Fidelio – Beethoven – Royal Opera House
Image taken from the Royal Opera House website
Whilst the first of three versions of Fidelio was premiered in Vienna in 1805, it wasn’t until 1814 that the final version titled Fidelio – as opposed to Leonore for the previous two – was itself premiered to critical acclaim, with the original three Act version now reduced to two Acts. This was Beethoven’s only opera and he best described it in a letter to one of his Librettists, Georg Friedrich Treitschke, that his ‘Cooperation had saved what is best from the shipwreck’.
The action was written to take place in a Spanish state prison a few miles from Seville where the Governor Pizzaro had secretly imprisoned the Spanish nobleman Florestan. The Warden at the prison Rocco has a daughter Marzelline and an assistant Jaquino, who falls in love with her. Florestan’s faithful wife Leonore, disguised as a man, finds work in the prison and eventually working for Rocco enables her husband to be released despite Pizarro’s efforts to kill him.
The German Director Tobias Kratzer gives this unified work a production of unequal halves. He moves the work from Spain – Beethoven’s need to avoid the censors – to France at the time of the revolutionary forces and opens with lots of guillotined heads in a basket.
The Designer Rainer Sellmaier gives us an old fashioned French town set framed by a white strip light. Representing different scenes there are moveable parts to the stage, albeit that the vision of the stage is sometimes hidden from the side by the wall frame between different rooms.
Michael Bauer’s lighting is always satisfactory in the first half of the opera, but that’s as good as it gets! The second Act, which is described as ‘Florestan alone in his cell deep inside the dungeon feeling nothing but darkness and silence’ is now a centred slab of charcoal rock in a brightly lit stage surrounded by chorus members mainly dressed in suits and sitting on chairs. The Director explained that the chorus represents the silent majority who never seemed to speak up at critical times. This might have been the Director’s view, but the booing for the production at the curtain call spoke volumes for the audience’s reaction. It is a shame that this second Act, in moving to a contemporary staging, also had video of the chorus on a white walled backdrop, which included members of the chorus eating chocolate. Even if in the first Act one can accept the early de-masking of Leonore as Marzelline enters the room to watch her undress from a boy to a girl, the second half is wilder by extreme.
It was Marzelline who was empowered to save Florestan and Leonore from Pizzaro’s knife, by shooting him in the arm as she holds aloft the Les Miserables revolutionary bugle – none of that of course written by Beethoven! And this theme runs throughout the second Act with the Director introducing new written text by Buchner and Grillpaizer – was the written text really enhanced through a loud speaker! - as well as there being some unfortunate blocking in the final crowd scene ‘Wer ein holdes Weib errungen’ when the principals get lost in the crowd and couldn’t come to the front of stage.
As for the principals themselves, the headline voice of Jonas Kaufmann as Florestan – announced beforehand that he was ill – was on bright form in what after all is a fairly small singing part. He only appears in the second Act, but never sounded under the weather and even though he looked under the weather he was indeed meant to, having been starved in prison.
But the voice of the night was that of his wife Leonore, sung by the outstanding Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, whose huge first aria set the scene of a tremendous performance. She is the new vocal diva of the day, even if there was some lack of vocal flexibility in the score’s tight runs. Her quiet moments are quite beautiful and her top is awe-inspiring.
The Jaquino of the Irish tenor Robin Tritschler and the Marzelline of the American soprano Amanda Forsythe were both well sung, but with underpowered voices that were too often lost to the sound of the orchestra. The German base Georg Zeppenfeld was an artful Rocco sharing a voice of quality and Simon Neal as Don Pizarro was quite a tight voiced nasty baritone, particularly as he crushed and killed Marzelline’s canary in his hands. He tried and sometimes failed to meet his 50 or so high D’s, but otherwise portrayed the evil of Pizarro outstandingly. The Jette Parker and Samling Artist Filipe Manu had a tenor voice to savour as the First Prisoner. Timothy Dawkins as the Second Prisoner and Egils Silins as Don Fernando the Minister both sang well.
Musically this was an outstanding evening with Antonio Pappano opening with a wonderful rendition of the Overture and leading the tremendous orchestra and chorus to great heights.
So musically a high quality evening, but the Director would say that the production was an ‘intellectual challenge’ when in fact with this top quality cast it was probably a missed opportunity in presenting a controversial production this way.
