Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel (Madrid, 2022)

Sergei Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel

Teatro Real de Madrid, 2022

Gustavo Gimeno,Calixto Bieito, Ausrine Stundyte, Leigh Melrose, Dmitry Golovnin, Agnieszka Rehlis, Mika Kares, Nino Surguladze, Dmitry Ulyanov, Josep Fadò, Gerardo Bullón, Ernst Alisch, David Lagares, Estibaliz Martyn, Anna Gomà

ARTE Concert - April 2022

Based on a Symbolist work by Valery Bryusov with autobiographical experiences that were shared to some extent by the composer, Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel is one of the most impressive and original works of opera I've come across. Musically and thematically it is quite unlike anything else in opera and each new production - although they aren't that common - always suggests new ways of looking at it. There have been some interesting perspectives taken on the work in recent years in Munich, Aix and Rome, but the idea of seeing what a director like Calixto Bieito can make of it is always going to be an intriguing proposition. It turns out that the Madrid production of The Fiery Angel doesn't seem to have a whole lot to say that is new, but the opera nonetheless remains fascinating, particularly with Ausrine Stundyte again taking on the mesmerising role of Renata. 

Sure, in some respects you can see Renata as a typical opera heroine abused and mistreated and misunderstood by the men in her life, her behaviour out of step with society around her, but in the case of Renata, there is indeed quite a bit to misunderstand. Not that her state of mind is any excuse for the abuse she endures or indeed the exploitation of her vulnerability, but fundamentally does seem to be the rationale for the irrational here. Because for whatever reason (there are hints and suggestions but nothing is made explicit), Renata is indeed not functioning on a rational level. Whether a victim of childhood abuse or suffering from schizophrenia, she has clearly been scarred by her childhood experiences, experiencing visions of a celestial being appearing in her bedroom, a fiery angel who becomes intimate with her.

This unfortunately sets her up to become a victim to be further exploited by the men she meets. She lets herself be taken in by Count Heinrich, who she believes is the angel Madiel in a corporeal form, and his eventual rejection only deepens her trauma. Even the noble knight, Ruprecht who comes to her aid in her distress, sees a vulnerable woman he can exploit sexually. His behaviours and actions are suspect, but when he is rejected he does at least try to consider his better nature and help, although it seems to be primarily because he is still fascinated by this extraordinary woman. With his assistance, Renata is exploited even further by charlatans and astrologers, as she tries to find a way to Madiel through occultism and mysticism. 

On one level then it is a familiar situation of a woman being exploited and shunned by a conformist society, leading her to seek answers elsewhere, but The Fiery Angel is also a work that seeks to explore the far reaches and complexities of human experience, Renata's journey being one to get in touch with a spiritual dimension or existence of life outside of the common experience. She has a sense of having touched on forbidden knowledge and seeks to press it further. For Ruprecht too, there is even a fascination for the mystery of a woman that Renata represents. She stirs up a riot of feelings that involve lust, compassion, fear, jealousy and possessiveness. Combined, The Fiery Angel is an exploration of human dualism, what it means to be human, a material physical being with a spiritual mind, mortal creatures with aspirations of an eternal afterlife. On an everyday level grappling with this dualism extends to male and female divisions, base instincts and a higher purpose, purity and corruption, subjective and objective realities.

In other productions by Mariusz Treliński at Aix-en-Provence and Emma Dante in Rome, the stage directors have sought ways to bring the otherworldly level of the opera expressed in the music to the fore, whereas Barrie Kosky's Munich production highlighted the comic absurdity. Calixto Bieito takes a surprisingly much more down to earth approach, seeing the opera very much as an opening into the mind of a woman rejected for not conforming to the expectations of society. It's even set (restricted I feel) in a specific period, the 1950s, before a more general liberalisation and a sexual permissive society. Initially we see Renata seeking mystery in the spinning of a bicycle wheel, creating patterns, the bicycle perhaps alluding to a childhood trauma. The set meanwhile consists of a block of compartments that, as occasional projections of Ausrine Stundyte as Renata illustrate, are representative of the idea that we are seeing into her mind.

Those rooms or compartments are mostly bare empty rooms, ready to be filled with horrors, each in their own little world, none of them connecting up to form any coherent view of reality. Significantly, perhaps rejecting any idea of a spiritual realm beyond physical reality, the few rooms that are decorated, the only lights in the darkness, are related to Agrippa von Nettesheim who in this version is less of a sorcerer than a physician, a man of science who is aware that we are still far from having all the answers. Her childhood bedroom, the source of her trauma, is also shown in all its horror. With an older man appearing, there is the suggestion of abuse by her father, who she looks up to. She sees Heinrich, an older man, as a substitute for her father, but inevitably that is a terrible mistake that only deepens her trauma. The tavern scene with Faust and Mephisopheles pushes Renata to her limits, and is quite disturbing in its own way. As she disturbs the community of nuns in Act 5, there are correspondences with Penderecki's opera Die Teufel von Loudun, which also featured Ausrine Stundyte in a recent Munich production.

