About the work
The Fiery Angel is an opera in five acts by Sergei Prokofiev after Valery Bryusov's 1908 novel of the same name, for which the composer wrote the Russian libretto himself. Prokofiev kept working on the score from 1919 until completing it in 1927; its concert premiere did not take place until 25 November 1954 in Paris, after the composer's death, followed by the first staged performance, sung in Italian, on 14 September 1955 at La Fenice in Venice.
Plot
The knight Ruprecht meets Renata, tormented by visions and demons, who believes she has recognised in Count Heinrich the human form of an angel that has haunted her since childhood. After he rejects her, she turns to magic and a pact with dark powers in her search for him, while Ruprecht's own love for her goes unanswered. In the end Renata is accused of demonic possession in a convent and handed over to the Inquisition.
Cultural significance
During Prokofiev's lifetime the opera remained unperformed because of its demanding forces and occult, expressionist subject matter, and it was largely forgotten after his return to the Soviet Union. Since its premieres in the 1950s, and especially following Mariinsky Theatre productions after 1990, it has come to be regarded as one of Prokofiev's musically most intense and dramatically densest operas.