Ukraine.

in the history of the Russian theatre (fig. 16.11). Although Prokofiev was still living in Paris that year and thus could not supervise the Moscow premiere of his opera (conducted by Nikolai Golovanov), it enjoyed a distinct musical success, especially because Antonina Nezhdanova, Nadezhda Obukhova, and other distinguished singers took part. The production was broadcast and recorded so that Prokofiev was able to hear the rendering, and for the scenic resolution, Rabinovich had interpreted a bouffonerie with exaggerated, caricatural costumes and volumetrical sets that were light and transparent,

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Figure 16.11. Isaac Rabinovich, costume design for a doctor. Love for Three Oranges, directed by A. D. Dikii. State Academic Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow. Premiere: May 17, 1927. КP 291915. Copyright © A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

thereby “creating an architecture of light, achieving a fantastic, fairy-tale spectacle.”29 Still, not everyone was impressed. The Bolshoi management complained that the designs contained “extrinsic appurtenances . . . creating a sharp breach with the musical content,” so that a special committee was charged with “reworking Three Oranges from the scenographic

Figure 16.12. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, costume design for Smeraldina, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky, New York City Opera Company, 1949. Love for Three Oranges (1949). Costume Designs, T-Vim 2010-082. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

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standpoint.”30 Subsequently, Rabinovich transmuted his costumes and masks, especially for the Gluttons and the Drunkards, into satirical effigies representing the Pope, International Capitalism, and Fascism, which he and his students built for a political carnival in the Park of Culture and Recreation in Moscow.31 For reasons not altogether clear, Anisfeld left the theatre in 1926 after designing Aziade and Carnaval for Mordkin and Turandot for the Metropolitan Opera (not produced). Perhaps by then Anisfeld had grown tired of the fragile glitter of show business; perhaps his sensual amplitude was now out of step with the cool geometry of Art Deco and the International Style; or perhaps the artistic competition, especially from fellow émigrés such as Boris Aronson, Eugene Dunkel, Re-Mi (Nicholas Remisoff), and Sudeikin was too abrasive. Perhaps he wished simply to return to his first passion, studio painting.32 In any case, in America, at least, Three Oranges fell out of favor after the Chicago interlude, and Anisfeld’s bold color schemes and visionary architectures seem not to have left a permanent imprint on subsequent productions. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s designs for Three Oranges (fig. 16.12), for example, which Theodore Komisarjevsky produced for the New York City Opera at City Center in 1949 with choreography by Charles Weldman, were very different. Essentially too restrained and too sober, they failed to evoke the magic of Prokofiev’s farcical opera. Although Anisfeld continued to paint and exhibit throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the demand for his designs and portraits declined rapidly as the American fashion for Russian culture faded. Anisfeld might have suffered the fate of other, less fortunate Russian artists in New York such as Abram Manievich and Nicholas Vasilieff, who lacked both wide public recognition and financial solvency. Fortunately, as a result of an exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute in 1929 that was well attended and well received, Anisfeld was invited to teach at the school there—an appointment he held until 1957.33 The fact that we are still celebrating Anisfeld’s decorations for Love for Three Oranges, a century later, indicates the aesthetic permanence of his achievement.

Notes The chapter title (“alchemist of color”) comes from “Blue Bird,” 187. 1. In 1930, most of Anisfeld’s designs for the production (and for The Snow Maiden) were destroyed by fire in a studio at Stony Point, New York, that he shared with Sergei Sudeikin. The Art Institute of Chicago possesses eight of the set and costume designs. For a full listing of Anisfeld’s stage designs, see Lingenauber and Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld, 174–267. See also, Flint, Boris Anisfeld.

Boris Anisfeld, an Alchemist of Color   |  391 2. Statement by Anisfeld in Watson et al., Boris Anisfeld Retrospective; statement by Edgar Eving in Watson et al. 3. See Brinton, Boris Anisfeld. After Brooklyn, the exhibition travelled to nine other cities, including Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, and Saint Louis. For references to Anisfeld’s other American exhibitions, see Mesley, Boris Anisfeld, 9, 10. 4. Letter from Leila Mechlin to Christian Brinton, dated September 25, 1918. New York Times, October 19, 1918; quoted in Evstigneeva et al., Anisfel’d. 5. “Blue Bird,” 187. 6. Watson et al., Boris Anisfeld Retrospective. 7. Kazarinova and Klimenskaia, Boris Anisfel’d. 8. On the so-called continental method of scene painting, see Polunin, Continental Method, and later editions. 9. Statement by Alexandre Benois in the Saint Petersburg newspaper, Rech’, no 7 (1912); quoted in Lingenauber and Sugrubova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld, 40. 10. Review in Le Gaulois, June 7, 1911; quoted in Buckle, Diaghilev, 109. 11. Fokin, Protiv techeniia, 470. 12. Fairbank, “Love for Three Oranges,” 282. 13. Moore, “’Love for Three Oranges’: Color Marvel.” 14. Hecht, “Around the Town.” 15. D. Levinsohn, untitled essay, in Watson et al., Boris Anisfeld Retrospective. 16. As scene painter for Diaghilev, Anisfeld worked on Paris productions of Boris Godunov, Pskovitianka, Giselle, Cléopatre, Petrouchka, Schéhérazade, and the Underwater Kingdom (from Sadko). 17. Statement by Alexandre Benois, quoted in Kazarinov and Klimenskaia, Boris Anisfel’d. 18. C. Brinton, “Arbiter of Museums,” quoted in Lingenauber and Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld, 20. 19. R. Saltykova, “Boris Anisfel’d v Rossii,” in Evstigneeva, et al. Boris Anisfel’d (in Russian and English). M. Ignat’eva, “Boris Anisfel’d: Zhizn’ khudozhnika v emigratsii” in Evstigneeva et al., Boris Anisfel’d (in Russian and English). 20. Quoted in Watson et al., Boris Anisfeld Retrospective. 21. Quoted in Ignat’eva, “Boris Anisfel’d: Zhizn’ khudozhnika v emigratsii.” 22. Weber and Chatfield-Taylor, Paintings by Boris Anisfeld, unpaginated. 23. Statement by Anisfeld, quoted in Lingenauber and Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld, 46. 24. Watson et al., Boris Anisfeld Retrospective. For a list of reviews of the Chicago premiere, see Lingenauber and Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld, 229. 25. Syrkina and Kostina, Russkoe teatral’no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo, 154. 26. Prokof’ev, “Ob ‘Apel’sinakh,’” quoted in Berezkin, Dmitriev, 63. 27. Chernova, Kasian Goleizovsky, 80 (“light, merry, and jocular”). Gvozdev, “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” quoted in Berezkin, Dmitriev, 76. 28. Ciczkewycz, “Berezil Theatrical Association.” 29. Syrkina, Rabinovich, 30. 30. Yufit et al., Sovetskii teatr, 2:134 (both quotes). 31. Margolin, Khudozhniki teatra, 111. 32. As surmised by Anisfeld’s grandson, Charles Chatfield-Taylor. See Lingenauber and Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld, 47. 33. Interest in Anisfeld’s work renewed in the 1970s onward, demonstrated by several important exhibitions, including ones in Chicago (see Taylor et al., Boris Anisfeld 1879–1973),

392  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges New York (see Bekkerman, Boris Anisfeld; Chatfield-Taylor, Works on Paper), and London (see Boris Anisfeld, auction catalog at MacDougall’s).

Bibliography Bekkerman. S. Boris Anisfeld. New York: A.B.A. Gallery, 2001. Exhibition catalog. Berezkin, V. V. V. Dmitriev. Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1981. “‘The Blue Bird’ in Music and Picture.” Art and Decoration (New York), January 1920, 187. Boris Anisfeld. London: MacDougall’s, 2008. Auction catalog. Brinton, C., compiler. Boris Anisfeld. New York: Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts, 1918–20. Exhibition catalog. Buckle, Richard. Diaghilev. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. Chatfield-Taylor, C. Works on Paper from the Estate of Boris Anisfeld 1879–1973. New York: Shepherd and Derom Galleries, 2007. Exhibition catalog. Chernova, N, ed. Kasian Goleizovskii. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo. Moscow: VTO, 1984. Ciczkewycz, Ihor, compiler. The Berezil Theatre Exhibition. New York: Organization of Modern Ukrainian Artists, 1980. Exhibition catalog. Evstigneeva, I., R. Salykhova, and M. Ignat’eva. B. Anisfel’d. Saint Petersburg: State Museum of Theatre and Music, 1994. Exhibition catalog. Fairbank, Janet. “The Love for Three Oranges.” New Republic, February 1, 1922, 282. Flint. J. Boris Anisfeld. Twenty Years of Designs for the Theater. Washington, DC: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1971. Exhibition catalog. Fokin, M. Protiv techeniia. Leningrad-Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962 Hecht, Ben. “Around the Town. A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. Fantastic. Lollypops.” Chicago Daily News, December 30, 1921. Kazarinova, N., and O. Klimenskaia. Boris Anisfel’d. Magiia tsveta. Naslediia Serebrianogo veka. Perm-Saint Petersburg-Paris [2001]. Lingenauber, E., and O. Sugrobova-Roth. Boris Anisfeld. Dusseldorf: Editions Libertas, 2001. Margolin, S. Khudozhniki teatra za 15 let. Moscow: Ogiz, 1933. Mesley, R. Boris Anisfeld. “Fantast-Mystic.” Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1989. Exhibition catalog. Moore, Edward. ‘”Love for Three Oranges’ Color Marvel, but Enigmatic Noise.” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 31, 1921. Polunin, Vladimir. The Continental Method of Scene Painting. London: Dance, 1927. Syrkina, F. Ia. I Rabinovich. Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1972. Syrkina, F., and E. Kostina. Russkoe teatral’no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978. Taylor, J., S. Terenzo, and J. Fint. Boris Anisfeld 1879–1973. Gilman Galleries, 1981–82. Exhibition catalog. Watson, D. C., A. Osver, E. Osver, E. Ewing, and D. Levinsohn. Boris Anisfeld Retrospective Exhibition. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1958. Exhibition catalog. Weber, N., and M. Chatfield-Taylor. Paintings by Boris Anisfeld. New York: Adler Fine Arts, 1979–80. Exhibition catalog. Yufit, A., et al., editors. Sovetskii teatr. Dokumenty i materialy 1917–1967. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1972.

17 Oranges in Leningrad Kevin Bartig

I

n the middle of rehearsals for the 1921 Chicago world premiere of Love for Three Oranges, Sergei Prokofiev was reunited with an old friend and compatriot, Feodor Chaliapin. The legendary bass had recently arrived from Europe on a concert tour, and Prokofiev asked after mutual friends back in Russia. Chaliapin had little to share, although he reported that Vsevolod Meyerhold was suffering from consumption. “And I so badly want him to produce Three Oranges some day,” Prokofiev wrote in his journal that evening.1 He sensed that Meyerhold, whose Oranges divertissement was the source for the opera’s libretto, would direct a very different production than the one being rehearsed at that moment in Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. Prokofiev’s wish never came true, although several years later he learned of plans for perhaps the next best thing: a Leningrad Three Oranges, to be directed by Meyerhold’s former student and mentee Sergei Radlov (1892–1958) at the storied Mariinsky Theatre, known after the Revolution as the Academic Opera and Ballet Theater (“Akoper” for short).2 Joining Radlov as designer was another Meyerhold associate, Vladimir Dmitriev (1900–48), and leading the performances would be Vladimir Dranishnikov (1893–1939), one of Leningrad’s top conductors and a friend of Prokofiev’s from his student days. The news delighted Prokofiev. Not only would Three Oranges appear in the intellectual and artistic milieu that gave birth to the theatrical divertissement on which it was based, but it would also be the first major production of one of Prokofiev’s stage works in his radically changed homeland. Unlike the Chicago production, the Leningrad production ran for multiple seasons, beginning in 1926, to great popular acclaim. When Prokofiev visited Russia for the first time after nearly a decade abroad, Radlov’s production was the highlight. The flattering

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reception and critical praise he received encouraged closer ties with Soviet Russia, ultimately setting him on the path toward his fateful 1936 repatriation. How did an eccentric opera about a fairy-tale hypochondriac prince written for a bourgeois Western audience by a composer who had absented himself from the revolution become a success on the postrevolutionary Soviet stage? In the end, a mix of Akoper politics and personal agendas brought Three Oranges to Leningrad, and once it had arrived, critics eager to conflate political and aesthetic revolution enthusiastically promoted it. But these events unfolded amid uncertainty and upheaval. The former Mariinsky’s purpose in a radically new political-cultural context was a divisive issue, and material and personnel shortages meant new productions were rare and subject to intense scrutiny. This chapter examines how Prokofiev, his supporters, and his critics navigated these issues to stage a production of Three Oranges that was, in many ways, more consequential than the world premiere production in Chicago.

