The Fiery Angel, which occupied Sergei Prokofiev’s mind from 1919 to 1927, was a turning point in his operatic search. After his mischievous opera The Love for Three Oranges, the composer was fascinated with Valery Briusov’s historical novel of an earthborn woman’s tragic affections towards a heavenly angel. The gist of the novel, in which medieval mysticism and real fagoting stories are interlaced with the author’s intimate thoughts and autobiographic motives, reveals itself in the penultimate sentence: “To cross that sacred edge that divides our world from the dark sphere in which float spirits and demons”. Seeking inspiration, Sergei Prokofiev left for the locale of the novel, Germany, and, inter alia, visited Oberammergau where the traditional Passion Play had been performed from the 17th century.
Turning to the eternal philosophic themes of love, life and death or to the problem of origin of universal evil or relationship between good and evil or to the contest of sanctity and peccancy for human souls, Sergei Prokofiev does not tend to unambiguous conclusions. In The Fiery Angel, the positive and the negative or the real and the unreal cannot be divorced from each other and have to co-exist, gliding into each other. The heroine, Renata, ecstatically loves Madiel, and this love makes her impassible enough to send her faithful knight, Ruprecht, to his doom. However, starting with Ruprecht’s carnal infatuation, his sentiment towards Renata turns into his sacrificial serving in love, leading him to his spiritual transformation. Longing for their unattainable ideals, the hero and heroine come along their Gothic Via Dolorosa where passion is misery. The other characters are images of Renata’s fate and, at the same time, intermediates between her and the beyond. All of them are freely spelled and usually appear in the culmination point of each act: the Soothsayer in Act 1, Jacob Glock and Agrippa in Act 2, Heinrich in Act 3, Faust and Mephistopheles in Act 4, and the Inquisitor in Act 5.
Plunged into the Dark Ages spiritually but not literally, Sergei Prokofiev has banished all thoughts of archaizing his music. The pliably embossed recitatives elicit a complicated variety of characters’ emotions. The driving elemental strife is primarily concentrated in the orchestra which is instrumental in musical dramaturgy of The Fiery Angel. Renata’s obsession with the fixed idea puts us in mind of Electra and Salome, heroines of Richard Strauss’s expressionistic operas. Renata’s mystic ecstasies and the ensuing visions need being expressed by media which are adequately effective in terms of their impact. In actual fact, Sergei Prokofiev establishes new orchestral acoustics which surpass all pre-existing ones and allow the orchestra to reach the frontiers of sounding. One of the most important orchestral functions is to outline the subconscious with multi-vocally symbolic leitmotifs. These leitmotifs become elements of orchestral performance and form, together with those of stage performance, two semantic fields which are generally independent but particularly overlapping. In the purely orchestral episodes, the development shifts to a metaphysical level.
The opera was highly esteemed by Sergei Prokofiev himself, and this is proved both by his eight-year work on its score and by the fact that the composer wrote a symphony based on his music for The Fiery Angel after all attempts to stage the opera had failed. The doom of the opera may be easily associated with the then hardly possible presentation of its religious and mystic contents on the stage. Sergei Prokofiev’s original score was first performed in full under the baton of maestro Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1991.
Nadezhda Kulygina
