A commission for an opera from Cleofonte Campanini, conductor of the Chicago Opera Company, was to result in what ultimately proved to be his most popular work composed for America—the humorous fairy-tale opera, “The Love of Three Oranges.” Campanini, however, had died in the interim, and it was Mary Garden, newly appointed director (she styled herself _directa_!) of the Chicago company, who undertook the production of the opera in Chicago in 1921. Its reception in Chicago and later at the Manhattan Opera House was scarcely encouraging. Almost three decades were to pass before a spectacularly successful production, in English, by Laszlo Halasz at the New York City Center gave it a secure and enduring place in the active American repertory.
Prokofieff next went to Paris, where he renewed ties with a group of Russian musicians and intellectuals, among them the two Serges who were to become so helpful in the development of his reputation as a dominant force in modern music. These were Serge Diaghileff and Serge Koussevitzky. For Diaghileff he wrote music for a succession of ballets, among them “Chout” (1921), “Pas d’Acier” (1927), and “The Prodigal Son” (1929). Considerable interest was aroused by “Pas d’Acier”, which was termed both a “labor ballet” and a “Bolshevik Ballet” by various members of the press both in Paris and in London, where the work was given in July, 1927. It was a ballet of factories and firemen, of lathes and drill-presses, of wheels and workers, and it brought Prokofieff the dubious title of composer laureate of the mechanistic age.
Koussevitzky had begun his celebrated series of concerts in Paris in 1921. This proved a perfect setting for the newcomer. Again and again the programs afforded him a double hospitality as composer and pianist. Koussevitzky introduced the Second Symphony and when he later took up the baton of the Boston Symphony, Prokofieff was among the first composers invited to appear on his programs in either or both capacities. In 1929, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony, it was to Serge Prokofieff that Koussevitzky went for a symphonic score to commemorate the occasion. The resulting work was Prokofieff’s Fourth Symphony. It was not till 1927 that Prokofieff, absent from his homeland for nine years, decided to return, if only for a visit. Of this period away from home, Nicolas Nabokov, who knew Prokofieff well, had this to say in an article written for “The Atlantic Monthly” in July, 1942:—