From Chicago to Leningrad In a 1922 interview, the new superintendent of Saint Petersburg’s former Imperial theatres, Ivan Ekskuzovich, catalogued the challenges facing these recently nationalized institutions.3 Chief among these was a lack of talent and competent personnel. Like Prokofiev, many artists had sought better fortunes in the West after the revolution, depriving theatres of performers, writers, and composers. Framing this challenge in economic terms, Ekskuzovich lamented that “our enemy the dollar” had drawn Russia’s best artists abroad, weakening current productions and precluding new ones.4 Ekskuzovich compensated as best he could. Veterans of the dramatic stage like Radlov were enlisted to direct opera and ballet, and a new advisory council debated which productions would be worthy of the theatre’s limited resources.5 A consensus emerged that, at least until a repertory of new “Soviet” operas was in place, the Akoper should rely on popular nineteenth-century Western European works such as Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1859).6 But when an exchange between Mezhdunarodnaia kniga (the Soviet import-export organization for media) and the Viennese music publisher Universal Edition was established, more recent works in Universal’s catalogue emerged as the most accessible and least expensive options.7 Thus the first new “Soviet” productions at the Akoper were of Western Modernist works: Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), directed by Iosif Lapitsky in the 1923–24 season, and Franz Shreker’s The Distant Sound (Der ferne Klang, 1912), directed by Radlov in the 1924–25 season.

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In the absence of new, Soviet-themed operas, the Akoper administration also encouraged creative updates to preexisting works. The directorplaywright Nikolai Vinogradov, for example, retrofitted a number of existing operas and ballets with revolutionary-themed libretti. Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836) became a drama about the 1825 Decembrist revolt, and the same composer’s Le prophète (1849) was re-set in the Paris Commune. More preposterously, Vinogradov transformed Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty into The Sunny Commune (Solnechnaia kommuna), a protorevolutionary drama set in medieval Europe.8 The dramatic weaknesses of these radical transpositions meant none made it to the stage. The only retooled classic heard by underwhelmed Leningrad audiences was а 1923 production of Wagner’s Rienzi (1838–40) in which director Nikolai Petrov restyled the opera’s title character as the French revolutionary François-Noël Babeuf.9 When newly composed works on Soviet themes finally arrived, they proved even more underwhelming. The initial works in this category were Sergei Bershadsky’s Stepan Razin and Andrei Pashchenko’s Eagle Revolt (Orlinyi bunt), operas devoted to the anti-tsarist insurrectionists Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev, respectively. The Akoper advisory council rejected Bershadsky’s work outright10 and mandated major revisions for Pashchenko’s, which premiered on the old Imperial stage during the 1925–26 season—the only new Soviet work to do so nearly a decade after the revolution.11 Prokofiev’s Three Oranges would never have become part of this disparate mix without the influence of two prominent advisory council members— Dranishnikov, recently appointed as a staff conductor at the Akoper, and the prominent critic Boris Asafiev (1884–1949). Longtime friends of the composer, both had worked to promote his music during his long absence, Dranishnikov from the podium and Asafiev in newspapers and journals. That they would have lobbied for Three Oranges is not surprising, and Prokofiev was aware how much he owed Asafiev in particular for his advocacy. As he wrote to the critic on August 14, 1925, “allow me to thank you again for facilitating the arrangements for ‘Oranges po-Leningradski,’ since I am fully aware that 99 percent of the effort and propaganda was yours.”12 Presumably, one of Dranishikov’s and Asafiev’s most challenging tasks was convincing the Akoper administration to pay fees to Prokofiev’s Parisian publisher from its paltry store of foreign currency. Given this added expense in addition to the cost of mounting a new production, a lot was being invested in Russia’s long-lost composer. Part of this investment involved justifying programming choices ideologically, given that the Akoper was a nationalized theatre. This involved circulating

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a thematic plan that implied the theatre’s increasingly eclectic repertory of prerevolutionary Russian, Soviet, and Western Modernist opera served specific didactic functions.13 Imagining the Akoper as a kind of museum, the plan’s authors argued that continued performances of prerevolutionary works juxtaposed with productions of contemporary Soviet works would demonstrate a teleological progression from less advanced (Russian) to more advanced (Soviet) repertory. (In reality, the Russian classics were prerevolutionary productions held over out of logistical necessity, and the postrevolutionary repertory did not yet exist.) According to the plan, the productions of Salome and Der ferne Klang had introduced audiences to the “best examples” of operatic innovation outside the Soviet Union.14 Given that it was composed for a foreign audience, Love for Three Oranges was placed into this last category of “Western” works.

Three Oranges at the Circus Prokofiev learned from Asafiev that the Akoper production would be directed by Radlov and feature designs by Dmitriev (fig. 17.1). The choice was practical, as Radlov already worked at the theatre and Dmitriev was an experienced theatre designer. But as Meyerhold’s former students, Radlov and Dmitriev were also steeped in the artistic and intellectual world of the Three Oranges divertissement. In fact, Radlov had experimented with many of his teacher’s ideas at the People’s Comedy Theatre (Narodnaia komediia, 1920–21), where he challenged traditional theatrical forms with improvisatory techniques of pre-realist theatre (notably commedia dell’arte) and elements drawn from the circus and music hall.15 Although the innovations of the People’s Comedy had lost their cutting-edge freshness by 1926, they seemed ideally suited to a commedia opera that mocked tradition. At least, this was what Radlov argued in several articles he wrote leading up to the production. “Italian comedy is not an end, but rather a means,” he explained, cautioning spectators not to expect a banal period setting or dashes of couleur locale corresponding to the plot’s eighteenth-century Italian origins.16 Instead, it was the opera’s insistent rhythmic drive that inspired him, and he promised to give his production a corresponding visual physicality by resurrecting the circus stunts and tricks of his earlier theatrical work.17 Radlov also bolstered his production choices with vaguely Marxist–Leninist language. In an article published in Leningrad’s Vecherniaia krasnaia gazeta (Evening red gazette) on the eve of the premiere, he applauded Prokofiev for “ridiculing” what was mainstream and, therefore, “almost sacred” in opera.18 Moreover, to disparage the production would be to reveal a bourgeois soul:

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Figure 17.1. Vladimir Dmitriev, design for act II, scenes 1-2 (Prince’s bedroom and palace courtyard festivities scenes). Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, Akoper, Leningrad (1926). Paper, watercolor, graphite, ink, 34.6 × 27.8 cm. GIK 4291/2 OR 5740, St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

Coughing, fighting, spitting, vomiting, laughing, swearing, brawling—a continuous “shocking” unfolds on the well-mannered operatic stage, seasoned with childish delight at devils, trap doors, smoke and other “outdated” effects of simple féerie theatres. Prokofiev does all this with such determination and courage that lovers of the dignified, the beautiful, and the gently dreamy certainly should not upset themselves by attending Love for Three Oranges. Prokofiev’s achievement is that he strikes at the middle class and petty bourgeoisie, clearing the

398  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges way for the future growth of “opera” along the new path of musical comedy, the sharpest satire, free from all conservative operatic biases.19

More puzzlingly, Radlov sought to exclude Meyerhold from the production’s story, turning the spotlight instead on Carlo Gozzi, the author of the eighteenth-century fiaba on which Meyerhold and his collaborators based the Three Oranges divertissement: Having taken the theme of his opera from a fairy tale by Gozzi, who successfully revived the aesthetics of the popular entertainments of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Prokofiev knew instinctively to return to the popular sources that nourished Gozzi, to write something much more robust and coarse. . . . Given this, I felt obliged in the opera’s staging not to depend on the aesthetics of Italian comedy characteristic of 1913–14—the era of Meyerhold’s journal Love for Three Oranges, with its commitment to formal mise-en-scène and stylized pantomime—and instead to rely on my work in the People’s Comedy Theatre from 1920–22, with its sharp dynamism and the rough cheerfulness of improvised, quasi-circus-like folk theatre.20

Radlov most likely sought to put distance between himself and his famous teacher. To be sure, he had learned a great deal from Meyerhold about improvisation and the ways in which circus and music hall elements could upend theatrical tradition; however, to acknowledge this lineage was to risk being branded unoriginal. But what exactly did “sharp dynamism” and “quasi-circus-like folk theatre” mean in practice?21 Firsthand observations and a cache of production photos document stylized use of props, direct audience engagement, and creative use of horizontal and vertical space to highlight the opera’s theatrewithin-theatre interplay (figs. 17.2 and 17.3). Radlov, for example, working in part from Dmitriev’s sketches, added a bridge between the two towers that are called for in the divertissement and libretto (fig. 17.4). Meyerhold imagined his “Fools” as spectators observing the Prince’s fairy-tale adventures from these towers, their metatheatrical vantage point demarcated by the use of vertical space. Radlov’s horizontal bridge both allowed the opera’s similar onstage spectators to roam high above the stage and highlighted supernatural interventions in the fairy-tale action. In Radlov’s production, for example, Celio the Wizard passes overhead in act I (rather than across the forestage in Meyerhold’s and upstage in Prokofiev’s stage directions), and in act II, spectators assemble on this same bridge to watch the various entertainments concocted to make the Prince laugh. At the beginning of act III, Celio addresses the Prince and Truffaldino from the bridge, comically dangling before them a magic ribbon to distract the murderous Cook who guards the three oranges.

Figure 17.2. Photo of the King’s palace, act I, Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov. Akoper, Leningrad (1926). Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 1032, l. 3.

Figure 17.3. Photo of act II, scene 2: the festivities in the royal palace courtyard, with onstage spectators watching from side staircases. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov. Akoper, Leningrad (1926). Inv. no. 3821/18. St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

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Figure 17.4. Photo of act III, scene 1: Wizard Celio summoning Farfarello and his devils. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov. Akoper, Leningrad (1926). Inv. no. 10187/19. St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

These were all important expansions of Meyerhold’s exploration of theatrical space but also ones that Radlov had tested in his own work as early as 1921. In a witty People’s Comedy production entitled Love and Gold (Liubov’ i zoloto), Radlov used multiple horizontal levels above the stage to compress linear action into a rapid-fire comic display of simultaneities.22 Radlov also expanded the stage horizontally. During the Prologue and act II, curtains with rectangular openings covered the towers to simulate three tiers of loges on either side of the stage.23 Peering out from these openings were Prokofiev’s Tragedians (stage left) and Comedians (stage right) and his expanded cast of Eccentrics, who exited through small doors at stage level to intervene in the fairy-tale plot they ostensibly observed. Much to the real audience’s delight, these spectators entered from the house at the beginning of the performance and took their loge seats as if they were Leningrad regulars.24 In blurring the line between stage and audience, Radlov challenged theatre’s traditionally clear boundaries: Were the spectators part of the opera’s action, an extension of the audience, or something in between? The action on Radlov’s multileveled stage involved references to pantomime and circus. The People’s Comedy Theatre was again a source; specifically, two 1920 productions that dressed up commedia-inspired plots with circus tricks: The Corpse’s Bride (Nevesta mertvetsa, 1920) and The Monkey Who

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Was an Informer (Obez’iana-donoschitsa, 1920). Acrobatic stunts had filled the former, most notably a heart-stopping plummet from a high window, and the title character of the latter had comically soared above the stage on a trapeze.25 In Radlov’s Three Oranges, the analogues are plainly obvious. In act I, scene 1, a dummy costumed as the clownish Truffaldino plunged from the wings to the stage on a wire—mimicking the plummet of The Corpse’s Bride— with the human Truffaldino swapping places with it at its destination. The monkey’s trapeze was reimagined as a vertical rope grid suspended over the stage in act II, scene 2 (see fig. 17.3). As Truffaldino directed “divertissements” to induce the hypochondriac Prince to laugh, acrobat extras dangled from the ropes above in various positions, as if shot from a circus cannon. These same rope-suspended acrobats also dangled above the act IV, scene 2, chase (immediately after the palace guards attempted to fire a cannon at Princess Ninetta, whom a cursed hair pin had transformed into a rat). Smaller and undoubtedly funny touches included equipping Fata Morgana with a set of fake legs that flew high into the air during her act II fall and arming the Little Devils with megaphones and “Bengal Fires” (sparklers) in act I, scene 2. Vladimir Dmitriev’s specific contributions to the production are more difficult to pinpoint.26 Many of his surviving sketches are for costumes and brilliantly colored interlude curtains that facilitated quick scene changes (fig. 17.5). He also suggested visually striking features, such as a band of skeletons—presumably those of the Cook’s unfortunate victims—that announce Creonta’s castle in act III, scene 2 (fig 17.6). Some of his contributions were deliberately satirical, such as a backdrop emblazoned with exotic plants that places Linetta, Nicoletta, and Ninetta—the three orange-hatched princesses who appear in act III, scene 3—in a lush desert oasis. Against this backdrop, Linetta’s and Nicoletta’s deaths from thirst seemed all the more absurd.27 The extent to which Dmitriev collaborated directly with Radlov, particularly on the innovative production features discussed earlier, is less clear. Radlov’s public writings projected an auteurlike authority, and, as we will see, critics were all too ready to fault him alone for the shortcomings they perceived.