Prokofiev, in a work long laboured over that he never saw performed in his own lifetime, strives to find similar expression in the music for the tangible and intangible, and it truly is a remarkable endeavour. The music is powerful and dynamic, sweeping between sensual and disorientating, evoking objective and subjective realities. I think its complexities came across better in the Rome production, but that might just be that the recording benefitted from superb High Resolution sound mix on the Blu-ray presentation. Here, conducted by Gustavo Gimeno, the detail isn't all there, nor the same dynamic shifts of tempo and volume.

Where the opera really comes to life however here in this Madrid production is in the singing performances. Once again - a revelation in the same role in Aix-en-Provence - we have a marvellous performance by Ausrine Stundyte. It's a role that has considerable vocal challenges but there are dramatic challenges too that require expression beyond the external, a requirement for Renata to be possessed of a deep and mysterious inner life. Bieito makes it physically challenging too and Stundyte is again impressive. Leigh Melrose is also excellent, his Ruprecht grappling with things beyond his comprehension and his own limited knowledge and experience. He brings that out in a similarly committed physical performance. 

The origins of the work and its Symbolist trappings leave a lot of room for analysis in The Fiery Angel, but it seems like the controversial Catalan director Calixto Bieito uncharacteristically seeks to demystify the work and restrict its possibilities. In his hands it does indeed boil down to familiar opera themes of a woman with unconventional individual behaviours being shunned by a closed society, moulded to conform and eventually destroyed by it. Prokofiev music suggests a wider context, but in that dialectic between the score and stage representation, the opera still works and weaves its fascination. Principally of course its real human level is expressed by the singers, and with prior experience of these roles, Stundyte and Melrose are thoroughly convincing.

Links: Teatro Real, ARTE Concert

Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel (Rome, 2019)

Sergei Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel

Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, 2019

Alejo Pérez, Emma Dante, Leigh Melrose, Ewa Vestin, Anna Victorova, Mairam Sokolova, Sergey Radchenko, Andrii Ganchuk, Maxim Paster, Goran Jurić, Domingo Pellicola, Petr Sokolov

Naxos - Blu-ray

Composed in 1927 but considered far too extreme to stage, Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel was never fully performed or staged during the composer's lifetime. It is however an extraordinary opera and is indeed a work of extremes, one that pushes at musical, dramatic and psychological boundaries. There are consequently many different ways of approaching it, but in almost every case you have to wholeheartedly embrace its extremes and its madness. Emma Dante's 2019 production for the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma succeeds in just about every level, perhaps even getting close to illuminating what this strange and almost forgotten masterpiece is all about.

What it is, is what it is about. It's indeed about extremes, about the human experience pushing and being pushed to extremes, to the extent that it borders and almost spills over into madness; and what is madness but humanity pushed to extremes? The troubled Renata is not just schizophrenic who searches to recapture a hallucinatory vision of an angel that visited her as a child, but she is chasing what the angel represents; a growing to sexual awareness as well as the longing for fullness of being. She was able to indulge this burning desire in her marriage to Count Heinrich, but since he has abandoned her, her thirst for and taste of forbidden pleasures has not been sated.

The same can be said about Ruprecht, the travelling knight who hears her torments while staying next door to her in an inn. He doesn't see her the way others do as a wanton madwoman, but having seen much of the world and having visited the new world of America, he finds her state of mind compelling in its willingness to embrace something bigger than itself, her uniqueness and her determination to achieve it, and is consequently filled with lust for her. For this, he is even willing to indulge her journey to Cologne, visiting mages, scientists and philosophers in her quest to rediscover Heinrich - or what he represents for her in her mind - and he too wholeheartedly follows her down some strange paths.

The scientists, religious guides, occultists and the esoteric forbidden texts that they seek out and pore over are just another representation of the human desire to extend and expand knowledge of the capacity of mankind, to experience life fully on all fronts; love and tenderness, hatred and death, body and soul. It's evidently an endless quest, torn between angels on one side and demons on the other. That essentially is what Prokofiev pours into his incredible score for The Fiery Angel and it's what director Emma Dante strives to do justice to in visual and dramatic terms. If you achieve that, you have something remarkable; total opera. That is certainly the impression you get from this production.

