Reception
The Fiery Angel was met with mixed reviews for different reasons. Largely, The Fiery Angel was, despite lack of productions, reviewed as Prokofiev’s “… strongest and most dramatically intense scores.” In a review of the Bolshoi performance of The Fiery Angel, it is said that Prokofiev’s “…score is crazy, but shouldn’t sound chaotic.” Prokofiev may have only been interested in the overarching story rather than the smaller details. It was also criticized that maybe the language would have been better in French rather than Russian. Some even called the opera a “16th-century Carmen with supernatural trimmings” amongst other mixed reviews. Another criticism is that The Fiery Angel is nothing but confusion and noise with the “modern” title. Using staging should not be there to make up for the music, but to mix with it and make a grand production. Prokofiev was able to write the music how he saw fit, which appealed to many more than the staging has, according to different reviews.
In all, it can be assumed that Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel has had a lot of insight and thought from the composer. He used a novel that interested him very much that was written by a very important author that helped start the Russian symbolist movement. It was a work that reached the brink of public acceptance and came out as a work of great praise, most staging aside.
Read more about this topic: The Fiery Angel (opera)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)