What makes an opera a success? The eccentrics, airheads, comedians, lyricists and tragicists think they know, proclaiming their point of view at the craziest times and not even bothering to intervene in the action. Welcome to the wonderful world of Prokofiev's L'amour des trois oranges, back on stage this month at the Amsterdam musical theatre.
At the centre seems to be an absurdist fairy tale about a hypochondriac prince who is doomed to love three oranges by a sorceress. We also get to see those oranges, but director Laurent Pelly and set designer Chantal Thomas use an earlier scene from the opera as the basis for the entire staging. The card game that sorceress Fata Morgane (a wonderful role by Anna Shafajinskaya) wins from Tchélio (excellently sung by the evening's standout Kurt Gysen) sets the story in motion, and so we see playing cards everywhere. Metres high and remote-controlled, like collapsing houses of cards just before the interval and withered and curled up in the desert scene. The result is visually overwhelming.
Emphatically, Laurent Pelly also refers to the remarkable life story of Prokofiev himself. After the Russian revolution, he left for Paris and, as an émigré, was part of illustrious company: Matisse painted his portrait, Picasso visited his premieres, Gershwin visited him in his flat and with Nabokov he discussed literature. He made trips to the United States as a pianist and composer, and at the time (1919) he wrote L'amour des trois oranges. But at the height of his fame, he abandoned his luxurious Western life and settled permanently in the Soviet Union under Stalin in 1936.
Why? What possessed the 40-year-old composer to return to Russia at the moment when Stalin's reign of terror had also penetrated the West? Not only because his return made him inaccessible to European creditors - Prokofiev had hefty gambling debts. Above all, however, he thought that his international fame would exempt him from the regime and he would be allowed to have all the state facilities at his disposal in order to get his operas performed more easily. That gamble turned out disastrously and Prokofiev became more and more embittered and after he died at the age of 61, 55 minutes before Stalin, according to tradition, there were no flowers at his funeral - they were all bought up for Stalin's ceremony.
At L'amour des trois oranges however, we hear Prokofiev at his most exuberant. The opera is not a fairy tale, but a satire, especially musically. For instance, the exuberant and rather loud march that accompanies the king is mainly a persiflage on such a march and is preceded the first time by notes that seem to mock Wagner, and for good reason. Arias are absent, but the love duet from the third act is again orchestrated so sugary that the irony drips from it.
The palette of sounds is incredibly broad and the dynamic differences are equally large, but where an insecure conductor would reduce those contrasts, the relatively young Tomás Netopil actually thickens them, helped by the razor-sharp Residentie Orkest. The Netherlands Opera chorus, superbly rehearsed by Taiwanese Ching-Lien Wu, once again claims a leading role. From the 2005 cast, Martial Defontaine returns as the Prince and Serghei Khomov as the jester Trouffaldino, but as then, it is the sets in particular that make a lasting impression.
De Nederlandse Opera: Sergei Prokofiev: L'amour des trois oranges, Muziektheater, Amsterdam, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 21 March 2013
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