It's a busy enough drama, but there is so much going on in the musical expression of the drama and its undercurrents, that it's simply not enough to just tell the story. The director finds some quite brilliant ways to highlight the ideas, the less tangible and the unknowable side of Renata and Ruprecht's restless quest, looking for answers, trying to solve the mysteries that lie on the boundaries of human experience and sexual desire. Setting it mainly in a crypt and in a book filled library to highlight the themes, Dante also employs extras and dancers who whirl and spin around the singers, dancing and moving to the music, a legion of fleeting thoughts and impressions that go through Renata's disturbed mindset. Even her related story of Heinrich and her encounter with Madiel finds visual representation on the stage, as they are very much present in the music.

If you can illustrate what the music is expressing the way Dante does - and it really is vivid, colourful, endlessly creative music - and you have great singers to draw the human side out of it, you have got an opera here that itself pushes the limits of human and artistic expression. The musical performance under the direction of Alejo Pérez is a marvel, perhaps all the more impressive for it being illustrated so well on the stage, but the sound recording on this video release is also just breathtaking, capturing the wild dynamic of the ever changing and evolving sound world, giving a wide soundstage to the instruments in the Blu-ray's High Resolution audio mixes. It sounds as incredible as it looks.

There's only one way to sing The Fiery Angel and that's with total commitment and controlled outpouring of passion. The only other work that I think comes close to this - or that this comes close to perhaps - is Wozzeck. Both take on an ambitious musical exploration of depths of human soul, the challenges of life, subject to misfortune outside of one's control to influence. It's up there with Elektra too in that respect. Like those works - early twentieth century masterpieces all - Prokofiev's piece is incredibly demanding but when done well impressive on a scale that few other operas can match.

The cast here are all excellent, all of which contributes to the overall impact of the opera and the production. Renata can't be anything but remarkable but that shouldn't be taken for granted, and Ewa Vestin has terrific presence, giving an excellent dramatic and singing performance that is controlled in its outpouring of emotions. She is matched by a fine Ruprecht in Leigh Melrose, but there are also excellent performances from Maxim Paster as Mephistopheles and Goran Jurić as the Inquisitor, the two anchoring opposing forces of the opera's extremes. Absolutely faultless in performance, impressive in direction, this is nothing but glorious opera.

The Naxos Blu-ray give this the kind of presentation you could hope for. The A/V quality is superb, the image clear, colourful and detailed, but it's the Hi-Res audio mixes that lift this to another level. The force and detail of the orchestral performance has tremendous presence around the singing voices, spread across the spectrum in both stereo and surround mixes. The enclosed booklet contains an essential detailed synopsis and an interesting interview with Emma Dante. The Blu-ray is all-region (A/B/C), BD50, with subtitles in English, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean.

Links: Teatro dell'Opera di Roma

Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel (Aix, 2018)

Sergei Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel

Festival d'Aix en Provence, 2018

Kazushi Ono, Mariusz Treliński, Aušrinė Stundytė, Scott Hendricks, Agnieszka Rehlis, Andreï Popov, Krzysztof Bączyk, Pavlo Tolstoy, Łukasz Goliński, Bernadetta Grabias, Bożena Bujnicka, Maria Stasiak

Culturebox - 15 July 2018

It's hard to say exactly what the true nature of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel is, whether it's a satire, an exploration of mental illness, decadent, absurdist, symbolist, but I'm pretty sure it's not a comedy. Any yet it's a work that does push the boundaries of human experience or at least the expression of them, so the absurdity of madness can indeed appear to be strangely comic, a side of the work that Barrie Kosky emphasised in his typically colourful and somewhat camp 2015 Munich production of the work. Director Mariusz Treliński takes it a little more seriously and is more open to alternative interpretations, but The Fiery Angel remains an enigmatic experience.

Written by Valery Bryusov, whose work is associated with Russian Symbolism and the Decadent Movement, The Fiery Angel is intentionally allusive and unconnected to any superficial narrative viewpoint, more concerned with exploring hard to define and even taboo human states and emotions. If there's an edge of absurdity in The Fiery Angel it's because it heads towards those outer reaches, exploring the fragility of the human psyche and human desires, where love turns to obsession and where madness is just one step removed from reality, and it's an easy line to cross.

In The Fiery Angel, Ruprecht a German knight, finds a distressed woman in his lodgings. Renata tells him that she has lost the love of her life, Heinrich, a man she believes to be the human incarnation of the Madiel, the fiery angel. First encountering Madiel as an eight year old child, Renata has followed a chaste and ascetic path towards sainthood, walking barefoot and inflicting wounds on herself. Wishing a more physical communion however angered Madiel and he disappeared in a pillar of fire. Heinrich, although denying he was Madiel, has now left her, and Renata reaches out to Ruprecht, seeing advice and guidance from alchemists, spiritualists and occult practices, in hallucinatory drugs and all manner of strange rituals.

