In his opera The Angel of Fire, Serguei Prokofiev was inspired by Valery Bryusov’s novel published in 1907. In it, the young student Rupprecht tells of his meeting with a mysterious girl, Renata, and how the Devil appeared to him in disguise as an angel of light, seduced her and lost her, how he and she engaged in sacrilegious magical practices, how he witnessed the Sabbath, a collective possession of nuns, and the ensuing Inquisition trial, and how he met the illustrious Faust and Mephistopheles…

A violent and fatal love story, worthy of Elizabethan theater, a passionate and spiritual adventure, which Serge Prokofiev makes into an opera full of lyrical force and nightmarish din.

Calixto Bieito’s staging transposes the story to the present day, to the ordinary life of a young innocent woman who is nevertheless going to live in the burning of fantasy and violence. By this actualization, the irrational part of the story of the novel fades, to make this adventure even more urgent, corrosive, destructive, that of a modern journey, interior and devastating.