Strauss responded to this deeply philosophical libretto with a complex, lushly colored and opulently lyrical score.
The lyrical score shifts rapidly between satirical musical-theater-style excerpts and more serious, quasi-operatic numbers.
Lewis Murphy's fluid, lyrical score uses baroque techniques, but there's an air, too, of Tudor lute music, folding and unfolding in endless cadence.
The lyrical score was somewhat bland given the turbulence of the relationship it evoked, although the soprano Emily Pulley aptly conveyed the turmoil of Caitlin's life.
But even granting that this is one of Prokofiev's more overtly lyrical scores, it needs a steeliness that seemed just out of reach.
This cinematic visual effect was mirrored in the well-crafted lyrical score, ably conducted by the Florida Grand Opera's music director, Stewart Robertson.
The composer Marc Lowenstein, who wrote a raptly lyrical score for that episode and also served as the production's music director, commented, "Everything that happens is part of the scene".
For his show, students in the Labyrinth Project spent the last two years adding the sounds of engines, birds and the Danube and a lyrical score by the Hungarian composer Tibor Szemzo.
Above all, it has a sense of coherence and continuity: the dancing follows the musical lines of Greg Haines's lyrical score; the balletic style is stretched but never broken; duets are always embedded within a wider sense of the ensemble; there is a clear arc.
All this performance needed, really, was a few dozen more of Mr. Christie's employees; costumes and a bit of scenery; a more expansive, dramatic, lyrical score by Lully or Rameau; and a comfortably reverberant hall with a stage and pit big enough to accommodate all the rest.