That suggests that there is a dividing line between reality and a world where visions, unconventional thought and even madness takes over, but it's not that clear-cut. Ruprecht's reactions towards Renata's story and her experience, not to mention the physical presence of this vulnerable woman, brings out a side to the knight that is split between chivalry and lust that - when he cannot resist the woman and in this production tries to rape her - is followed by subsequent feelings of guilt. Possibly. There's nothing about those areas of human behaviour that the work explores that can be determined to fit a logical, consistent thought process that makes rational sense. And that's before the work becomes even more complicated.

Although it is set in medieval Germany, there is an autobiographical element to The Fiery Angel in Bryusov's involvement with the poet Nina Petrovskaya who had just ended a relationship with fellow Symbolist writer Andrei Bely - all Russian artists personally known to Prokofiev. Petrovskaya committed suicide in 1927, the same year that Prokofiev finished The Fiery Angel, although the opera was never performed in his lifetime. There is however no correlative map to help you understand what is real, imagined and hallucinated, or what is merely a Symbolist writer's attempt to find a colourful and darkly poetic expression of deep emotional states.

For the Polish director Mariusz Treliński, directing The Fiery Angel for the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2018, Prokofiev's music is very much an expressionistic response to the meteoric decline in rational behaviour that occurs when love turns to obsession and madness, Ruprecht, Renata and Heinrich all coming crashing down to earth. Treliński's working methods often draw on cinema references and techniques; David Lynch's Blue Velvet is always going to be a reference for something like The Fiery Angel, but Treliński also seems to draw on the heightened expressionism in the neon and colour saturated imagery of Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives and Neon Demon.

It's a fluid dream-world then, the sets and locations blending and dissolving into one another. It looks amazing, nightmarishly surreal and hallucinogenic, finding creative ways to represent the intentions of the work, the feelings of the characters and the expression of it all in Prokofiev's music. In his duel with Heinrich, Ruprecht is transformed into a small child with an absurdly large Ruprecht head representing his feelings of inadequacy; the spiritualist Agrippa von Nettesheim appears in multiple forms that may part of his occult persona or just be one of many other visions that assail the Ruprecht in his impressionable drug-induced state.

The Fiery Angel however is not entirely just the subjective impressions of a disturbed mind or minds, but it does place them in the context of other social factors. Renata's behaviour and self-harm also suggests childhood sexual abuse and conflicting feelings for her abuser, but certainly in Prokofiev's version there is confrontation with a patriarchal society, with its institutions and with the repressive influence of religion. It suggests that evil can come in the form of what is perceived to be good, and how it can be difficult to tell the difference. There's a lot to take in here and much that won't make sense, but Treliński illustrates and delves into those mindsets as vigorously, unflinchingly and richly as Prokofiev's highly expressive score, conducted here by Kazushi Ono.

It would be harder to carry off however if you don't have someone like Aušrinė Stundytė singing the role of Renata, and she is simply phenomenal here. It's not enough that she can take on the challenge of the singing, being on stage continuously for most of the two hours of the opera, but director Treliński also expects her to act out Renata's condition as if she were a film actress. Filmed for live broadcast with close-ups that show every gesture and expression, it's a thoroughly convincing performance. The mostly Ukrainian, Polish and Russian cast have the advantage here with the language, which must have made it all the more of a challenge for Scott Hendricks as Ruprecht, but while I can't account for his Russian, it was an excellent performance, perfect for the demands of the role and the production.

Links: Festival d'Aix en Provence, Culturebox

Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel (Munich, 2015 - Webcast)

Sergei Prokofiev - The Fiery Angel

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2015

Vladimir Jurowski, Barrie Kosky, Evgeny Nikitin, Svetlana Sozdateleva, Heike Grötzinger, Elena Manistina, Vladimir Galouzine, Kevin Conners, Okka von der Damerau, Igor Tsarkov, Jens Larsen

Staatsoper.TV - 12th December 2015

We are well used to seeing productions from the Bavarian State Opera that are more than a little unconventional, often even seeming to have scant regard for the directions of the libretto. With Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel - a fairly rare work that was first performed only after the composer's death - the Munich opera company seem to have found a work that is truly bizarre enough to fit with what commonly takes place on their stage. Somewhat surprisingly then, especially since it's Barrie Kosky who is given charge of the direction here, the production struggles to match or keep up with the strange happenings that take place in Prokofiev's highly unusual work.

