The Gambler (Prokofiev)

"I was planning a symphonic suite based on the music of The Gambler. But I could not make much headway with it. The close interweaving of the music and the text resulted in an intricate pattern from which it was hard to pick any thread for a single symphonic line. In the end I discarded the idea of a suite in favour of portraits of the individual characters. This, however, was not so simple either, inasmuch as the music of the different characters was scattered throughout the opera. I devised the following method: I took the score apart, picked out everything relating to a given character and spread the sheets out on the floor. Seated on a chair, I studied the pages for a long time until gradually the unrelated episodes began, as it were, to coalesce. This gave me sufficient concentrated material to work with."