Music: Brilliant Angel

When he was conducting his Third Symphony in Rome in 1934, Composer Sergei Prokofiev made a rare admission to a visiting musicologist. “This,” said he, “is my best work, but only because The Flaming Angel is my greatest.” Prokofiev had, in fact, lifted the Third Symphony almost entirely from The Flaming Angel —probably because he despaired of ever seeing his monumentally difficult opera produced. He never did: Flaming Angel had its first stage performance in Venice (TIME, Sept. 26, 1955) 2½ years after the composer’s death. At Italy’s Spoleto festival, which closed last week, Angel appeared again—in a performance that justified Prokofiev’s grandest expectations.

Based on a novel by Russian Symbolist Poet Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), the opera unfolds the story of a demon-haunted doxy named Renata, who grows up in 16th century Germany in the company of an angel, but loses her impulse to sainthood when she decides that she wants to be his mate. The angel disappears in an angry burst of flame, and Renata keeps looking for him until she at last runs afoul of the Inquisition and is sentenced to death at the stake. Part of the fascination of this murky Gothic tale is that most of it exists in Renata’s own mind, and much of the opera remains perilously poised between tragedy and low farce.

Prokofiev’s music, written in the early ‘205, is taut, economical and superbly dramatic, consisting of almost continuous recitative, punctuated with an occasional soaring aria. The opera reaches its vocal and dramatic climax in the Inquisition scene, in which Renata. a group of nuns and the Inquisitor weave eleven different vocal lines into a complicated polyphony, terminated by a staggering explosion of brass and cymbals.

Star of the Spoleto performance was brilliant Turkish Soprano Leyla Gencer, who in the role of Renata demonstrated one reason why Flaming Angel (now available in a Westminster recording) is so rarely produced: the heroine, onstage and singing almost constantly, is required to deliver some of her most memorable lines while crawling on the floor or hopping in hysterical convulsions. Said Director Frank Corsaro plaintively about the work: “I want to move it to New York, but nobody wants it.”