Even by Prokofiev's extravagant operatic range, The Fiery Angel is over-the-top in almost every respect. This is a composer who can plunge into the particularly Russian nature of the worlds of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with ambitious and dynamic works like War and Peace and The Gambler, but he also reveals a side for the comic and the absurd in his Betrothal in a Monastery and The Love for Three Oranges. Musically and thematically, The Fiery Angel is no less flamboyantly orchestrated for the rhythms, patterns and strange paths that its plot takes. It's not an opera that is memorable for melodies or arias, but every dramatic line and gesture is underscored with complex arrangements and an invigorating punchy delivery.

The music then is perfectly suitable for a work that has few recognisable sentiments in its headlong descent into madness. The person suffering from delusions that take her on a spiraling sequence of hallucinations is a young woman called Renata. She has been discovered by Ruprecht, a rather more worldly-wise man who has found her in his hotel room raving about her childhood encounter with a fiery angel, Madiel. The angel however, becoming aware of Renata's growing carnal lust, abandoned her, but Renata believed that Madiel subsequently took human form in the shape of Count Heinrich. However, he too abandoned her after a year.

Ruprecht is inclined to take advantage of the young woman's delusions in her search for Heinrich/Madiel, her fiery angel, but as he makes the pretence of assisting her by exploring esoteric texts and seeking instruction from Agrippa von Nettesheim, he soon becomes caught up in the strange world that Renata lives in. The line between fantasy and reality (and erotic role-playing) becomes increasingly blurred as they are visited by nightmarish visions of Faust and Mephistopheles, which in turn leads to a kind of religious epiphany when Renata decides to enter a convent only to face trail by the Inquisitor for being possessed by a demon. The whole nightmarish descent into deeper madness is played through here over almost two and quarter hours without an interval. With Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Bayerisches Staatsorchester through Prokofiev's challenging score, it really is a whirlwind ride.

With such a subject and treatment, you would expect that the stage presentation would also be on the extravagant side, particularly as it's the Bayerische Staatsoper and Barrie Kosky is directing. Surprisingly, the opera set for the hotel room looks more like the Marschallin's boudoir in Der Rosenkavalier, with numerous footmen and porters on call at Ruprecht's arrival. With Prokofiev's tone being fairly manic from the start, perhaps Kosky felt it might be a little better to introduce a little bit of normality at this stage by way of contrast to where the opera goes later. That might not be a bad idea if the director were able to establish a more consistent tone that works with the opera, but instead all Kosky has to contrast it with in the latter half of the work is all the familiar camp hallmarks that seem rather too crude to have any bearing on the intent of the opera.

Kosky goes to town of course on the tavern scene, with the obligatory dancing men in drag, and he has Mephistopheles wave his willie around and play suggestively with large sausages. As one of the more unhinged scenes in a fairly bizarre opera, one doesn't expect the director to read anything deep into the irreverent and sexually-charged content, but there are surely more inventive ways of doing it than this. In a work like The Fiery Angel, you're not so much looking for elucidation as something that might engage and hold the audience through the increasingly absurd turn of events. On its own, Prokofiev's difficult score is fascinating in its own right, but at over two hours long and with no intermission (an intermission would only break the mood and the flow), it needs a little more visual engagement. The letterboxing of the stage and Rebecca Ringst's set designs at least manages to inventively keep things moving through a five-act opera, suggesting an interior world more than actual locations.

The uninterrupted two and a quarter length of the work is just as much a challenge for the performers, particularly as Vladimir Jurowski is intent on keeping up the pace and momentum, fairly rattling though the complexities of the score. Taking on most of the singing challenges as Renata and on the stage for pretty much the entire length of the performance, Svetlana Sozdateleva copes incredibly well, even when she has to endure the indignities of Kosky's direction. Such is the commitment and personality that she brings to a difficult character that Sozdateleva makes almost everyone else seem rather dull by comparison - Kevin Conners' delirious Mephistopheles excepted. Evgeny Nikitin consequently, while he sings well, never seems to get to grips with who Ruprecht is or what he wants. Prokofiev, admittedly, doesn't make that easy to determine, but you might have hoped for more from Kosky and the Bayerische Staatsoper.

The next live opera broadcast from the Bayerische Staatsoper is a new production of Verdi's UN BALLO IN MASCHERA on 19th March, conducted by Zubin Mehta and directed by Johannes Erath, with an outstanding cast that includes Piotr Beczala, Simon Keenlyside (fingers crossed) and Anja Harteros.


Links: StaatsoperTV