Los Angeles Festival : AN L.A. LANDING FOR PROKOFIEV’S ‘ANGEL’

Bearing enough black magic, violence and sex for several sequels to “The Devils,” “The Fiery Angel” flies into town this week.

Its arrival may come as a shock to those who know Sergei Prokofiev as the precocious, ironic “bad boy of Russian music.” For, in this brooding, demonic and oddly neglected opera, the sunny, sardonic creator of such tuneful crowd-pleasers as the “Lt. Kije” Suite, the “Classical” Symphony and “Cinderella” displays his dark side.

It’s a Freudian dream come true.

The new Los Angeles Music Center Opera production is also a historic occasion: a West Coast premiere. In fact, this appears to be only the third United States staging of Prokofiev’s ill-fated masterpiece manque , which received its American premiere at New York City Opera in 1965, and was mounted in Chicago the following year.

Assembled in collaboration with English National Opera and the Geneva Opera and staged by Andrei Serban, the Music Center production, part of the Los Angeles Festival, opens a four-performance run on Wednesday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It will be sung in an English translation by Edward Downes.

Amid the theological turbulence of 16th-Century Germany, “The Fiery Angel” spins a tale of religious hysteria and libidinous excess so lurid as to make “Tosca” seem like “Little Bo Peep.”

There’s a bit of everything: exorcism, mysticism, magic tricks and more sinister varieties of occultism, a sadomasochistic menage a trois, a psychotic heroine who careens between nymphomania and divine abstinence, a brutal Inquisition. There are cameo appearances by the occult philosopher Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Faust and Mephistopheles.

“Peter and the Wolf” it’s not.

Serban, who has also staged Prokofiev’s “Love for Three Oranges” in Geneva, is taken with “The Fiery Angel.” He calls it “a very mysterious and amazing piece” and “my favorite among all operas.”

Even Serban admits, however, that the libretto, in five acts and seven vivid scenes, is often “confusing for an audience. It has the logic of a collage: It’s not something that goes from point A to B to C.

“And the opera is very ambiguous--although intentionally. We’re not always sure if we should take it as a parody of religion, or as serious commentary.”

If the dramatic success of “The Fiery Angel” is a matter of debate, its musical significance is not. The opera contains some of the most complex material Prokofiev (1891-1953) ever wrote, either for symphonic orchestra or for the operatic stage.

And that is saying something for a man who despite repeated failures insisted upon thinking of himself as an operatic composer, completing seven operas (including “The Gambler,” “Love for Three Oranges” and “War and Peace”) over a 40-year period.

Of particular interest is the fierce and athletic role of the troubled heroine Renata. The dramatic soprano part will be sung here by Marilyn Zschau.

According to Serban, Renata is a fascinating character precisely because she is ambiguous.

“One is never sure if she is an agent of the devil or of God,” the director says. “She is searching for God in a world in which all logic is broken--the world of Mephistopheles. And she was living in a state of total chaos, like we are today.”

Serban’s contagious enthusiasm leads, of course, to an awkward but inevitable question. Why has the “The Fiery Angel” been produced so rarely?

“Actually,” Serban replied without hesitation, “I think the opera’s difficult history is a perfect reflection of its content. It’s haunted.”

Although Prokofiev loved to brag how quickly he could toss off new opus numbers, it took him an extraordinarily long time--eight years, from 1919 to 1927--to finish this one. And after all that, Bruno Walter reneged on his pledge to produce in Berlin.

Nor was Prokofiev able in his own lifetime to persuade any other American, European or Soviet opera house to mount his magnum opus. Partly out of frustration, he decided to recycle and reassemble large chunks of the music from the opera in his raucous Third Symphony, completed in 1928. That the music from “The Fiery Angel” is still best known in this form testifies to the opera’s symphonic conception and substance.

Several incomplete concert versions were given in Europe during Prokofiev’s lifetime. The first, conducted in 1928 in Paris by his longtime friend and colleague, Serge Koussevitsky, earned no better than a tepid critical response. (The reigning Stravinsky-Diaghilev clique was then dismissing opera as passe.) The Metropolitan Opera briefly expressed interest, but eventually rejected “The Fiery Angel” as beyond its resources.

When the stage premiere finally came in Venice in 1955, Prokofiev had been dead for two years.