The Critics Prokofiev’s irreverence toward tradition in Three Oranges impressed Soviet critics, who granted him the most unequivocally positive reception of his career to date. The opera’s metatheatricality and self-referentiality were major attractions, as was its idiosyncratic form, which resembled a continuous recitative lacking any obvious arias. Radlov fared far worse. Critics balked

Figure 17.5. Vladimir Dmitriev, design for the second musical interlude curtain (devils blowing Truffaldino and Tartaglia to Creonta’s castle). Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov, State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (1926). Paper, watercolor, gouache, graphite, ink, 24.0 × 27.3 cm. GIK 16438/1345 OR 22258, St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

Figure 17.6. Vladimir Dmitriev, design for act III, scene 2. Creonta’s castle. Love for Three Oranges, by Sergei Prokofiev, directed by Sergei Radlov. Akoper, Leningrad (1926). Paper on cardboard, watercolor, ink, 32.4 × 25.3 cm. GIK 16438/1341 OR 22254, St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

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at his recycled theatre aesthetics, faulting him for staging innovative music in a passé and derivative fashion. Underlying these divergent reactions was the pan-European concern for technical and expressive novelty that became a central feature of early twentieth-century Modernism.28 However, Soviet critics conflated aesthetic innovation and political innovation far more often than their Western colleagues did, often filling their writings with revolutionary rhetoric. Consequently, the reception of the Leningrad Three Oranges proved far more ideological than those of earlier Western productions of the opera. Nevertheless, the values of Soviet critics—at least in 1926—must have seemed far more familiar to the composer than those of the conservative US critics who had panned the Chicago and New York premieres of Three Oranges five years earlier. By 1926, Prokofiev had grown accustomed to the chic-loving circles of Paris, his adopted home, which brimmed with self-styled Modernist artists and novelty-fixated critics. And Prokofiev followed the reaction to the Leningrad premiere carefully, using reviews that Dranishnikov couriered to Paris and those gathered by a professional clipping service.29 What follows is a brief survey of the critical reaction based on that cache of documents, now preserved in Prokofiev’s archive in Moscow. The organizers of the Three Oranges production were predictably its loudest advocates. Perhaps hoping to shape critical reaction following the February 18, 1926 premiere, Asafiev (writing under his pen name Igor Glebov) published an advance panegyric in Krasnaia gazeta (The red gazette) that focused on operatic form, particularly Prokofiev’s novel solution to the combination of “comic and fairy-tale theatrical elements in a holistic, live spectacle.”30 Rather than relying on traditional forms, Prokofiev had, in Asafiev’s estimation, turned to cinema for inspiration. Perhaps thinking of the rapid-fire montage of recent avant-garde films like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Asafiev described a “fabric [that] consists of a mosaic-like alternation of incisively characteristic musical moments, different in character, strength of expression, color, etc., but united by constant mechanized movement.”31 This was a clever linking to film, an artform that had, unlike traditional opera, already proven highly adaptable to the Soviet present, both ideologically and aesthetically. Viktor Rappaport, a theatre director and Asafiev’s colleague at the Akoper, was more blunt: “We regard the success of the performance not simply as the success of a new opera, but as a new victory of the theatre, one that managed to transform its glorious artistic past into a joyful construction of a new future, as proof that the rumors of our decline are false and ridiculous. The Akoper is alive and will live a new, better life.”32 Asafiev and Rappaport both trumpeted grandiose conclusions but offered little meaningful

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analysis. Their reviews were not meant to evaluate the production but rather to set the tone for the ensuing discussion. Several prominent critics not directly associated with the production offered similar praise. Borrowing a phrase that Meyerhold had coined in the early 1920s, the theatre critic Aleksei Gvozdev wrote that the Akoper Three Oranges had achieved a “theatrical October.”33 The theatre’s productions of Salome and Der ferne Klang had fallen short of this goal, he reasoned, the former already showing its fifteen-year age when it premiered in Leningrad and the latter being nothing more than an “out-of-date echo” of Wagner. Three Oranges, on the other hand, criticized “all operatic traditions, cruelly mocking them.”34 David Zaslavsky, one of Leningrad’s most prolific critics, was more temperate. Three Oranges was only a “February” Revolution, he reasoned, likening theatre that “laughs at theatre itself” to the initial wave of mass unrest in 1917 that forced the tsar’s abdication and establishment of a provisional government.35 Although Zaslavsky applauded the Akoper for programming a work that would have been too radical for the old Mariinsky, he still awaited opera’s “October.” Significantly, neither Gvozdev nor Zaslavsky wrote about the content of Three Oranges—namely, the misadventures of its orange-tracking Prince. Indeed, it seemed almost irrelevant to their primary criterion for theatrical revolution: skepticism toward tradition. Thus, stylistic pastiche, metatheatricality, and self-referentiality—pillars of Prokofiev’s mockery of tradition— were their focus, not the linear plots and arias of traditional opera. The critic S. Gintsburg addressed the question of form and content head on, arguing that a work like Pashchenko’s Eagle Revolt did little more than package revolutionary content (anti-tsarist insurrection) in traditional forms (arias and recitatives).36 Likewise, Salome and Der Ferne Klang featured a pioneering through-composed structure, but their plots were hardly the stuff to inspire revolutionary fervor. In Three Oranges, however, form itself effected the necessary revolutionary theme—namely, the overturning of tradition. Gintsburg insisted the opera’s assault on “state order, operatic theatricality and dreamy lyrics about love, overblown heroism, and a caste-based concept of valor and honor” made it an attack on the very social order that the revolution was to overturn.37 Such was a heady accomplishment for Prokofiev, who worried about a lack of topicality during the opera’s gestation.38 (Later he joked that all he did was write a “cheerful show.”39) Other critics expressed similar ideas without political metaphors. The musicologist Yuri Vainkop wrote that “all sentimentality, all artificial lyricism, everything that can weigh down or hold back the rapid flight of the

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composer’s musical thought has been expelled from the opera.”40 Likewise, a critic writing for the theatre weekly Rabochii i teatr (Worker and theatre) under the initials “B. B.” insisted that the work was an attack “on elevated pathos: on stilted mysticism (Celio the Wizard, Fata Morgana, the Devils), on sentimental lyricism (the three oranges, the chorus of Lyricals), on pompous dramatism (the chorus of Tragedians, the Cook).”41 More important for B. B. was Prokofiev’s artistic trajectory. Praising the composer’s gifts for “grotesquery,” the critic insisted that Prokofiev had “long ago been freed from the academic precepts of his teachers [Nikolai] RimskyKorsakov and [Anatoly] Lyadov” and that Oranges “summed up the pursuits and achievements of his second period.”42 Detaching Prokofiev from the prerevolutionary world of his teachers and invoking stylistic periods, B. B. placed Prokofiev into a kind of apprentice-to-master narrative that had been popular in composer biographies since the nineteenth century.43 Such a narrative dovetailed nicely with increasingly progress-obsessed public discourse—the kind that later came to buttress grandiose endeavors such as Stalin’s FiveYear Plans—but also forced a number of clumsy interventions on the part of progress-focused critics. D. N. Mazurov allowed, for example, that one might note similarities between Love for Three Oranges and Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1907 opera The Golden Cockerel (Zolotoi petushok), but he insisted—without any compelling explanation—that Three Oranges differed “at is core” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s work.44 Likewise, Dmitri Kashintsev, writing under the pen name Anton Uglov, described the opera’s lack of alternating recitatives and arias as a leap forward for Prokofiev in particular and musical language in general.45 But Uglov, an experienced music critic, surely knew other composers had conceived of similar experimental forms decades before. Such critics may have been swayed by Radlov’s and Asafiev’s pre-premiere writings. This was certainly the case with Evgeny Braudo, who wrote for the central newspaper Pravda. Like his colleagues, he commended Prokofiev for the opera’s innovative form and structure. He also, parroting Asafiev almost verbatim, described music that unfolded in a “mosaic-like” fashion, a briskly moving “sound montage” so crucial to the opera’s overall effect that the work’s plot was essentially irrelevant. Prokofiev was “entirely modern,” he concluded.46 Similarly, the poet-playwright-composer Mikhail Kuzmin penned a glowing review that did little more than recap Radlov’s pre-premiere manifesto: “Youthfulness and genuine passion for fun and theatricality pervade Radlov’s production. There is parody, of course, and of course a challenge, but a challenge mainly to people who have forgotten how to laugh, how to have fun, and how to love theatre. The challenge of Prokofiev’s production

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and opera hit its mark: ‘serious’ people were terribly offended, while the children taken to the show in large numbers were delighted.”47 Nevertheless, the overall critical response to Three Oranges—whether overblown, derivative, or genuinely insightful—was unanimous on one important point: Prokofiev had something to contribute to the growth of Soviet musical theatre. That the opera had been written for a very different audience thousands of miles away seemed easily forgotten. The withering remarks that critics reserved for Radlov read as particularly harsh next to Prokofiev’s accolades. Much of the bile came from those who either knew Meyerhold’s and Radlov’s work intimately, such as Gvozdev, or were fellow veterans of Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio, such as Konstantin KuzminKaravaev. Writing under the pseudonym “K-oi,” Kuzmin-Karavaev articulated the central complaint of almost all Leningrad and Moscow critics: that the production’s aesthetics were out of date.48 Adopting the same “February” metaphor used by Zaslavsky, Kuzmin-Karavaev questioned the production’s basis in earlier theatre experiments, both Meyerhold’s (which Radlov obscured) and those of the People’s Comedy (which Radlov widely advertised): “The present production is connected directly to pre-revolutionary (in the chronological sense) attempts at a ‘theatrical February.’ This is a significant limitation that raises significant doubts. . . . Already in 1913, V. Meyerhold’s protests were directed (as in the days of Gozzi) at the frozen, canonized forms of bourgeois theatre. The People’s Comedy Theatre was already, to an extent, out of date and bound to wither, although it did yield a number of wonderful and valuable formal discoveries. But now, after the difficult revolution our theatre has endured since October 1917, insisting on the same means seems like completely groundless aestheticism.”49 Other critics dwelt on the appropriateness of Radlov’s circus tricks. Gregory Kryzhitsky’s response in Rabochii i teatr was typical: “The director rolled out the whole arsenal of the old féerie: there were flights through the air, appearances through trap-doors, and all sorts of devilry of the kind we enjoyed in the fairground booths of our youth. In a word, the kind of theatricality only a semiliterate could confuse with real theatre. Radlov promised us ‘completely new production methods’ that would ‘deliberately contrast with the old.’ There was a lot that was old (or worn-out, to be precise). As for the ‘completely new’ . . .”50 Even Gvozdev complained about the hackneyed theatrical devices paired with the music he so admired. Topping the list were the Bengal Fires, which seemed like unnecessary kitsch when paired with “a ball with mirrors casting little flecks of light on the backdrop.”51 “The staging fundamentally differed from the music,” Gvozdev complained, “and instead of a visual repudiation of operatic traditions it turned out to be no less than their

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affirmation.”52 Unlike other critics, Gvozdev even admonished the designer Dmitriev, whose black-and-yellow costumes made the rope-ladder suspended extras seem like “canaries” invading a comic revue.53 The only writer to condemn Radlov and Prokofiev in equal measure was the musicologist Nikolai Malkov. He found the opera to be “halfway between operetta and féerie,” a triteness born of Prokofiev’s long years away from revolutionary struggle in the Soviet Union.54 More significantly, Malkov challenged the work’s perceived newness by likening it to The Gambler (Igrok), an opera Prokofiev had completed several years before Three Oranges.55 Malkov had some license to exaggerate the works’ similarities because the earlier work had never been performed in Russia and remained largely unknown. Nevertheless, he articulated the more general truth that Prokofiev benefited from the relative obscurity of his stage works in Russia, which made Three Oranges seem like a sudden and novel arrival from the West. As the reviews surveyed here demonstrate, Radlov enjoyed no such benefit and labored under the twin shadows of his famous teacher and his own well-known theatrical past.

