The Fiery Angel - Bayerische Staatsoper (2015-2016) - The Fiery Angel - Bayerische Staatsoper (2015-2016)

Description

New production

A couple and their hallucinatory journey to the dark side of passion. Renata is driven by a longing for the consummate sexual encounter. Since her youth she has had a vision of an ecstatic conjugation with a shining angel. Ruprecht falls for Renata and follows her unreservedly on her obsessive quest to fulfil this fantasy. The couple cross the boundaries of perception, leaving behind all traces of morality or reason, until their willingness to devote body and soul completely to one another threatens to pull their previous existence apart.

In 1907, the Russian Symbolist Valery Bryusov wrote a historic novel as a means to get an overdependent relationship out of his system: Against a backdrop of the transition from the medieval to the modern age, he recounts the knight Ruprecht's memories of his fateful encounter with Renata: plagued by hallucinations, driven by desire and denounced as a heretic - in a world caught between the fanaticism of the Inquisition and the spirit of humanism; occultism and empirical science; mystical ecstasy and demonized sexuality. Sergei Prokofiev stumbled across this novel in 1919. During his nomadic years spent wandering between America, France and the Bavarian region of Pfaffenwinkel, he composed his dark and enigmatic opera, which was not performed until after his death.

More information is available on the opera house's official website.