Laughter at the Opera House: The Case of Prokofʼevʼs The Love for Three Oranges

This essay traces the diverse sources and fates of the pursuit of laughter in Sergei Prokofʼevʼs first full-length opera The Love for Three Oranges (1921) – arguably the composerʼs only pronounced take on modernism. Conceived and composed during the turbulent times of war and exile, the opera at once harked back to the pre-revolutionary Petersburg theater suffused with historical homage, and leaped forward to the amnesiac ebullience of the interwar modernist stage. In a series of examples, I demonstrate Prokofʼevʼs distinctive ways of generating comedy, the multi-media techniques that allowed, even if for a brief while, for a happy marriage between modernism and the up-and-coming Soviet “culture industry”.