Prokofieff’s “The Fiery Angel”: First Recording of a Russian Opera … in French

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I listened to Prokofieff’s opera The Fiery Angel in its initial recording, a French-language performance from 1957 apparently recorded for Paris Radio and featuring members of the original cast from the 1954 world premiere. Prokofieff wrote the piece (based on a Russian writer’s novel but set in medieval Germany) in the 1920’s but never got it performed in his lifetime, though the score was published. Later he based his Third Symphony on music he’d composed for the opera just to get it heard somewhere, in some form. The plot is the story of a young woman, Renata, who’s convinced that she’s in love with an angel, who turns her down but promises he will return some day in human form. A lecherous Count convinces her that he is her angel, and he gets her to have sex with him, but then he abandons her. Another man, the knight Ruprecht, falls in love with her but all she wants from him is to help her find her “angel” and get him back. They find the count, but he rejects her (again!), and at the end Renata literally calls on all the devils in Hell to avenge her as she is burned at the stake by the Inquisition.

I saw this recording turn up on amazon.com in my search for Irma Kolassi’s performances, since she’s in it – though only in a minor role as a fortune-teller;she also doubles as the Mother Superior of the convent Renata briefly considers joining and in that scene her voice is easily recognizable. (The main magical character, Agrippa von Nettelsheim, is a male sorcerer.) Prokofieff wrote the opera in both Russian and French, as he’d done with his previous opera The Love for Three Oranges (based on a fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi, whose works also provided the bases for Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen (“The Fairies”), and Puccini’s last, Turandot), but while he was able to get The Love for Three Oranges (composed in 1921) on the stage of the Chicago Opera in 1927 at a time when soprano Mary Garden was the company’s director and she was always looking for new works that pushed the envelope of what American audiences considered “opera” and she preferred works in French to those in Italian, The Fiery Angel wasn’t produced either in the West or in Russia (Prokofieff had fled Russia after the Revolution but returned in 1932 and lived the remaining 21 years of his life there, and his biographer Harlow Robinson argued that what you think of Prokofieff depends largely on which of those decisions you think was his biggest mistake: leaving Russia or coming back) until 1954, over three decades after Prokofieff had completed the short score in 1923 (he did the orchestration in 1926 after Bruno Walter promised him a performance in Berlin, which fell through – one wonders what language that would have been sung in, since in the 1920’s the common practice in Germany was to perform everything in German, regardless of the language it had been written in) and a year after Prokofieff died. (When he died in 1953 – by a macabre coincidence, on exactly the same day Stalin died – about half his extant music had never been heard publicly, and his widow, Mira Mendelsohn-Prokofieva, was able to take advantage of the Khrushchev “thaw” to get his unperformed scores before the public at last. Robinson’s biography ended abruptly with Prokofieff’s death and I would have liked either a final chapter or an epilogue detailing her struggles with the Soviet authorities to get her late husband’s music performed.)

Hearing it on record with only a vague idea of how the music relates to the plot, it reminds me more than anything else of Schönberg’s Erwartung (also about the anguish of a woman who was seduced and then abandoned, though over the half-hour length of the piece she realizes that the dead body at her feet she’s stumbled on in the forest is indeed he). The opera doesn’t sound particularly Russian (though maybe it would in a Russian-language recording) and what’s most notable about it is its sheer energy: it’s the sort of piece that starts at 11 and pretty much stays there. It’s also rather oddly marked as being in five acts even though the total duration is a little over two hours and the piece fits easily on two CD’s (Acts I and II on disc one and the other three on disc two). There’s also an interpolated scene from Goethe’s Faust which Prokofieff (his own librettist) inserted to lighten things up, and like Busoni, Prokofieff made Faust a low-voiced singer (he’s a baritone in Busoni’s Faust and a bass here) and Mephistopheles a tenor. (The male lead, Ruprecht, is a baritone and the male sorcerer who refuses to help them because he’s afraid of the Inquisition – no wonder the Soviet authorities didn’t want to produce this at the height of the Gulag, their secular equivalent – is a tenor.) Incidentally Prokofieff’s name is usually spelled “Prokofiev” in the Roman alphabet these days, but the American Record Guide calls him “Prokofieff” because that was the spelling he used himself during the 15 years (1917 to 1932) he lived in countries that use the Roman alphabet, and so it seems to make sense to spell it that way. I’ll never forget the bizarre day in 1979 when I entered the library at San Francisco State University and noticed that, because someone claiming authority over the matter had decided that the correct transliteration of Tchaikovsky’s name was “Chaikovskii," the staff had actually crossed out tne name “Tchaikovsky” from the covers all their records of his music and written in “Chaikovskii.” In its own way that’s as hideous an example of politically correct language as the terms “Latinx” and “LGBTQ,” terms which (to paraphrase S. J. Perelman) should be taken out and burned at the earliest opportunity.