Prokofiev in the USSR The mixed criticism did not deter audiences, and performances of Radlov’s production were “constantly sold out,” as Prokofiev’s friend Nikolai Miaskovsky reported months after the premiere.56 Prokofiev saw the production himself in early 1927, and he was impressed enough to dispatch an atypically effusive letter to the Akoper: I would like to express the extraordinary impression Love for Three Oranges made on me. It was not only the best production among those I have seen, but indeed so much better that the others seem deeply provincial by comparison. The brilliance and ease of the Prologue, the fantasy of the infernal scenes, the running tables,57 the flying Truffaldino, the trapeze, Fata Morgana and her whip, the dizzying tempos and precision of the scene before the cook’s appearance—all of this was possible thanks to the exceptional artistic level of the academic opera with its exemplary soloists, choir, orchestra and technical personnel and thanks to the rare talent of the production’s creators: Dranishnikov, Radlov and Dmitriev. Please accept my deepest thanks for this attention to my opera. I am glad that this took place in my home country.58

This success with opera had eluded Prokofiev in the West, and the possibility for recognition in the Soviet Union only seemed to grow. As he described to his friend Natalie Koussevitzky, “I saw ‘Oranges’ at the Mariinsky, a merry production, in June they’re taking it to Paris and they’ve already made arrangements. But the Bolshoi Theatre [in Moscow] is preparing to stage it

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even more magnificently, and now there’s a fight to see which theatre will go to Paris.”59 The idea for the tour came from no less a figure than Anatoly Lunacharsky, the USSR’s powerful Commissar of Enlightenment, who had seen Radlov’s production with Prokofiev on February 20, 1927.60 Even more enticingly, Ekskuzovich suggested an Akoper production of The Gambler the following season, and Prokofiev, in turn, considered canceling upcoming performances in Western Europe and the United States so he could return to the USSR.61 In the end, logistical difficulties sank both Lunacharsky’s and Ekskuzovich’s plans, but the attention made an impression on the composer. The warm critical reception must have been welcome, too, with the conservative critical backlash that followed the Chicago and New York premieres of Three Oranges still a recent memory (an experience Prokofiev likened to “being savaged by wild animals”).62 At least in 1926, Soviet critics saw Prokofiev as he saw himself—a leading light of musical Modernism. * * * Although plans for a European tour of Three Oranges fell through, the Bolshoi Theatre production Prokofiev mentioned in his letter to Koussevitzky still opened in 1927, a little over a year after the premiere of the Akoper production. As Prokofiev suspected, it was intended as a rival production, but it never achieved the popularity or critical acclaim of Radlov’s Three Oranges.63 The only production to do so opened December 1, 1949, at the New York City Opera. Directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky and with designs by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky—both theatre veterans with deep connections to prerevolutionary Russian cultural circles—the production attracted a great deal of attention, not least for being the first major staging of the opera in some two decades.64 Despite using a puzzlingly loose English translation of the libretto and streamlining the plot in several places, Komisarjevsky and Dobuzhinsky, like Radlov, foregrounded the opera’s satirical spirit.65 Most important, they managed to enchant the city’s most important music critic, the New York Times’s Olin Downes. “A singularly swift, difficult and ingenious score,” he raved, a “parody of romantic opera and all its ways.”66 Downes dismissed the critical uproar that followed the opera’s world premiere three decades earlier with a wave of his pen, reminding readers that “much water has flowed under the bridge in the intervening years.”67 Downes was clearly thinking of atonality and twelve-tone music, as he assured New York opera-goers that Prokofiev was a traditionalist whose dissonances were nothing more than “dominants of dominants” and “borrowed chords.”68 In other words, Prokofiev—alternately

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condemned and praised as an “ultramodern” revolutionary in 1921 Chicago and 1926 Leningrad—was, in 1949 New York, comfortingly quaint now that Modernisms far more “ultra” had rocked the world. Komisarjevsky’s Three Oranges proved undeniably popular, so much so that City Opera remounted the production during the 1950–51 season. Covering the opening performance, Downes’s colleague Howard Taubman admired that the stereotypically serious endeavor of Modernism could, in fact, be entertaining: “Prokofieff’s work can be relished on two levels. The most obvious one is in the broad fooling that takes place on stage, and there are moments when even a congenital sourpuss would have to chuckle. The other level is more subtle, and it is to be explored mostly in Prokofieff’s puckish score, which carries the piece along at a rattling pace and at the same time pays its impudent respects to such honored masters as Wagner, Strauss and others of the grand opera hierarchy.”69 Such an opera could “catch on,” Taubman wrote, something that had eluded almost all other contemporary operas. Time would confirm his prediction, as the City Opera production ran for another five seasons—seven in total—making it one of Prokofiev’s greatest operatic successes.70 Meyerhold’s name was conspicuously absent from the 1949 production, and how an arcane Gozzi fiaba ended up on the opera stage seems to have aroused some curiosity. “I would like to know very much the reasons which lead you to choose this subject for an opera,” Downes wrote to Prokofiev in 1952.71 At the time, Downes was writing 10 Operatic Masterpieces, a lavishly produced opera guide in which Three Oranges would rub elbows with confirmed repertory works such as The Marriage of Figaro, Carmen, and Aida.72 Prokofiev replied that his source was a contemporary “theater journal” that included “Gozzi’s play,” a half-truth Downes dutifully disseminated. Writing from the Soviet Union, Prokofiev could not mention his friend and former collaborator by name, as Meyerhold had become a nonperson there since his 1939 arrest and 1940 execution in the Great Terror. By the time Meyerhold was posthumously rehabilitated after Stalin's death, Prokofiev had died, and the notion that he adapted directly from Gozzi had become a well-circulated myth. As Three Oranges became a repertory work, its origins in the theatrical ferment of Meyerhold’s prerevolutionary experiments were ever more obscured. Major productions followed Komisarjevsky’s Three Oranges at Sadler’s Wells Opera (1963), La Scala (1974), Lyric Opera of Chicago (1976), San Diego Opera (1978), Opéra National de Lyon (1980), and Opéra National de Paris (1983), and in 1979, the publisher Boosey & Hawkes issued the full score of the

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opera (previously only the piano-vocal score was commercially available).73 Moreover, as Three Oranges became a repertory work, directors sought to add their own layers of innovation to those of Prokofiev, Meyerhold, and Gozzi. In Frank Corsaro’s 1983 Glyndebourne Festival production, for example, the Prince pursues the oranges during the French Revolution while the onstage commentators—restyled as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—squabble about politics rather than theatrical taste.74 As Love for Three Oranges enters a second century, its popularity shows no signs of waning. New productions are ever wittier and more unpredictable (recent examples featured dancing cactuses and Cirque du Soleil–like acrobats), a testament both to the work’s origins in improvisatory theatre and the long process of revolution, adaptation, reframing, improvisation, and transposition that began more than two and a half centuries earlier on a Venetian stage.

Notes 1. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 638 (entry of December 3, 1921). 2. The theatre was again renamed in 1935 in honor of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. On its development, see Bogdanov-Berezovskii, Leningradskii, esp. 27–58. 3. “Iz besedy upravliaiushchego petrogradskimi gosudarstvennymi akademicheskimi teatrami I. V. Ekskuzovicha s korrespodendentom zhurnala ‘Obozrenie teatrov i sporta’ A. B. Potemkinym o rabote Akademicheskogo teatra opery i baleta,” October 14, 1922, in Trabskii, Russkii sovetskii teatr, 287–88. 4. Trabskii, 287. 5. Trabskii, 284. 6. “Zaiavlenie gruppy chlenov khudozhestvennogo soveta Akademicheskogo teatra opery i baleta o sostoianii i perspektivakh raboty opernoi truppy,” November 26, 1923, in Trabskii, 292. On efforts to build a Soviet repertory, see Bullock, “Staging Stalinism”; Frolova-Walker, “Soviet Opera Project.” 7. See Bobrik, Venskoe izdatel’stvo; Vlasova, “Pis’ma.” 8. “Iz zapiski upravleniia leningradskimi akademicheskimi teatrami o sozdanii proizvedenii revoliutsionnogo soderzhaniia putem podtekstovki oper ‘Gugenoty’ i ‘Prokok’ D. Meierbera, ‘Rientsi’ R. Vagnera i baleta ‘Spiashchaia krasavitsa’ P. I. Chaikovskogo,” not later than September 1924, in Trabskii, Russkii sovetskii teatr, 293–96. 9. Trabskii, 293–96. 10. Trabskii, 298, 304n72. 11. “Protokol zasedaniia komissii po obsuzhdeniiu opery A. F. Pashchenko ‘Orlinyi bunt’ (‘Pugachevshchina’),” June 4–5, 1925, in Trabskii, 296. 12. Kozlova, “Pis’ma S. S. Prokof’eva,” 15. Prokofiev describes their negotiations in his journal; Diaries 1924–1933, 170 (entry of June 4, 1925) and 184 (entry of June 22, 1925). 13. “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska upravleniia Leningradskimi akademicheskimi teatrami k opernomu repertuaru na sezon 1925/26 g.,” in Trabskii, Russkii sovetskii teatr, 297-98. 14. Trabskii, 298. On the performance of Western works in the USSR, see Frolova-Walker and Walker, Music and Soviet Power, esp. 132–42; Fairclough, Classics.

Oranges in Leningrad | 411 15. See Gordon, “Radlov’s Theatre”; Hamon, “Radlov et le théâtre.” 16. Glebov, Dranishnikov, and Radlov, Liubov’, 34. This booklet, specially prepared for the production in 1926, contained brief overviews, a biographical essay on Prokofiev by Asafiev, a short summary of the opera’s history by Dranishnikov, and Radlov’s aesthetic manifesto. The second edition was published in 1934 when the production was renewed at Akoper. 17. Glebov, Dranishnikov, and Radlov, 34. 18. Radlov, “Shoking,” 4. 19. Radlov, 4. 20. Radlov, 4. 21. Details in this and the following two paragraphs come from Prokofiev’s own observations of the performance he attended on February 10, 1927; Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933, 487–90 (entry of February 10, 1927). In a letter sent during rehearsals, Prokofiev cautioned Dranishnikov about pitfalls that had marred previous productions. Although his suggestions were minor (e.g., making sure oranges rolled onstage soundlessly), Prokofiev’s letter appeared in Vecherniaia krasnaia gazeta on the day of the premiere to document the composer’s interest; “Naputstvie Sergeia Prokof ’eva,” Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (hereafter RGALI), f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 181. Prokofiev had photographs of the sets of the 1921 Chicago production couriered to Radlov, but it is unclear what he hoped their example would provide. 22. Gordon, “Radlov’s Theatre,” 116. 23. I am grateful to Dassia N. Posner for pointing this detail out to me. The simulated loges are visible in an act II production photo accessible at https://www.mariinsky.ru/about /exhibitions/prokofiev125/oranges_1926/, accessed January 10, 2021. 24. Braudo, “Liubov’,” 5. 25. Gordon, “Radlov’s Theatre,” 113–14. 26. On Dmitriev’s designs, see Berezkin, Dmitriev, 60–63. 27. The backdrop is visible in a production photo available at https://www.mariinsky.ru /about/exhibitions/prokofiev125/oranges_1926/, accessed January 10, 2021. 28. The literature on this topic is vast; an insightful introduction is Albright, Modernism and Music, esp. 1–22. 29. On the reviews Dranishnikov sent to Paris, see Shcherbakova, “Avtograf,” 361. Clippings are in RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923. 30. Glebov, “Liubov’,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 170. 31. Glebov, l. 170. 32. Rappaport, “Ak-opera i ee prem’era,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 177. 33. Gvozdev, “Liubov’,” 16. On the origins of “theatrical October,” see Posner, Director’s Prism, 88. Gvozdev was the only critic to remind readers that Meyerhold was Prokofiev’s source, not Gozzi, as the playbill indicated. He was intimately familiar with the Three Oranges divertissement, having reviewed it in his 1914 debut as a critic. Although Gvozdev was initially critical of Meyerhold and his collaborators, the divertissement nevertheless inspired Gvozdev’s own research into Gozzi and his connections to the French playwright Alain-René. Gvozdev, Teatral’naia kritika, 4. 34. Gvozdev, “Liubov’,” 16. 35. D[avid] Zaslavskii, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia v opere,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 167. Zaslavsky would go on to become a staff writer at Pravda, and in 1936, he authored the infamous article criticizing Dmitri Shostakovich’s music; see Efimov, Sumbur. 36. Gintsburg, “Liubov’,” 6. 37. Gintsburg, 6.

