Summer Night, Suite from ‘Betrothal in a Monastery’, Op. 123

Program notes

About the Work

Betrothal in a Monastery is the comic opera Prokofiev began in 1940, and its source was an eighteenth-century English comedy: Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna, a farce of disguises, elopements and a miserly father outwitted by his daughter and her governess, set in Seville. Prokofiev wrote the Russian libretto himself with Mira Mendelson, later his second wife. The opera went into rehearsal, the war stopped it, and it did not reach the stage until 3 November 1946, at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad.

Ten years after starting the opera, in 1950, Prokofiev went back to it and drew out a five-movement orchestral suite which he called Summer Night, Op. 123. The suite belongs to the small group of orchestral works from the last years of his life. What he lifted out of the opera was its warm, nocturnal side, the serenades and love music, framed by two livelier pieces, with the plain melodic style he had been cultivating since his return to the Soviet Union. It lasts about twenty minutes and is rarely played, which makes its appearance here, as the first half of a pairing with his very different early opera The Gambler, a real attraction.

What to Listen For

The Introduction is the opera’s short overture: bustling, festive, led by a trumpet tune with the wide, slightly crooked leaps that mark a melody as Prokofiev’s. The Serenade is the music of the lovers Antonio and Louisa, slow and warm, with the tenor’s line from the opera passing to a solo cello. The Minuet belongs to Louisa’s father, Don Jerome, and is a courtly dance that keeps tripping over its own feet, affectionate satire of a man who thinks himself dignified.

‘Dreams’, subtitled Nocturne, is the heart of the suite: the love theme of the opera’s second couple, Clara and Ferdinand, with a solo flute floating over strings divided into many parts. The closing Dance comes from the end of the opera. It starts quietly, on a rhythm that repeats and repeats, and grows to a bright, full climax.