Slightly Bourgeois

Sergei Prokofiev's little comic opera, The Duenna,* almost got lost in the shuffle. Finished in 1940, it had reached the dress rehearsal stage in Moscow when the war put a stop to it. After the war, it was put on in Leningrad and Prague, but the score was still in manuscript.

Last week, Manhattan opera fans were given a pretty good idea of what The Duenna is all about. Greenwich Village's aggressive little Lemonade Opera (TIME, Sept. 8) had acquired two vocal scores from which it squeezed out an arrangement for two pianos and a full complement of 19 singers.

Prokofiev based his opera on Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 18th Century comedy: a grandee's daughter, facing parental opposition to her marriage, slyly marries off her duenna to the parental choice (a rich fish merchant).

For the music, Prokofiev had put away the powerful pen that wrote the Fifth Symphony, used instead the light-nibbed one that wrote the delightful Classical Symphony. Lemonade Opera played The Duenna's tuneful arias, duets and quartets for laughs -- and got them from a cheering, sell-out audience.

The Duenna might never be performed again in Russia: its plot is hardly in the acceptable groove, especially after the brisk spanking Russia's composers got last winter for "bourgeois, Western-oriented'' ideas and music.

* Also known as Betrothal in a Monestery.

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