412  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges 38. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 359 (entry of November 17/30, 1918). 39. Prokof’ev, “Avtobigrafiia,” 177. 40. Vainkop, “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 169. 41. B. B., “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 176. 42. B. B., l. 176. 43. Knittel, “Construction.” 44. D. E. M., “Liubov’ k 3 apel’sinam,” 4. 45. Uglov, “‘Apel’siny’ Prokof’eva,” 5. 46. Braudo, “Liubov’,” 5. 47. M[ikhail] Kuzmin, “Novoe ispytanie sil,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 178. 48. K-oi, “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 7. 49. K-oi, 7. 50. Kryzhitskii, “Velikoe ili maloe?,” RGALI, f. 1929, op. 1, ed. khr. 923, l. 182. (The copy of this article in Prokofiev’s archive is annotated in the composer’s hand.) Kryzhitskii was a cofounder of Fabrika ekstsentricheskogo aktera (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), an avant-garde theatre and cinematography workshop active 1921–26. 51. Gvozdev, “Liubov’,” 16. 52. Gvozdev, 16. 53. Gvozdev, 16. The only other significant newspaper mention of Dmitriev’s designs came from Dmitri Mazurov, who wrote that there was “a lot of imagination, many effects, Radlovlike circus tricks. But this powerful primitivism coexisted with a ballet-like sugariness in the scenery and especially the costumes.” D.E.M., “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam,” 4. 54. Malkov, “Liubov’,” 16. 55. Malkov, 16. 56. Letter dated April 29, 1926. Prokof’ev and Miaskovskii, S. S. Prokof ’ev, 240. Radlov went on to direct another ten operas and ballets; on his work with the Akoper, see Zolotnitskii, Sergei Radlov, 73–92; Tret’iakova, “Opernye spektakli.” 57. In act I of Radlov’s production, Smeraldina attempts to escape while hiding beneath a table. 58. The Akoper published Prokofiev’s letter in Krasnaia gazeta on February 13, 1927; cited in Shcherbakova, “Avtograf,” 363. 59. Quoted in Vishnevetskii, Sergei Prokof ’ev, 323. 60. Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933, 514–15 (entry of February 20, 1927). 61. As Prokofiev detailed in a July 21, 1927, letter to Lev Tseitlin, Russian National Museum of Music (Moscow), f. 33, d. 419. 62. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923, 666 (entry of January 17–February 25, 1922). 63. The Bolshoi production, directed by Aleskei Dikii and with designs by Issak Rabinovich, ran from May 19, 1927, until June 8, 1930. The Akoper production also ran for three seasons and closed only because the foreign-currency royalties Prokofiev’s publisher charged proved prohibitive. See Shcherbakova, “Avtograf,” 366. 64. When Komisarjevsky became ill several weeks before the premiere, the director Vladimir Rosing took his place for the remainder of the season. 65. Prokofieff, Love for Three Oranges. The translator, Victor Seroff, claims that the cuts were intended to bring the opera closer to Gozzi’s fiaba. 66. Downes, “Fantastic Work,” X7. 67. Downes, X7. 68. Downes, X7. 69. Taubman, “City Center,” 33. 70. Press, “I Came Too Soon,” 370–71.

Oranges in Leningrad | 413 71. Olin Downes Papers, ms 688, Hargrett Library, University of Georgia, series 2, 51:28. 72. Downes, 10 Operatic Masterpieces. 73. Prokofieff, L’Amour. 74. Corsaro worked with the illustrator and author Maurice Sendak, whose designs for the production were later published in a full-color book; Corsaro, Love for Three Oranges.

Bibliography Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. B. B. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Rabochii i teatr, February 23, 1926. Berezkin, V. N. V. V. Dmitriev. Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1981. Bobrik, Olesia. Venskoe izdatel’stvo ‘Universal Edition’ i muzykanty iz sovetskoi Rossii: Istoriia sotrudnichestva v 1920–30-e gody. Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo im. N. I. Novikova, 2011. Bogdanov-Berezovskii, V. Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii ordena Lenina teatr opery i baleta imeni S. M. Kirova. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1959. Braudo, Evg[enii]. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Pravda, May 29, 1926, 5. Bullock, Philip Ross. “Staging Stalinism: The search for Soviet opera in the 1930s.” Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (2006): 83–108. Corsaro, Frank. The Love for Three Oranges: The Glyndebourne Version. London: The Bodley Head, 1984. D. E. M. [D. N. Mazurov]. “Liubov’ k 3 apel’sinam.” Novaia vecherniaia gazeta, February 19–20, 1926, 4. Downes, Olin. “Fantastic Work: Prokofieff Opera Blends Satire and Humor.” New York Times, October 30, 1949, X7. ———. 10 Operatic Masterpieces. New York: Scribner, 1952. Efimov, Evgenii. Sumbur vokrug ‘sumbura’ i odnogo malen’kogo zhurnalista. Moscow: Flinta, 2006. Fairclough, Pauline. Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Frolova-Walker, Marina. “The Soviet Opera Project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin.” Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (2006): 181–216. Frolova-Walker, Marina, and Jonathan Walker. Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932. Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2012. Gintsburg, S. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Vechernaia krasnaia gazeta, February 20, 1926, 6. Glebov, Igor’. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Krasnaia gazeta, February 17, 1926. Glebov, Igor, V. A. Dranishnikov, and Sergei Radlov, eds. Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam: k postanovke opery Sergeia Prokof ’eva: avtograficheskie dannye i stat’i, 2nd ed. Leningrad: Leningradskii Gosudarsvennyi Akademicheskii Teatr Opery i Baleta, 1934. Gordon, Mel. “Radlov’s Theatre of Popular Comedy.” Drama Review 19 (1975): 113–16. Gvozdev, A. A. Teatral’naia kritika, edited by N. A. Tarshis. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1987. Gvozdev, A[leksei]. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Zhizn’ iskusstva (Leningrad), March 2, 1926, 16. Hamon, Christine. “Radlov et le théâtre de la Comédie populaire.” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 23 (1982): 109–16. Knittel, K. M. “The Construction of Beethoven.” In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, edited by Jim Samson, 118–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. K-oi [Konstantin Kuz’min-Karavaev, aka Tverskoi]. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Rabochii i teatr, March 2, 1926, 7.

414  |  Three Loves for Three Oranges Kozlova, M. “Pis’ma S. S. Prokof’eva-B. V. Asaf’evu [1920–1944].” In Iz proshlogo sovetskoi muzykal’noi kul’tury. Vol. 2, 4–54. Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1976. Kryzhitskii, G[rigorii]. “Velikoe ili maloe?” Rabochii i teatr, February 23, 1926. Malkov, N. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Zhizn’ iskusstva (Leningrad), March 2, 1926, 16. “Naputstvie Sergeia Prokof’eva,” Vecherniaia krasnaia gazeta, February 18, 1926. Posner, Dassia N. The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical AvantGarde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Press, Stephen D. “‘I Came Too Soon’: Prokofiev’s Early Career in America.” In Prokofiev and His World, edited by Simon Morrison, 334–75. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Prokof’ev, S. S. “Avtobiografiia.” In S. S. Prokof ’ev: Materialy, dokumenty, vospominaniia, edited by S. I. Shlifshtein, 13–196. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1961. Prokof’ev, S. S., and N. Ia. Miaskovskii. S. S. Prokof ’ev i N. Ia. Miaskovskii: Perepiska, edited by M. G. Kozlova and N. R. Iastenko. Moscow: Sovietskii kompozitor, 1977. Prokofieff, Serge. L’Amour des trois oranges, op. 33, opéra en 4 actes et 10 tableaux avec un prologue d’après Carol Gozzi. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1979. ———. The Love for Three Oranges, adapted and translated by Victor Seroff. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1949. Prokofiev, Sergey. Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915–1923. Behind the Mask, translated and edited by Anthony Phillips. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. ———. Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1924–1933. Prodigal Son, translated and edited by Anthony Phillips. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Radlov, Sergei. “Shoking.” Vecherniaia krasnaia gazeta, February 18, 1926, 4. Rappaport, V[iktor]. “Ak-opera i ee prem’era. (Glavnyi rezhisser Ak. opery V. Rappaport o postanovke ‘Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam’).” Novaia vecherniaia gazeta, February 19–20, 1926. Shcherbakova, Mariia. “Avtograf S. S. Prokof’eva v arkhive S. E. i A. D. Radlovykh.” In Nasledie: russkaia muzyka—mirovaia kul’tura, edited by E. S. Vlasova and E. Sorokina, 357–69. Moscow: Nauchno-izdatel’skii tsentr “Moskovskaia konservatoriia,” 2009. Taubman, Howard. “City Center Gives Prokofieff Opera.” New York Times, September 29, 1950, 33. Trabskii, A. Ia., ed. Russkii sovetskii teatr 1921–1926. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1975. Tret’iakova, E. “Opernye spektakli S. Radlova.” In Muzykal’nyi teatr. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, edited by A. L. Porfir’eva, 217–40. Saint Petersburg: RIII, 1991. Uglov, Anton. “‘Apel’siny’ Prokof’eva.” Izvestiia, May 29, 1926, 5. Vainkop, Iu. “Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam.” Pravda, February 20, 1926. Vishnevetskii, Igor. Sergei Prokof ’ev. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2009. Vlasova, N. O. “Pis’ma iz 1920-kh: k istorii pervykh postanovok oper Shrekera, Berga i Ksheneka v Rossii.” Vestnik SPbGU. Iskusstvovedenie, tom 8 (2018): 381–98. Zolotnitskii, D. Sergei Radlov: The Shakespearian Fate of a Soviet Director, translated by T. Ganf and N. Egunova. Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic, 1995.

Contributors

NATALYA BALDYGA is an independent scholar, educator, and stage director. She is editor and annotator of Wendy Arons and Sara Figal’s award-winning new and complete translation of G. E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, freely available online; a print version with contextual essays (2019) is also available. Her original translation and adaptation of Gozzi’s King Stag had its world premiere at Tufts University in 2017. KEVIN BARTIG is Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University. His research bridges archival work, reception history, and musical analysis to explore topics ranging from early twentieth-century Soviet audiovisual culture to cultural diplomacy in early Cold War Eastern Europe. His books include Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film and Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. GIULIETTA BAZOLI holds a PhD in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Padua and a PhD in Italian Philology from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where she has also taught. Bazoli is author of L’orditura e la truppa. Le Fiabe di Carlo Gozzi tra scrittoio e palcoscenico and editor of Gozzi’s La donna serpente and (with Franco Vazzoler) Versi per attori. For twenty years, Bazoli has studied theatre as a form for human expressiveness. ALBERTO BENISCELLI was Professor of Italian Literature and Chair of the Department of Italian and Romance Studies, Classics, Arts, and Theatre at the University of Genoa before his retirement in June 2019. His many published monographs include La Finzione del Fiabesco: Studi sul Teatro di Carlo Gozzi; Le Fantasie della Ragione: Idee di Riforma e Suggestioni Letterarie nel Settecento; Le Passioni ‘Evidenti:’ Parola, Pittura, Scena nella Letteratura Settecentesca; and Libertini Italiani: Letteratura e Idee tra XVII e XVIII Secolo. He also edited Carlo Gozzi’s Il Ragionamento ingenuo and Fiabe Teatrali. JOHN E. BOWLT, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, is a specialist in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian art. This includes both careers of individual artists, such as Bakst, Benois, Filonov, Kandinsky,

415

416 | Contributors Malevich, Somov, and Tatlin, and philosophical issues, such as the concept of zero in the avant-garde and the occult dimension of Symbolism. He is currently editing a collection of essays on Russian artists in America, including Anisfeld, Konenkov, and Sudeikin. MARIA DE SIMONE is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD) program at Northwestern University. Her research investigates immigrant artists’ use of racial impersonation as a stage device and tool for grappling with identity, assimilation, and foreignness in the United States. Maria holds an MA from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she was first introduced to eighteenth-century Venetian theatrical practices. CARYL EMERSON is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her scholarship has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), Mikhail Bakhtin, and Russian music, opera, and theatre. Current projects include Bakhtin and the performing arts, the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950), and the allegorical-historical novelist Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018). TED EMERY is Senior Lecturer of Italian at the Ohio State University. He is a translator, teacher, and historian of eighteenth-century Venetian literature. With Albert Bermel, he edited and translated a selection of Gozzi’s fiabe teatrali (Five Tales for the Theatre, 1989). He is author of a monograph on Goldoni’s opera libretti (Goldoni As Librettist: Theatrical Reform and the drammi giocosi per musica, 1991), and has published numerous articles on Gozzi, Goldoni, Chiari, Da Ponte, and Casanova. JULIA GALANINA is a historian of Silver-Age theatre and literature. After receiving her PhD from the Philological Faculty at Leningrad State University, she helped to found the first Leningrad museum to be dedicated to Alexander Blok. Her book Liubov Dmitrievna Blok: Siudba i stsena was published in 2009. She has been a Senior Researcher at the Russian Institute of Art History and at the Moscow State Institute of Art Studies in the group dedicated to Meyerhold’s creative legacy. She is currently completing a three-volume work on Vladimir Soloviev. SIMON A. MORRISON is Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He is author, most recently, of Bolshoi Confidential (2016), which has been published in six countries. The revised,