Owing to ideological and bureaucratic obstacles, the opera has fared no better in the composer’s homeland. Even though Prokofiev received his entire musical education in Russia, even though he returned from the West to spend the last 17 years of his life there, and even though “The Fiery Angel” is based on a novel by an important Russian writer, the Soviet (and Russian-language) premiere took place only in 1983 in the provincial city of Perm--more than 60 years after the opera was begun.

Changing taste and the vagaries of Soviet cultural politics do go a long way in explaining why “The Fiery Angel” has traveled such a rocky road to acceptance. But there was one other thorny problem: the literary source and libretto.

The source that now captured his fancy was a somewhat unlikely one: “The Fiery Angel,” a lengthy picaresque novel by the Russian symbolist poet, translator and prose writer Valery Bryusov (1873-1924). The Russian title, “Ognennyi angel,” has been translated variously as “The Fiery Angel,” “The Flaming Angel” and “The Angel of Fire.”

At the center of the action stands Renata--beautiful, seductive, but tormented by “demons.” Ruprecht, a virtuous knight embodying sanity and chivalry, and Madiel, the “fiery angel,” wage a fierce battle over her desirable body and twisted soul.

To Serban, Ruprecht, the witness to the action, is the opera’s Everyman--and the audience’s representative on stage.

On a higher level, the struggle in Renata’s soul symbolizes the conflict between reason and obscurantism characteristic of the Counter-Reformation, and the eternal human desire to make sense of a perplexing universe.

Whether the fiery angel (Madiel) is real, or only a figment of Renata’s vivid and psychotic imagination, is never made clear. At first, Renata believes Madiel to be incarnated on earth as another man with whom she has been in love, Count Heinrich, who receives a small non-singing role in the opera.

If Prokofiev’s pessimistic mood in 1919 is one reason why he was drawn to Bryusov’s novel, its abundance of dramatically potent demonic scenes is certainly another. He had lavished attention on similar scenes (though with ironic and comic intent) in “Oranges” and the “Scythian” Suite. As a teen-ager, he had first made his reputation with an impish piano piece called “Diabolic Suggestion.”

Prokofiev himself adapted Bryusov’s novel for the stage. Unfortunately, reducing a long and complicated novel set during the Spanish Inquisition, stuffed with philosophical and religious argumentation, was a formidable task beyond his not-inconsequential literary abilities. Revised countless times, the libretto was doomed--like Prokofiev’s later “War and Peace”--to remain something of a hodgepodge.

In working on the opera for the Los Angeles production, Serban has come to believe that Prokofiev intended the fragmentary quality of the scenario to reflect the anarchy in Renata’s soul, and the chaos of the world in which she lived.

Musically speaking, “The Fiery Angel” is (with “The Gambler” close behind) the most ambitious and adventurous of the composer’s seven operas.

In his preceding operas, Prokofiev had emphasized the text above all other considerations. “The Gambler” and “Oranges” were declamatory in the extreme, with the instrumental accompaniment assuming a decidedly inferior role. In “The Fiery Angel,” on the other hand, the real drama takes place in the orchestra pit.

The expressionistic, frequently dissonant orchestration was of such density and complexity, and written for such a huge ensemble--each string group frequently divides into three parts--that Prokofiev had to struggle to copy out two measures a day.

The pages of the score illustrating the demons’ assault upon Renata (in Act II, Scene 1) and then upon an entire convent of hysterical nuns (Act V) are a maze of shimmering, shuddering sonic and rhythmic effects, a souped-up version of “A Night on Bald Mountain.” Leitmotifs associated with the main characters are used extensively and skillfully.

Echoes of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and (strangely enough) Debussy resound, but the result is unique.

Prokofiev was down and out in New York when he started work on his third full-length opera in late 1919. Twenty-eight years old, already famous as a pianist and the creator of the “Scythian” Suite, he had left the Soviet Union only a year before, in the confusing aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

Making it as a composer and pianist in America had proven to be more difficult than he had anticipated. Conservative American audiences and promoters preferred Prokofiev the performer of Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Rachmaninoff to Prokofiev the noisy avant-grade composer. The planned Chicago premiere of the light and comic “Love for Three Oranges”’ had just fallen through.

“Perhaps I was being stubborn, unconsciously,” he wrote 20 years later in his memoir. “One opera didn’t work out, so I’ll write another.”