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Until the fall of 1994, Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel had always seemed to me the epitome of operatic kitsch, a pretentious yawn popular with those easily titillated by a "modernism" consisting of screaming meemies onstage and blaring ostinatos in the pit. I still feel that way about Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. But the joint Kirov Theater-Covent Garden production, brilliantly directed by David Freeman, which played in San Francisco lost season, was a stunning coup de theatre of a kind that the composer never foresaw.
Prokofiev was uninterested in the "theology" of the Valery Bryusov novel on which he based his opera, as he wrote to his friend, the composer Nikolai Miaskovsky. What interested him were the "orgies." In Freeman's production the orgies were certainly in place, but the theology was back, thanks to the St. Petersburg Maryinsky Theater Acrobatic Troupe, which with extravagant physical aplomb incarnated the "spirits" that haunt Renata, the ostensible hysteric whose ravings dominate the opera. Because Freeman, unlike Prokofiev, had understood the nature of Bryusov's Symbolism and seen its dramatic potential, the spirits were real to the audience. All at once we were on Renata's side of what Bryusov called "the sacred edge." She was no hysteric but a true clairvoyant (and so were we). The other characters, in their efforts to restrain her, were not rational beings but defectives--as we ourselves are defective, we began to think, in our "normal" lives. What the Russians call inoy svet ("the other world")--and what Charles Boudelaire and the other French pioneers of Symbolism called the au dela ("the world beyond")--had been made palpable. We left the theater as skeptical as Bryusov himself of the reality of the phenomenal world, the world of appearances that we normally inhabit without a qualm.
How fitting that (for all that the actual director had been Australian) it was St. Petersburg's Kirov Theater--once again (except on tour) the Maryinsky--that brought us a true Symbolist Fiery Angel. St. Petersburg was the very city of Symbolism. (The greatest of all Symbolist novels, by Andrei Bely, is even titled St. Petersburg.) Ever since Alexander Pushkin hymned its weirdness in his precociously surrealistic poem The Bronze Horseman, the Russian Imperial capital--Peter the Great's willfully erected Venice of the North, with its white nights...