About the work
Betrothal in a Monastery is a comic opera in four acts by Sergei Prokofiev after Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Duenna, with a libretto the composer wrote together with Mira Mendelson. Work began in 1940, was interrupted by the war, and resumed in Almaty in 1943; the opera premiered on 3 November 1946 at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad, conducted by Boris Khaikin.
Plot
In eighteenth-century Seville, the wealthy Don Jerome wants to marry his daughter Louisa to the rich but unattractive fishmonger Mendoza, although she loves the penniless Antonio. With the help of her duenna and a series of disguises and mix-ups, Louisa escapes the arranged marriage; in the end, three couples come together at a monastery, including Louisa's brother Ferdinand and his Clara.
Cultural significance
Despite its light-hearted, apolitical subject, the opera fell under suspicion of 'formalism' in 1948 along with other works by Prokofiev and was rarely performed in the Soviet Union for years afterward. Only with its Western premieres in New York (1948) and London (1963), and later festival productions, did the work gain growing attention outside Russia.