Prokofiev, Sergei. Suite from Love for Three Oranges. Cond. Lorin Maazel. Orchestre National de France. CBS, 1985.

"During the summer of 1917, twenty-six-year old Sergei Prokofiev settled into a dacha, or small house, not far from St. Petersburg. The composer-pianist was uninterested in politics and seems to have been more irritated than alarmed by the revolution that had recently toppled the Czar. As he impatiently remarked at the time of his subsequent emigration to the West, the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath was simply not a good time for concerts. . .

It was in 1914 that Prokofiev first read the satiric fairy-tale comedy by the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi entitled The Love for Three Oranges. This appealed strongly to his sense of the ridiculous, and even then he began to consider setting the work to music. However, the subject had to wait until 1919, when Prokofiev received a commission for an opera from the Chicago Opera Company. . . . The absurd plot concerns a king whose melancholy son will die unless he can be made to laugh, plus a magician, a witch, a scheme to take away the throne and three oranges containing three princesses. Throughout, Prokofiev's music is appropriately bizarre and colorful" (Philip Ramey).