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Heaven, Hell or Somewhere in Between: Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel and the Search for Spiritual Truth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2021
Abstract
Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (Ognennyi angel) has remained comparatively little studied among his operatic works, interpreted primarily as a parody of Russian symbolist beliefs and practice. In the last few years, however, new biographical information has emerged about the period during which Prokofiev wrote The Fiery Angel that points to ways of reconsidering the opera's compositional history and legacy. Furthermore, recent scholarship on the application of narrative theory to opera studies presents new methods for examining how opera might incorporate a narrative point of view. Combining these lines of inquiry, this article scrutinises Prokofiev's two complete versions of Angel (1923 and 1927) in the context of the composer's conversion to Christian Science during the intervening period. It argues that the 1927 version privileges its central character's point of view, as he experiences a process of spiritual awakening similar to the composer's own.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
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Margaret Frainier, University of Oxford; margaret.frainier@merton.ox.ac.uk
References
1 This tendency is changing in recent years and scholars are beginning to explore Prokofiev's operatic works in closer detail. See Guillaumier, Christina, The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev (London, 2020)Google Scholar; and Seinen, Nathan, Prokofiev's Soviet Operas (Cambridge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Taruskin, Richard, ‘To Cross that Sacred Edge: Notes on a Fiery Angel’, On Russian Music (Berkeley, 2008), 223–32, at 231Google Scholar. David Freeman's 1991 production of the work caused Taruskin to moderate this position, according to a postscript to the article.
3 Morrison, Simon, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, 2nd edn (Princeton, 2019), 207Google Scholar.
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7 Paperno elaborates: ‘Art was proclaimed to be a force capable of, and destined for, “the creation of life”, while “life” was viewed as an object of artistic creation or as a creative act. In this sense, art turned into “real life” and “life” turned into art.’ Paperno, ‘Introduction’, 1.
8 Maslenikov, ‘Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov’, 113.
9 Maslenikov, ‘Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov’, 112. See also the correspondence between the two, published as Valeriy Briusov and Nina Petrovskaia. Perepiska: 1904–1913, ed. N.A. Bogomolov (Saint Petersburg, 2004).
10 Grossman, Joan Delaney, ‘Valery Bryusov and Nina Petrovskaya: Clashing Models of Life in Art’, in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994), 150Google Scholar.
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12 Elsworth, John, ‘Prokofiev and Briusov: The Libretto for The Fiery Angel’, Slavonica 10/1 (April 2004), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While Demchinsky played a crucial role in the early drafts of the libretto for the first version of the opera, his tardiness in sending material caused Prokofiev to lose patience and complete the text himself.
13 Prokofiev wrote to his friend, composer Nikolai Myaskovsky, in January 1924 that ‘there is little of the divine in The Fiery Angel, but an orgiastic darkness’. S. S. Prokof'ev i N. Ya. Myaskovskiy. Perepiska, ed. D.B. Kabalevskii (Moscow, 1977), 183.
14 Natalia Savkina was the first to publish about Prokofiev's conversion to Christian Science and its possible impact on his musical output. See Natalia Savkina, ‘The Significance of Christian Science in Prokofiev's Life and Work’, Three Oranges: The Journal of the Serge Prokofiev Foundation 10 (November 2005). www.sprkfv.net/journal/three10/summary10.html.
15 The diary entry for 20 August 1927 reads: ‘Hah! The burden of orchestrating The Fiery Angel is finally lifted – a nightmare that has been hanging over me for two years.’ Sergei Prokofiev Diaries, trans. and ann. Anthony Phillips, 3 vols. (London, 2008), III: 621.
16 Mary Baker Eddy, ‘No and Yes’, Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16624.
17 Botstein, Leon, ‘Beyond Death and Evil: Prokofiev's Spirituality and Christian Science’, in Sergei Prokofiev and His World, ed. Morrison, Simon (Princeton, 2008), 530–61, at 540Google Scholar.
18 Botstein, ‘Beyond Death and Evil’, 552.
19 Studies of the opera libretto as a literary entity in its own right include the chapters in Arthur Groos and Roger Parker's Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), which re-examine the role of the text in the creation of opera, and the libretto's mediation of the genres of text and music. However, my analysis posits that narrative viewpoints can be expressed in operatic music as well as in its written texts.
20 Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar. Abbate focuses her discussion of Wagner's operas on the role of the leitmotif as a kind of reminiscence or memory in operatic narration, and its additional function as a device to re-emphasise plot elements.
21 See Halliwell, Michael, Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James (Leiden, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cone, Edward T., The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, 1976)Google Scholar.
22 The operas of the Ring cycle seem particularly open to this kind of analysis: the orchestra ‘knows’ much more than any character and acts independently as a narrative entity, much as the classical Greek chorus functions independently from the onstage drama. See Foster, Daniel H., Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ewans, Michael, Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia (London, 1982)Google Scholar; and Magee, Bryan, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.
23 Nina Penner is the first to apply these theories to opera studies and was an invaluable resource in writing this article. I am extremely grateful to her for sharing with me proofs of her (then) forthcoming monograph Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theatre (Bloomington, 2020).
24 Currie, Gregory, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 In his work Narrative Discourse, Genette recommends the question ‘Who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective?’ may be paraphrased as ‘Who sees?’, limiting the role of point of view to visual phenomena only. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1980), 186.
26 Currie, Narratives, 89.
27 Currie, Narratives, 89.
28 Currie, Narratives, 130.
29 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 131.