Contributors | 417 expanded edition of his first book, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, has recently been published. INNA NARODITSKAYA, Professor of Music at Northwestern University, is a widely published ethnomusicologist, historian, and performer. Among her many research interests are Russian Theatre, music and gender, and the music of her native Azerbaijan. She is author of Song from the Land of Fire: Azerbaijani Mugham in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods and Bewitching Russian Opera: The Empress from State to Stage and editor (with Linda Austern) of Music of the Sirens and Music in the American Diasporic Wedding. DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO is Professor of Italian and Drama at the University of Toronto. His monographs include Pragmatics and Semiotics of Stage Improvisation, (with Mary-Ann Parker) The Baroque Libretto, and Dante Studies in the Age of Vico. He is editor of thirteen additional books, including Goldoni and the Musical Theatre and The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell’Arte. DASSIA N. POSNER is Associate Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. She specializes in Russian and Soviet avant-garde theatre, the history of directing, dramaturgy, and puppetry. Her books include The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance. RAISSA RASKINA is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Cassino, where her research interests include the history of twentieth-century Russian theatre, theoretical poetics, and the work of Osip Mandelshtam. She studied in the Department of Performing Arts at Sapienza University of Rome, where she also received her PhD. She is author of Mejerchol’d e il Dottor Dappertutto. Lo studio e la rivista “L’amore delle tre melarance” (2010). She is currently working on a book on Anton Chekhov’s literary legacy and on an Italian translation of Mandelstam’s The Moscow Notebook (with Pina Napolitano, 2021). NATALIA SAVKINA is Associate Professor at the Moscow Conservatory. She specializes in the music of Prokofiev and in other aspects of twentiethcentury Russian music. She has written documentary films and broadcast scripts and published extensively in scholarly journals and edited volumes. She is author, most recently, of Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel: On The History of Its

418 | Contributors Creation. She was part of a group of authors who were awarded a prize from the French Academy of Fine Arts for the exhibition catalogue “Lenin, Stalin and Music” (2010).   LAURENCE SENELICK is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include Gordon Craig’s Moscow “Hamlet,” The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance, A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre, Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters, Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History, and, most recently, Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture. He was awarded the St. George Medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for services to Russian research and theatre. VADIM SHCHERBAKOV is a lead research associate at Moscow’s State Institute for Art Studies. He completed his undergraduate work at GITIS and his graduate work at VNII. He is a member of the research group and book series The Legacy of V. E. Meyerhold. He teaches theatre theory in the MFA program in Directing at the Meyerhold Center. His books include Pantomimes of the Silver Age (2014) and, as editor, N. M. Tarabukin on V. E. Meyerhold (1998, coauthored with Oleg Feldman) and Meyerhold: Directing from the Perspective of a Century (2001, coauthored with Béatrice PiconVallin). He is editor in chief of the journal Voprosy Teatra/Proscaenium.

Index

acrobatics, 14, 226, 243, 401 Afanasev, Alexander, 354nn38–39 Akoper (Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre). See Mariinsky Theatre Alexandrinsky Theatre, 9, 237 Alpers, Boris, 229–30 Althusser, Louis, 114 Andreev, Leonid, 254, 264n4, 357 anima allegra concept, 208–9, 230, 357; Gozzi on, 231n3 Anisfeld, Boris, 1, 18, 22, 24, 25, 29n74, 155, 342, 354n36, 374–86, 390; design illustrations, 2, 21, 156, 275, 277, 378–84; self-portrait, 375 Anna Ioannovna, 210, 231n7, 335, 336–37, 352–53 Antique Theatre, 237–40, 241, 243, 340 argomento, xi, 69n30, 76, 102, 106n18 Aristophanes, 80 Aristotle: dramatic rules of, 100–101; on laughter, xxiii Asafiev, Boris, 366n10, 395, 396, 403, 405 Atellan farces, 236, 242 Auditorium Theatre (Chicago), 1, 4, 16, 19, 21, 22, 374, 377–83 Augustus the Strong, 336–37 B., B., 405 Bachta, Iriada, 193 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxviiin5, 243, 337–38 Bakst, Léon, 377, 382, 383, 384 balagan. See fairgound Baldick, Chris, 109 Ballets Russes, 30n83, 212, 277, 339–40, 343, 354n36, 377 Barber, Benjamin, 95 Bartoli, Francesco, 86, 89 Basile, Giambattista, 39–40, 68n6, 76, 79–80, 83n13, 125–26, 139nn4, 7–8, 10–12, 140n19, 353n1 Bekhterev, Vladimir, 228

Bely, Andrei, 28n54 Beniscelli, Alberto, 117, 354n12 Benois, Alexandre, 212, 213, 256, 274, 340, 342, 377, 383 Bergson, Henri, xxiii, xxviiin4 Bershadsky, Sergei, 395 Biancolelli, Domenico, 211 biomechanics, 15, 147, 148, 218, 220, 225–28, 246 Blok, Alexander, 193, 241, 244; The Little Fairground Booth (dir. Meyerhold), 11, 187–88, 199, 212–16, 339, 341; on Love for Three Oranges, 254; “Unknown Woman,” 385; Unknown Woman (dir. Meyerhold), 209, 224; Verses about the Beautiful Lady, 339 Blok, Liubov, 207, 240 Blokh, Iakov, 188, 196 Blue Monster, The (Gozzi), 82, 84n35, 116, 118, 119, 192 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 41–42, 69n26, 126 Bondi, Yuri, 218 Borodinskaia Street Studio, 9, 14–15, 27n38, 27n47, 148, 155, 193, 217–18, 241, 406; actor training at, 207–10, 219–23; flyer for, 149 Braudo, Evgeny, 405 Brecht, Bertolt, 147 Brinton, Christian, 374, 384 Buffoon, The (Prokofiev), 277, 332n15, 343, 354n38 burlesque, 1, 22 Butkovskaia, Natalia, 242 Bychkov, Nikolai, 207 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 132, 138, 189–90, 240 Callot, Jacques, 241 Calvino, Italo, 125–26 Caminer, Domenico, 110, 113–14 Caminer, Elisabetta, 110, 113, 114, 121n27 Campanini, Cleofonte, 17, 278

419

420 | Index Campbell, Eric, 364 canovaccio. See scenario form card-playing (and playing-card characters), 41–42, 68n21, 97–98, 126; in Meyerhold, 151, 153–54, 345; in Prokofiev, 345, 358, 361; on Russian stage, 334 carnival culture, 243, 337–38; Shrovetide, 141n38, 211 Casali, Gaetano, 84n24, 86, 86 Casanova, Giacomo, 88 Casanova, Ignazio, 86 Catherine the Great, 351–52, 355n48 censorship in Russia, 182n11, 266n27, 338–39 Cervantes, Miguel de, 78, 131, 132, 189, 193, 240 Chaliapin, Feodor, 393 Chatfield-Taylor, Charles, 391n32 Chatfield-Taylor, Mara Otis, 385 Chekhov, Anton, 215, 341 Chekhov, Mikhail, 230 Chiari, Pietro, 5, 6, 8, 68n18, 68n20, 74, 93–94, 98–99, 110, 124–25; Gozzi on, 26n17, 38, 40–42, 47, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 64, 77–78, 111 plays by: Attila, 56, 57, 69n36, 111; The Betrayed Mother, 69n35, 78; Ezelino, 40, 101; The Lover of Two, 98; Virgilian trilogy, 70n42 Chicago Opera Association, 17–19, 253 Chukovsky, Kornei, 215 Chudovsky, Valerian, 239–40 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 104 circus, 11, 153, 260, 267n50, 337; Meyerhold and, 223–24; Prokofiev and, 362, 386, 396, 398, 401, 406, 412n53 Clayton, J. Douglas, 243, 342 Clurman, Harold, 227 Coates, Albert, 15 Coini, Jaques, 333n22 Colombani, Paolo, 6, 37, 43 Columbine’s Veil (Meyerhold), 11, 194, 217. See also Dohnányi, Ernö; Schnitzler, Arthur Comic Theatre at the Pilgrim’s Tavern (Gozzi), 26n17, 76 commedia dell’arte: canovaccio in, 6, 68n19; condemnation of, 113–14, 202; as experimental theatre, 245; Gozzi’s revival of, 4–5, 8, 92–105, 108, 342; histories of, 235–36, 246; meta-commedia

dell’arte, xxii; Meyerhold and, 10–11, 188–90, 218–19; Miklashevsky on, 241– 49; in Russia, 210–11, 217, 243, 246–49, 335–42, 353, 396; stock characters (tippi fissi) in, 6, 69n28, 92, 100, 126, 236, 241. See also lazzi; masks Convulsions, The (Gozzi), 88 copyright issues, 262, 263–64 Corsaro, Frank, 410 Craig, Edward Gordon, 191, 225, 244 Croce, Benedetto, 250n35 Crommelynck, Fernand, The Magnanimous Cuckold (dir. Meyerhold), 228–30 Crooked Mirror cabaret, 340 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 192 Dante Alighieri, 40, 126, 131, 132, 367; illustrated, 133, 136 Darbes, Cesare, 8, 86, 89, 90n9, 92 Dargomyzhsky, Alexander, 19, 364, 365n2, 366n15 Deburau, Jean-Gaspard, 193, 211 Debussy, Claude, 20, 364, 366n16, 371 Decroux, Etienne, 221 Demchinsky, Boris, 260 Diaghilev, Sergei, 340, 342, 377, 383, 391n16. See also Ballets Russes divertissement, definitions of, 14, 150, 154, 192, 255 Dmitri I, 362, 366n10 Dmitriev, Vladimir, 386, 393, 396–98, 401–2, 407, 408, 412n53 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav, 155, 389, 408 Dohnányi, Ernö, 11, 194 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 15, 345 Downes, Olin, 408 drama genres in Russia, 230–31, 254 drama genres in Venice: of character, 6, 38, 56, 94, 112, 195; fairy tale, 115–17, 121n34; grandiose/pompous, 6, 38; melancholic, 43, 51, 96; sentimental, 94, 110, 114–15, 116–17, 121n24 Dramsoiuz (Union of Dramatic and Musical Writers), 262, 265n18 Dranishnikov, Vladimir, 256–57, 265n17, 393, 395, 403, 407 Draper, Muriel, 333n22 Drizen, Nikolai, 237, 239–40

Index | 421 Drugs of Love, The (Gozzi), 122n41 Duchartre, Pierre Louis, 246–47, 250n40 Dzhivelegov, Aleksei, 243, 247, 249 Ehrenberg, Vladimir, 256, 261 Eisenstein, Sergei, 199, 200, 201, 227, 403 Ekskuzovich, Ivan, 257, 258, 265n19, 394, 408 Elizabeth Petrovna, 211, 335 Enlightenment, 97, 108, 117, 118, 124, 127, 131, 135, 137, 197 Erdman, Nikolia, The Mandate (dir. Meyerhold), 231 estrangement, 188, 199, 362 Evreinov, Nikolai, 235, 236–37, 240, 241, 242, 244, 247, 340–41, 342 exoticism, 125, 126, 140n19; in ballet, 384 Fabrizi, Angelo, 68n6 Fairbank, Janet, 21–22, 379 fairground, xi, 153, 183n37, 202, 337–38; Blok’s play on, 11, 187–88, 199, 212–16, 339, 341; Meyerhold’s essay on, 11, 28n54, 148–49, 154, 182n10, 188–89, 192, 193, 221; Parisian fairground theatre, 139n5; Petrushka puppet and, 341; Prokofiev and, 357, 365, 406 fairy tale. See fiaba Fajel (Gozzi), 83n23, 88 Falbaire, Charles-Georges Fenouillot de, 110, 115 Falconi, Clelia, 184n56, 249n1 Fall of Lady Elvira, The (Gozzi), 116 fantasy, 10, 25; actors and, 217; Gozzi and, 23, 95, 97, 99, 125, 127, 132, 138; Prokofiev and, 363, 407 Fellowship of Actors, Writers, Artists, and Musicians, 11, 240 fiaba, defined, xi Fiorilli, Agostino, 8, 77, 86, 92, 100, 102, 103 Fokine, Mikhail, 212, 339–40, 354n36 Fomin, Evstignei, 352 Foregger, Nikolai, 201, 256, 265n17; workshop (MastFor) of, 266n25 forestage (proscenium), 9, 148, 151, 152–54 forestage servants, 14, 152, 153–54, 155, 158, 183n20, 184n40, 276 formalism, 15, 147, 155–56, 192, 202 Fossati, Domenico, 6, 26n23

fourth wall, 9, 153 Fox, William H., 374 Fregoli, Leopoldo, 341, 354n26 French Romanticism, 190–91 Freud, Sigmund, xxiv, xxviiin6 Frolova-Walker, Marina, 353 futurism, 363, 366n13; Cubo-Futurism, 385 Gambler, The (Prokofiev), 15, 17, 19, 29n71, 262, 345, 353n1, 407, 408 Gamblers of Venice, The (Meyerhold and Soloviev), 148, 182n5 gambling culture: in Venice, 97–99; in Russian literature, 345 Garden, Mary, 17, 26n10, 366n16 Gastev, Aleksei, 225, 227 Gennari, Giuseppe, 76 German Romanticism, 8, 10, 11, 70n52, 108–9, 116–17, 125, 127, 140n32, 148, 152, 188, 189–90; Zhirmunsky on, 198–99 Gherardi, Evaristo, 103 Gintsburg, S., 404–5 Glagol, Sergei, 216 Glinka, Mikhail, 334, 344, 345–46, 351, 352, 358, 362, 364 Gnesin, Mikhail, 218 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 88, 125, 128–30, 132 Gogol, Nikolai, 19, 231 Goldoni, Carlo, 5, 6, 8, 68n18, 74–76, 82n1, 93–94, 98–99, 101, 108, 110, 124–25, 195–97, 201, 222, 235, 245; gambling and, 98; Gozzi on, 26n17, 38, 40, 42–43, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 64, 66, 67, 77–78, 111–13; in Meyerhold, 151, 171, 184n54, 254–55; Sacchi and, 27n29, 88 plays by: The Antique Dealer’s Family, 71n57; Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters, 71n57, 88; The Bizarre Old Man, 126; The Chioggia Scuffles, 68n20, 71n59, 80, 82n7, 112; The Deceiver, 90n9, 354n12; The Fan, 196; The House Servants, 68n20, 78, 80, 83n13, 112; Il Campiello, 68n20, 80, 112; Mistress of the Inn, 196; Momolo the Courtier, 102 Golovanov, Nikolai, 387 Golovin, Alexander, 383 Goncharov, Ivan, 342

