The Fiery Angel is a lurid tale of sexual frustration, sorcery and possession, culminating in an exorcism in a convent. Strictly adult entertainment, then, at least compared to the antics of its immediate predecessor, The Love for Three Oranges. Black magic and grotesquerie are of course as old as the tradition of Russian opera itself, but this story is a far cry from Ruslan and Ludmilla or Christmas Eve, and Prokofiev's musical setting is just as far removed from Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov. Indeed, despite some obvious nods to Stravinsky (such as the motif for Renata's obsession with her Fiery Angel being a speeded-up version of the opening of The Firebird) the genetic line would seem to be more that of Strauss's Salome and Elektra than anything Russian. Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle provides another useful point of reference for the newcomer.
Unlike Strauss or Bartok, however, Prokofiev's attitude to his subject-matter is not always clear. In a masterly introductory essay Richard Taruskin elucidates the real-life background to the story in the love-triangle between femme fatale Nina Petrovskaya, poet Andrei Bely and Russian Symbolist-par excellence Valeri Bryusov. It was Bryusov who in 1907-08 fashioned the novel from which Prokofiev made his libretto some 12 years later. But Taruskin also points out that Prokofiev had no knowledge of the background to the story and simply responded to the power of its narration. What is remarkable, and unsettling, is that Prokofiev introduces so many touches of apparently cynical humour, in particular undercutting the black magic elements which are crucial to the experience of the central characters. Thus a servant mocks the pretensions of the fortune-teller, the part of Jacob Glock is so written as to suggest that he has stage-managed the knocking spirits which Renata takes as heralds of her beloved, three skeletons rattle their bones as Agrippa of Nettesheim undergoes the sixteenth-century equivalent of a chat-show interview with Ruprecht, and Mephistofeles shows his impatience with the service at an inn by gobbling up the serving-boy and then having him rematerialize in a dustbin. On the other hand, by far the greater part of the opera seems designed to elicit fascination and eventually pity for Renata, whose obsession with her angelic apparition draws the gullible knight Ruprecht into her life; and if Prokofiev did not want his main protagonist to be taken seriously, he composed an awful lot of very serious-sounding notes in the process.
Such occasional ambivalence is probably less disturbing on record than it must be in the theatre (it may be recalled that The Fiery Angel had to wait until 1955 for its first stage production and has apparently still not been seen in Moscow or Leningrad). At any rate for much of the time the sheer inventive power of the score sweeps all before it. And what a complex score it is—with a far higher norm of dissonance than we usually associate with Prokofiev, and a range of orchestral colour that similarly aligns it with German Expressionism. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra cope splendidly with its excessive demands. And yet perhaps there is something in the much-vaunted acoustic of their famous concert-hall which is not ideally suited to it—a mellowness which takes something away from the incisive edge of the sound, and a sense that there is not quite enough space to avoid sonic congestion.
The very opening, instead of seizing the attention as it should, sounds plump and cushioned. And if this is a legitimate character delineation for Ruprecht, the lack of intensity at his first perception of Renata (track 1, from 1'30'') is more damaging. There is a pervasive sense of having to get an unfamiliar score right, to the detriment of dramatic immediacy. Those passages familiar from their incorporation into Prokofiev's Third Symphony still make their mark, but anyone expecting, for instance, the seance scene in Act 2 (track 10) to deliver an equal frisson to the symphony's scherzo is in for a severe disappointment.
The part of Renata is a hugely demanding one, and Nadine Secunde rises well to the challenge. But there is still a lot more variety of tone and inflexion to be found in her long monologues, as a brief comparison with Jane Rhodes on Charles Bruck's old French Decca recording (nla) soon reveals. Similarly Siegfried Lorenz's Ruprecht excites admiration but rarely more than that. Indeed few of the new DG cast match up to their counterparts on the older set—not so much because of vocal shortcomings, but because there is less feel of the whole performance being carried along by the feeling of something greater than the sum of its parts. Jarvi and the Gothenburgers frequently give the singers too little intensity to react to, so that attempts at melodrama tend to ring false. Of course the singers themselves are not native Russians. They have all been carefully coached and they do far better than the average Western attempt at Russian opera, but there are moments when an element of inhibition is apparent. What is missing becomes strikingly apparent with the entrance of Kurt Moll as the Inquisitor in the final act. By his vocal presence alone he immediately communicates the sense of blood-curdling relish which should have been steadily accumulating through the opera.
It should be said that Prokofiev's carefully planned overall dramatic crescendo still makes its mark. Jarvi does a good job in keeping the whole thing together, even if under his direction there is less variety of pacing and sense of theatre than Charles Bruck achieved. This is an important issue in that it restores a significant twentieth-century opera to the catalogues, for the first time in the original language. Much of it makes splendid listening: all the same, as I have indicated, it is not a wholly convincing experience.
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