30 Penner, Storytelling, 117.
31 Penner, Storytelling, 111. Genette was the first scholar to observe the tendency for literary scholars to conflate the two questions; Narrative Discourse, 186.
32 Penner, Storytelling, 99.
33 For a more detailed comparison of these differences, see chapter VI in Natalia Savkina, Ognennyi angel S.S. Prokof'eva: k istorii sozdan'ya (Moscow, 2015). See also Ondrej Gima, ‘The Genesis of Serge Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel, with a Reconstruction and Orchestration of the Original Version (1923)’ (PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2019).
34 Prokofiev, Sergei, The Fiery Angel, Opera in Five Acts and Seven Scenes (London, 1994), 343Google Scholar.
35 See Morrison, Russian Opera, 241–9, for a discussion of Prokofiev's sketches for the third version.
36 Morrison points out that a new melody Prokofiev sketched for the Act III duel between Ruprecht and Heinrich was recycled as ‘The Dance of the Knights’ in Romeo and Juliet (Morrison, Russian Opera, 248).
37 Morrison, Russian Opera, 249.
38 Morrison, Russian Opera, 249. For an allegorical reading of the Third Symphony as a struggle between the forces of heaven and hell, see Zeyfas, Natal'ya, ‘Simfoniya “Ognennogo angela”’, Sovetskaya muzyka 4 (1991), 35–41Google Scholar.
39 McAllister, Rita, ‘Natural and Supernatural in “The Fiery Angel”’, Musical Times 11/1530 (1970), 787Google Scholar.
40 Morrison, Russian Opera, 220–21.
41 See Penner, Storytelling, chapter 4.
42 The relationship between Renata's and Ruprecht's motifs can be closely compared with the relationship between Boris's and Dmitrii's motifs in the first version of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov: Boris's motif changes and develops throughout the opera while Dmitrii's stays consistent.
43 See McAllister, Rita, ‘Prokofiev's Early Opera “Maddalena”’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 96 (1969–70), 138–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Morrison, Russian Opera, 221–7.
44 See Penner, Storytelling, 99–100.
45 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, 15.
46 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, 86.
47 Morrison, Russian Opera, 217.
48 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 143
49 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 160–1.
50 At fig. 164, the Labourer sings, ‘The witch fooled them nicely’.
51 See Abbate, Unsung Voices, 119; and Currie, Narratives and Narrators, 59.
52 Though writing about art song, Edward Cone has famously theorised that sounds in the protagonist's environment can represent how the protagonist perceives those sounds. See Cone, The Composer's Voice, 35–6.
53 Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich, ‘Ognenni angel’, in Izbrannaya proza, ed. Kolosova, N.P. and Galakhova, N.A. (Moscow, 1986), 27Google Scholar.
54 Prokofiev had personal experience of this. In his diary entry of 30 November 1921, Prokofiev describes a séance performed by the soprano Nina Koshetz where he is ‘quite ready to accept that the table was moving independently’ despite his professed scepticism. No doubt some of this was due to Prokofiev's persistent romantic interest in the singer, but Prokofiev ‘went home deeply stirred’ by his experience (Diaries, II: 635–7). Igor Vishnevetsky claims in his biography of Prokofiev that Koshetz served as the composer's muse and model for the role of Renata, and perhaps meant for her to sing the role. See Vishnevetsky, Igor, Sergei Prokof'ev (Moscow, 2009), particularly chapter 4Google Scholar.
55 Figs. 205–6, Sergei Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel (first version), box 139/SPA_190, Sergei Prokofiev Archive, Butler Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University.
56 Morrison, Russian Opera, 220.
57 This character inadvertently unites the planes of historical and operatic reality: the historical Agrippa was a fifteenth-century German occultist who avoided persecution by the religious authorities. See van den Pol, Marc, Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and his Declamations (Boston, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Prokofiev's Agrippa is highly fictionalised, however, and in the first version is presented as genuinely in touch with supernatural forces.
58 Letter from Prokofiev to Boris Demchinsky, 18 June 1926. Quoted in David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West, 1891–1935 (New Haven, 2003), 227.
59 SPA_190, 34.
60 SPA_190, 40.
61 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, figs. 286–301.
62 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 338.
63 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 358.
64 McAllister, ‘Natural and Supernatural’, 788.
65 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, figs. 423–5.
66 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, figs. 428–9.
67 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 423.
68 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 423.
69 Morrison, Russian Opera, 213.
70 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 476. Early in the novel, Bryusov compares Ruprecht's room in Cologne to the shape of a viol case – Prokofiev extends the metaphor to Ruprecht himself.
71 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 506.
72 The three ostinati are as follows: repeated pitches c2–a1 (Pattern A), c2–b1–a1–f1–e♭1 (Pattern B), and a series of four phrases – ascending scale a1–e1, descending glissando e1–a1, running quavers f1–g1–f1–e1, and repeated pitches e1 (Pattern C).
73 The three sections are as follows: upper two voices repeat notes e2–f♯2–g2–e♭2, the lower two voices repeat same notes down a tritone, and the middle two voices fill in minor seventh chords on A and E♭.
74 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 582.
75 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, fig. 608.
76 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, figs. 571–4.
77 Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel, up to fig. 1.
78 Morrison, Russian Opera, 233.
79 SPA_190.
80 Maslenikov, ‘Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov’, 126.
81 Bryusov, Proza, 294.
82 Diaries, III: 361–2.