422 | Index Gotter, Friedrich Wilhelm, 127 Gozzi, Carlo, xxii, xxvi, 4–8, 73–82, 187–202, 235, 245, 342; conservatism of, 96–97, 108–9, 113–20, 197, 199; early plays by, 73–77; family feud of, 117–18; French interest in, 190–91; German interest in, 125, 127–38, 152, 189–90; later writings of, 73, 76, 80–81; in Love for Three Oranges Journal, 187; Meyerhold and, 10–11, 13, 43, 45, 70n52, 109–10, 113, 116, 120, 148, 152, 189, 191, 195, 209, 222, 223; Russian interest in, 9, 15, 189, 192–202; translations of, 28n58, 67n1. See also self-referentiality; and titles of plays Gozzi, Gasparo, 8, 26n14, 39, 76, 77, 79–80, 81, 117, 125, 139n8 Gozzi Collection (Fondo Gozzi), 4, 86, 88, 89n1, 94 Gradenigo, Pietro, 77 Granelleschi Academy, 4, 6, 26n14, 73, 77, 82n1 Gratarol, Pierantonio, 118, 122n41 Green, Martin, 336 Green Bird, The (Gozzi), 89, 97, 118, 97, 118 Green Bird, The (Russian almanac), 28n58, 201–2 grotesque, 127, 128, 132, 214, 245; Hoffmann and, 138; Meyerhold and the, 11, 12, 14, 210, 244, Prokofiev and the, 19, 344–45, 360, 364, 405 Gvozdev, Aleksei, 108–9, 196–98, 199, 257, 258, 262, 265n24, 386; on Leningrad Three Oranges, 404, 406, 407, 411n33 Hanswurst character, 131, 132, 137 harlequinades, 155, 211, 212; by Evreinov 340–41; Meyerhold on, 14; by Soloviev, 14, 148, 182n4, 183n26, 217, 240. See also pantomimes Harlequin the Card-Lover (Soloviev and Meyerhold), 183n26 Hecht, Ben, 380–81 Hobbes, Thomas, xxiii Hoffmann, E. T. A., 11, 13, 27n31, 27n38, 125, 151, 152, 187, 189–91, 193, 209–10, 241; Strange Sorrow of a Theatre Manager, 35, 135–38, 145, 190, 191–92, 202n17, 271 Holland, Norman N., xxviii

Humperdinck, Engelbert, 367 hypochondria, xxiii, 5, 18, 39, 40, 43, 261, 334 Iakovleva, Varvara, 258, 266n28 Iffland, Augsut Wilhelm, 132 Ignatov, Sergei, 11, 191, 203n23 Imperial (later State) theatres, 9, 225 258, 266n31, 340 improvisation, xxi–xxii, 6, 101–5, 241; “literariness” vs., 217; Meyerhold and, 10, 12, 14, 189, 192, 208–9, 217–18, 219, 398; suppression of, 231 Ingenuous Disquisition . . . (Gozzi), 76, 109, 113–14, 116, 196 innamorati, xi, 78, 126 inoskazanie, 336, 338–39, 341, 353 interlude: in Cervantes, 193; in Gozzi, 152; in Meyerhold, 14, 153–55, 345; in Prokofiev, 20, 262, 276, 357, 361, 390, 401; traditional use of, 241–42 James, William, 228 Janacopulous, Vera, 278, 332n17 jokes. See laughter Kamerny Theatre, 196, 266n31 Kant, Immanuel, xxiii, xxviiin5 Karamzin, Nikolai, 345 Karasev, Leonid, xxvi–xxvii Karsavina, Tamara, 340 Kashintsev, Dmitri, 405 Khvostenko-Khvostov, Alexander, 386–87 King Stag, The (Gozzi), 28n58, 81–82, 116, 118, 131, 271 Koestler, Arthur, xxi, xxviiin1 Komisarjevsky, Theodore, 155, 390, 408–9 Komissarzhevskaia Theatre, 9, 27n33, 212, 215 Korneeva, Tatiana, 342 Koshetz, Nina, 363 Kotzebue, August von, 132 Koussevitzky, Natalie, 407 Koussevitzky, Serge, 19 Kozintsev, Grigori, 201 Krylov, Ivan, 222 Kryzhitsky, Gregory, 406, 412n50 Kugel, Alexander, 242 Kurbas, Les, 386 Kustodiev, Boris, 337–38

Index | 423 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 194, 202, 241, 341, 405 Kuzmin-Karavaev, Konstantin, 406 laughter, xxi, xxiii–xxviii, xxviiin1, xxviiinn4–6, xxviiin10; Aristotle on, xxiii; in Prokofiev, xxii–xxvii, xxviiin4, xviiin8, 261, 343, 363, 370 Lavrov, A., 210 lazzi, 68, 79, 103, 154–55, 214, 247, 363, 364; defined, xi, 84n27; Sacchi’s company and, 6; Soloviev and, 153, 184n42 Lecoq, Jacques, 249 Lee, Vernon, 189, 191, 197 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 367 Leroux, Xavier, 376 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 127 Lombardi, Roderigo, 100 Lombardi, Rosa, 86 Love for Three Oranges (Prokofiev), xxi–xxviii, 17–22, 24, 260–62; audiences for, xxii, 1; buttocks scene in, 334, 353, 370; Chicago premiere of, 1, 4, 18, 25, 25n10, 155, 278, 363, 376, 377–86, 393; choruses in, 1, 2, 344–45, 358, 360; composition of, 17, 29n68, 253, 260, 266n33, 273, 385; English translation of, 280–331; French translation of, 278, 332n17; introduction to translation of, 273–79; later productions of, xxvi, 17–18, 408–10; laughter in, xxii–xxvii, xxviiin4, xviiin8, 261, 343, 363, 370; Leningrad premiere of, 22, 24, 256–57, 262, 264, 386, 393–408; magic in, 261; modifications of Meyerhold’s divertissement for, 274–78, 332n14; Moscow premiere of, 386–88, 408; music of, xxv, 19–20, 335, 345–51, 352, 357–65, 367–72; New York production of (1949), 155, 333n18, 389–90, 408–9; parody in, 357–65; plot of, xxi–xxiii, xxvi–xviii; Russian cultural influences on, 334, 336, 339–53; sources for, 1–4, 15, 20–22, 151, 207, 210, 253, 256–60, 262, 273–74, 334–35, 409; stage directions in, 277 Love for Three Oranges (Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev), 2–4, 9, 11–14, 17, 20–21, 23, 192–93, 207, 253–61, 262, 273–78, 336, 344, 396, 398; divertissement’s structure in, 151–52; English translation of, 160–81;

framing characters in, 152; Gvozdev on, 108–9, 196–97; interludes and improvisation in, 153–55; introduction to translation of, 147–59; modifications of Gozzi’s fiaba for, 13–14, 45, 151, 153–54, 182n11, 184n45; parades in, 153–54, 275, 357; performance status of, 155, 192, 256; theatrical space in, 400 Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto, 9, 12–13, 15, 28n48, 28n57, 108–9, 151, 187, 207, 210, 211, 218, 219, 241, 242, 254, 260, 398, 409; Gozzi in, 187, 192–202; origin of, 207–8; titular pseudonym for, 27n31, 193–94, 202, 341 Love of Three Oranges, The (Gozzi), xxii, 1–3, 5–6, 23, 73–74, 76–82, 89, 92–105, 109–13, 124–25, 194–95, 334–35; card games in, 97–99, 345; childhood imagination appeal in, 79, 81, 95–96, 100, 101; English translation of, 46–67; introduction to translation of, 37–45; magic in, 6, 49, 61, 79, 95, 101; pastiche in, 125–28, 139n3; plot of, 5–6, 39–40, 42–43; premiere of, 6, 8, 26n19, 37, 73, 74, 76, 79, 100; Prokofiev and, 20, 30n86, 30n93, 253, 257, 260, 261, 274, 343, 398, 409; publication history of, 6–7, 110; Russian translations of, 28n58, 37, 196, 203n45; sources for, 26n17, 39–40, 79–80, 111, 125–26, 139nn4–5, 139n8; staging of, 26n23; structure of, 100–104 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 408 Lyadov, Anatoly, 358, 405 Maddalena (Prokofiev), 365 Madebach, Girolamo, 74 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 189, 202n12, 214, 376 Makovsky, Konstantin, 337 Malkov, Nikolai, 407 Manceau, Alexandre, 235–36 manifesto, 2–3, 4, 12, 188, 192, 198, 360, 405 Mariinsky Theatre, 9, 15, 386, 393, 394–96, 404, 407–8, 410n2 Martellian verse, 5, 26nn18–19, 37, 40, 42, 70n51, 78, 99, 102; Gozzi on, 49, 51–53, 55, 56, 60, 64, 67, 111; in Meyerhold, 151, 184n44, 357–58; origin of, 106n19; in Prokofiev, 358 Martinelli, Tristano, 211

424 | Index Martín y Soler, Vincente, 352 masks: in commedia dell’arte, 5, 6, 11, 69n28, 74, 81, 92, 100, 125, 126, 188, 190, 211, 214, 235–36, 241; “commedia of masks,” 195; Darbes and, 90n9; Miklashevsky on, 241, 242, 245; in Prokofiev, 334, 341, 365; in Russia, 211, 223–24, 337, 339–41; training in use of, 218, 221–22; Zannoni and, 89 Massenet, Jules, 376, 384 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, Mystery-Bouffe (dir. Meyerhold), 223–24, 225 Mazurov, Dmitri, 405, 412n53 McNeil, Bethany, 371 Mechlin, Leila, 374–75 Medebach, Girolamo, 93 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 110, 114–15, 11n24 Meredith, George, xxviii Meshcheriakov, Arkady, 257, 258 metatheatricality, 9, 20, 80, 109–10, 188, 404; masks and, 190; stagehands and, 184n40 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 358, 395 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, xxii, xxvi, 2–3, 9–15, 147–56, 187–89, 207–31, 377; acting experience of, 11, 215–16, 228–29, 339, 340; arrests and execution of, 15, 17, 28n58, 120, 147, 155, 202, 224, 409; “circusization” of theatre by, 223–24; “conventionalized” theatre of, 195, 199–200, 201, 209, 224, 231, 406; fragmentation in, 147, 148, 151; Gozzi and, 10–11, 13, 43, 45, 70n52, 109–10, 113, 116, 120, 148, 152, 189, 191, 195, 209, 222, 223; Miklashevsky and, 236–37, 240–42, 244; “play” concept of, 222; plays by, 147–48; influence of (“Meyerholditis”), 155–56; Prokofiev and, 15, 17, 20–22, 253, 256–59, 263, 393, 409; rehabilitation of, 28n58, 409; workshops of, 225–26. See also biomechanics; Blok, Alexander; Borodinskaia Street Studio; Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto; New Theatre; selfreferentiality; and other productions essays by: “The Actor and the Future of Biomechanics,” 228; “The Fairground Booth,” 11, 28n54, 148–49, 154, 182n10,

188–89, 192, 193, 221; “Long Live the Juggler!”, 224 Meyerhold, Zinaida Raikh, 265n22 Miaskovsky, Nikolai, 359–60, 407 Miklashevsky, Konstantin, 201, 218–19, 236–49 Milizia, Francesco, 113 Miller, Johann Martin, 128 Mniszech, Marina, 362, 366n10 Mochulsky, Konstantin, 201 Modernism, xxvi, 22, 191, 200, 235, 245, 276, 339, 342, 409; and Russian musical theatre, 148, 335–36, 408 Mokulsky, Stefan, 202, 247, 257, 258, 265n24 Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 235, 242 Molinari, Cesare, 249 Molodtsova, Maia, 255 Monnier, Philippe, 189, 191 monodrama, 140n33, 237, 244 montage, 201, 403, 405 Montaigne, Michel de, 104 Monteverdi, Claudio, 358 Moore, Edward, 19, 20–21, 379–80 Morolev, Vasily, 361 Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), 9, 196, 214, 376; First Studio, 113, 208, 218 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 358, 364, 409 Munt-Golubeva, Ekaterina, 218 Muratov, Pavel, 11, 189, 191, 202n11, 249n1 Musorgsky, Modest, xxv, 19, 262, 362 Musset, Paul de, 190–91 Nabokov, Vladimir, 341 Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich, 374 Narkompros (Commissariat of Enlightenment), 225, 263 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 9, 196 New Theatre, Meyerhold’s conception of, 2, 3, 9, 148, 151, 153, 192, 193, 208, 218, 245 Nezhdanova, Antonina, 387 Nicoll, Allardyce, 244 Nijinska, Bronislava, 340 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 340 Nisnevich, Anna, 30n84, 345, 347 Obukhova, Nadezhda, 387 October Revolution, 196, 223; “theatrical October” description, 404, 411n33

