Chicago, 1921. Sergei Prokofiev premiered an opera about melancholy and mirth. A prince who is unable to laugh finds three oranges, each one containing a princess, and after various phantasmagorical exploits he marries princess number three. Outmoded characters representing tragedy, comedy, lyric drama and farce bicker at the sidelines with a bunch of “ridicules”. Reviewers of The Love for Three Oranges wanted to know who Prokofiev was poking fun at: them? The audience? Art itself? “All I was trying to do,” the composer later shrugged, “is write an amusing opera.”
Two years later, Jean Sibelius in Finland confused everyone with his Sixth Symphony. Gone are the great soaring swans of his Fifth Symphony. This is music that dodges pretty pictures. Sibelius reached sideways for the ancient modes of folk music and set them with introverted, evasive, disquieting plainness. Benjamin Britten said he must have been drunk when he wrote it. Maybe he was – he had abandoned seven years of abstinence – but Sibelius himself had a more interesting explanation. “Whereas most other modern composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, I offer the public pure cold water.”
Content from our partners
