On 14 and 16 May the Royal Academy of Music presents a new production of Benjamin Britten’s The Burning Fiery Furnace, directed by Victoria Newlyn and conducted by Christopher White, starring musicians from the conservatoire and mounted in the Susie Sainsbury Theatre.
Across 63 minutes, The Burning Fiery Furnace tells the story of three Israelites condemned by Nebuchadnezzar to the flames for their refusal to worship a golden idol of the Babylonian king; they are saved by divine intervention.
The second of Britten’s three church parables, The Burning Fiery Furnace succeeded Curlew River in 1966, again turning to William Plomer as librettist, and premiering in Orford Church at the Aldeburgh Festival. The triptych represented important experiments in Britten’s musical dramaturgy that straddle the worlds of chamber opera, oratorio, religious ritual, and Britten’s encounter with Japanese Noh theatre. They would inspire in turn Jonathan Harvey’s 1981 church opera Passion and Resurrection.
It draws on modest instrumental forces: flute, horn, viola, double bass, alto trombone, harp, percussion, and organ, and continued the advances in Britten’s compositional technique instituted by Curlew River, using short, decorative figures in solo instruments that are freely repeated and superimposed to create dynamic, unsynchronised layers.
Though originally intended for performance in sacred spaces, The Burning Fiery Furnace has been successfully mounted in a variety of contexts. In 2023 Oper Frankfurt presented the piece in a double bill with The Prodigal Son in the Bockenheimer Depot, a former tram shed and workshop - an idiosyncratic performance space reflecting these works’ distinctive theatricality and approach to dramatic form. In 2024 Enigma Chamber Opera in Boston completed their project of staging all three parables at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, following Curlew River in 2021 and The Prodigal Son in 2023, directed by Kirsten Z. Cairns. In 2018 it was mounted by Scottish Opera at the Lammermuir Festival, directed by Jenny Ogilvie; in Britten’s centenary year Frederic Wake-Walker directed it for Mahagony Opera at the City of London Festival, staging it in Southwark Cathedral.