Index | 425 On Theatre (Meyerhold), 151, 188–89 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 240, 364, 366n17; The Forest (dir. Meyerhold), 231 Oves, Liubov, 28n57, 249n5, Pandolfi, Vito, 247 panpsychism, 254 Pantalone, 6, 71n58, 78, 100, 115, 126, 190, 259; Darbes as, 89, 92 pantomime, 14, 193, 194, 211–12, 214, 217, 219, 232n16, 246, 260; 237. 398 parade. See under Love for Three Oranges (Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev) parody, xxi, 10; Bakhtin on, 338; Gozzi and, 38, 42, 43, 68n18, 70n55, 108, 110–12, 122n41, 127, 154, 159, 194, 196–97, 357; Prokofiev and, 357–58, 405, 409; Tieck and, 190, 199; Vampuka and, 256; Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev and, 184n45, 357 Pashchenko, Andrei, 395, 404 Pashkevitch, Vasili, 351 Pasternak, Boris, 345 Patriarchi, Gasparo, 8, 76–77, 83n14 Pavlov, Ivan, 228 Pavlova, Anna, 375 People’s Comedy Theatre, 201, 224, 260, 267n50, 296, 396, 400, 401, 406 Persimfans (First Symphonic Ensemble), 258, 259, 266n36 Peter the Great, 210 Petronio, Giuseppe, 115 Petrov, Alexander, 225 Petrushka plays, 338, 341–42 Pirandello, Luigi, xxii, xxvi polemic: in Gozzi, 4, 5, 10, 23, 24, 38, 40, 45, 73, 80, 82, 109, 110–12, 151, 184n54, 195, 196–97, 222, 254–55, 358; in Prokofiev, 2, 262, 365; in Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev, 13, 151, 183n35, 184n45, 193, 195–97, 217, 254–55 Popova, Liubov, 228–29 Potapenko, Ignaty, 222, 254, 264n4 Pozzi, Francesco, 86 Press, Stephen, 343 Prokofiev, Sergei, 1, 14–22; Meyerhold and, 15, 17, 20–22, 253, 256–59, 263, 393, 409; other compositions by, 29n71, 273, 342, 359; repatriation of, 394. See also Love for Three Oranges (Prokofiev)

Prokofiev, Sergei, Jr., xx Propp, Vladimir, xxvi Puccini, Giacomo, 67n1, 277, 376 Pulci, Luigi, 40, 46, 68n17, 69n34, 70n41, 84n34, 126, 139n14 puppets and marionettes, 190; in Germany, 137, 141n53; in Hoffmann, 137, 141n57; in Russia, 182n5, 212, 214–15, 244, 337–39; the Sands and, 236; in Stravinsky, 343 Pushkin, Alexander: Boris Godunov, 17; Eugene Onegin, 344; Mozart and Salieri, 362; The Queen of Spades, 344, 345; Ruslan and Liudmila, 334, 344; The Stone Guest, 19, 364, 366n15 Rabinoff, Max, 374 Rabinovich, Isaak, 387–88. 390 Radlov, Sergei, 183n27, 201, 224, 235, 265n17, 267n50, 412n56; and Leningrad Three Oranges, 22, 24, 256, 260, 386, 393, 396–408 Ranisch, Axel, xviiin10 Rappaport, Viktor, 403 Raven, The (Gozzi), 28n58, 81, 84n30, 115, 116, 127, 271 reflective analysis, defined, 6, 13. See also The Love of Three Oranges (Gozzi) refraction, 140n36, 275, 340, 345, 354n24 Ricci, Teodora, 122n41 Riccoboni, Luigi, 235, 236 Richards, Kenneth and Laura, 249 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 30n83, 343, 344, 345–47, 351, 353, 358, 361–62, 364–65, 367, 405; Anisfeld’s designs for The Snow Maiden, 376, 377, 390n1 Robertson, Lionel, 25 Romantic irony, 127, 138, 187, 190, 199, 261 Romashkov, Vldimir, 258, 266n30 Rosing, Vladimir, 413n64 Rossini, Gioachino, 20, 359, 362, 367 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 128 RSFSR Theatre, 225 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 223, 237 Ryshkov, Viktor, 222, 254, 264n4 Sacchi, Adriana. See Zannoni, Adriana Sacchi Sacchi, Angela, 86, 88 Sacchi, Antonia Franchi, 86, 92

426 | Index Sacchi, Antonio, 4, 8, 11, 74, 77, 102, 103, 122n41; acting troupe of, 3, 5–6, 23, 37, 47, 49, 56, 67, 68n17, 73, 74, 78, 83n9, 83n23, 86–89, 92–94, 103–5, 111, 112, 137, 190; background of, 88; death of, 105n1; family of, 86, 88–89; Goldoni and, 27n29, 83n9, 104, 354n12; in Russia, 210–11, 231n7, 335. See also Truffaldino: Sacchi as Sachs, Hans, 131, 132, 141n38 Sand, George, 235–36 Sand, Maurice, 235–36, 245, 246 San Francisco Opera, xxviiin8 San Samuele Theatre, 6, 8, 37, 43, 47, 73, 74, 76, 83n9, 93–94 Sapunov, Nikolai, 214–15 Saulnier, René, 251n40 scenario form, 11, 69n30, 100, 102–4, 151, 184n48, 189, 197, 207, 246 Schiller, Friedrich, 128 Schino, Mirella, 245 Schlegel, August, 189–90 Schlegel, Friedrich, 127, 132, 188, 189, 190 Schnitzler, Arthur, 11, 194, 217 Schönthan, Franz von, 11 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 127 Schumann, Robert, 340 self-referentiality: in German literature, 128; in Gozzi, 43, 45, 111–13, 342; in Meyerhold et al. (“Eccentrics”), 14, 20, 147, 148, 151, 182n13, 275–76, 358–59; in Prokofiev, xii, 20–22, 276, 341 Semyon Kotko (Prokofiev), 17, 29n71 Sendak, Maurice, 413n74 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 104 Seroff, Victor, 278, 333n18 Serpent Woman, The (Gozzi), 27n32, 82, 88, 89, 115, 118–19, 196; Wagner’s adaptation of, 67n1, 192 servetta, xi, 69n27, 39n39, 211 Shakespeare, William, 131, 132, 138, 189–90, 241–42 shame, xxvii Shostakovich, Dmitry, 155, 411n35 Shreker, Franz, 394, 396, 404 Shrovetide (Maslenitsa). See under carnival culture Simonetti, Chiara, 86

Simonetti, Giuseppe, 86 skomorokhi (medieval Russian minstrels), 235, 242, 365 slavas (Russian opera finales), 345, 355n43 Smeraldina, 6, 69n27, 126, 183n39, 259; Adriana Zannoni as, 78, 88, 92, 104, 183n39; Dobuzhinsky’s costume design for, 389; in Prokofiev, 276, 347, 359 Smith, Winifred, 236, 245, 250n35 Soloviev, Vladimir, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 184n42, 192, 207, 208, 211, 254–55; at Borodinskaia Street Studio, 217–19; on commedia dell’arte, 11–12, 148–50, 218–19, 240, 242–43, 336; Harlequin the Marriage Broker, 14, 148, 182n4, 217, 240; Miklashevsky and, 241, 242; Prokofiev dispute and, 257–59, 262; review of Princess Turandot by, 27n33. Somov, Konstantin, 339 Spencer, Herbert, xxiii, xxviiin5 Stahl, Aleksei, 278, 332n17 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 9, 196, 208, 227, 231n2, 241 Starikova, Liudmila, 231n7 Stark, Eduard, 239 Steel Step, The (Prokofiev), 17 Strauss, Richard, 255, 367, 394, 396, 404 Stravinky, Igor, 336; The Firebird, 343; Petrushka, 30n83, 212–13, 339–40, 342–43, 368 Stray Dog Cabaret, 182n13, 241 Sturm und Drang movement, 127 Stuttgart State Opera, xxvi, xviiin10 Swan, John, 336 Symbolist movement, 187, 198, 212, 245; Anisfeld and, 376, 384–85 Symonds, John Addington, 43, 102, 183n31, 184n48, 191, 199 Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos, 181n3 Tairov, Alexander, 196, 377 Tales of an Old Grandmother (Prokofiev), 363 Tartaglia: in Goethe, 130; in Gozzi, 5–6, 40, 41, 78–79, 99, 100, 102, 126, 352; Fiorilli as, 8, 77, 92, 102–3, 111; in Hoffmann, 135, 137, 138, 141n55, 190; in The King Stag,

Index | 427 118; in Prokofiev, xxi, xxiv, xxviiin8; 259, 332n14, 362; in Tieck, 132 Taruskin, Richard, xxii, xxvi, xxviiin8, 22, 335, 344, 353n1, 368 Taubman, Howard, 409 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 225, 227 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 344, 345, 353n1, 358, 361, 363, 367, 395 Tereshchenko, Mikhail, 255–56, 265n10 Theatre Competitions, The (Gozzi), 74–76, 77–78, 96 theatricality, 22, 120, 130, 137, 188, 191, 196, 221, 244, 385, 404, 406; originator of concept of, 240. See also metatheatricality Thousand and One Nights, The, 125, 139n5 Tieck, Ludwig, 109, 125, 131–35, 152, 188, 192, 193; Puss in Boots, 131, 132,140n37, 190, 198–99, 200 tipi fissi. See commedia dell’arte: stock characters (tipi fissi) Tirso de Molina, 239 Tolstoy, Lev, 345, 357 Trauberg, Leonid, 201 Trediakovsky, Vasily, 211 Troinitsky, Sergei, 240–41 Truffaldino: in Gozzi, 6, 40, 43, 78–79, 80, 99, 101–3, 115, 126, 154; in Hoffmann, 137, 138; in Prokofiev, 259, 276–77, 334, 343–44, 347, 358, 359, 360, 363–65, 370–71, 386, 398, 401, 407; Sacchi as, 8, 77, 83n9, 86, 88, 92, 102–3, 210, 231n7, 337; as “the spirit of improvisation,” xxii; in Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev, 153, 154, 182n11 Turandot (Gozzi), 67n1, 118, 119–20, 127, 354n12; Hoffmann adaptation of, 190; Schiller adaptation of, 128 Tynianov, Yury, 241 Uglov, Anton. See Kashintsev, Dmitri Useless Memoirs (Gozzi), 73, 76–77, 108, 117, 118, 122n41, 191, 197, 201 Ustinov, Boris, 257, 265n21

Vagin, Anna, xx, 13, 150, 194 Vainkop, Yuri, 404–5 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 28n58, 244 Valentini, Francesco, 235 Valentini, Giovanni, 86 Vampuka. See Ehrenberg, Vladimir Vanderbilt, Anne Harriman, 376 Vanzura, Ernest, 351 Verdi, Giuseppe, 277, 365, 409 Verigina, Valentina, 27n45, 153, 203n30, 207 Verkharin (Verhaeren), Émile, 225 Vinogradov, Nikolai, 395 Vitalba, Giovanni, 86 Vogak, Konstantin, 2, 3, 9, 11–15, 108–9, 148, 149–50, 192, 254–55; at Borodinskaia Street Studio, 218; Italian translation by, 149, 159, 183n31, 196; later life of, 182n7. See also Love for Three Oranges (Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev) Volkov, Nikolai, 13 Volkov, Solomon, 340 Wachtel, Andrew, 354n18 Wagner, Richard, 29n76, 29n84, 394, 404; Gozzi and, 67n1, 192; Prokofiev and, 20, 30n84, 345, 347, 361, 362, 371; Russian productions of, 27n34, 394, 395 Weber, Carl Maria von, 358 Werthes, August Clemens, 127 Williams, Robert I., xxv Wolff, Albert, 376 Zanni, xi, 78, 184n53, 211, 236, 241, 362 Zannoni, Adriana Sacchi, 78, 86, 88–89, 92, 104, 183n39 Zannoni, Atanasio, 78, 86–88, 92, 96 Zaslavsky, David, 404, 406, 411n35 Zeim, King of the Genies (Gozzi), 89, 118 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 109, 110, 116–17, 198; “Carlo Gozzi,” 199–200; “Comedy of Pure Joy,” 70n52, 198–99. See also anima allegra concept