A March for the FBI

Bonus track twenty-two was an Amsterdam that wasn’t. Bonus track twenty-three is a Russian march, written for Chicago, that ended up on American radio.

The facts. Bonus track twenty-three runs one minute and thirty seconds. It is the March from Sergei Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges, from the suite he drew from the opera. The credit is the same as on bonus track twenty-two.

In 1918 Prokofiev goes to America. After concerts in Chicago, he is asked for an opera.

The story is Carlo Gozzi’s, an eighteenth-century Venetian fairy tale, by way of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

The opera is sung in French. Prokofiev’s English was limited, and Russian would not have gone down well with an American audience.

It opens in Chicago on 30 December 1921, at the Auditorium Theatre, with Prokofiev conducting. The soprano Mary Garden, by then in charge of the Chicago Opera, had brought it back after it was cancelled.

The audience liked it. Some critics didn’t know what to make of it. One called it this:

“Russian jazz with Bolshevik trimmings.”

The March was the part that travelled. In 1922 Prokofiev made a piano version of it himself.

From 1944 to 1958, CBS radio ran a drama series called The FBI in Peace and War. Its theme was Prokofiev’s March.

In 1955 a columnist in The Washington Post noticed, with some surprise, that the FBI’s theme was by a Soviet composer.

On Garrett’s repertoire list, Prokofiev means the First Concerto and the Second Sonata, plus the Dance of the Knights on Alive. The March has one recording against it: Immortal.

Ninety seconds of it.

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Bonus track twenty-three’s answer is a tune good enough to borrow. In America the opera stayed rare. The March went on the radio.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as listed for the deluxe edition by Universal Music; the opera’s commission, sources, language, premiere and reception from the reference literature on The Love for Three Oranges and Opera Philadelphia’s history of the production; the critic’s line as quoted by Michael Pisani (The Musical Quarterly, 1997); the piano version, the radio series and the 1955 column from WRTI; Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com.