Fidelio was the first opera performed after the Second World War in Berlin and Vienna respectively. It was chosen to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the first opera Toscanini broadcast with the NBC Symphony. The Met has been producing it since their second season, in 1884. But no one thinks of it as a great opera.
Fidelio‘s storyline would have been tailor-made for Mozart: A Spanish nobleman is unjustly imprisoned; his wife dresses up as a man to get a job in the prison so she can rescue him, and her disguise is so convincing that the warden’s daughter falls in love with her. There is comic misunderstanding, sexual tension, political intrigue, a truly improbable plot—all things that Beethoven couldn’t have cared less about. Mozart might have written Fidelio as a Marriage of Figaro-style opera buffa. With Beethoven, the music towers so far over the story that this is not an opera in the conventional sense.
Beethoven worked hard on Fidelio. He produced three complete versions with four complete overtures over nine years. Its best-known musical legacy is the third rejected overture, “Leonore 3,” a fully developed symphony movement. Beethoven worried it would overshadow the opera, and replaced it with a shorter and lighter overture. The final version debuted in Vienna, in 1814, and he wrote his librettist “this opera will win me a martyr’s crown.” Beethoven was a happier martyr than a composer of operas, which may explain why the imprisoned martyr-figure in Fidelio, Florestan, is the strongest and best-written character. Florestan’s appearance at the beginning of the second act sets up one of the few periods of sustained and well-crafted dramatic tension. Tenor Klaus Florian Vogt made an unusually plaintive entrance on the startling high G of his first aria, and gave a rich and feeling performance.
But his character doesn’t appear at all in the first act. A balancing oddity is the warden’s daughter, who is first on stage and is nicely set up to be a central love interest and object of audience fascination. She disappears completely in the second act, as though Beethoven got tired of thinking about her. She returns only at the very end, to squirm uncomfortably in the arms of the warden’s assistant while the chorus around her joyfully shouts out the finale. Under the circumstances, Mozart would have looked for a plausible way to maintain that the warden’s daughter was really the nobleman in disguise all along.
But the Met’s staging—a revival of Jürgen Flimm’s 2000 production—makes the most of the limited drama. The vaguely Spanish Civil War-era sets and costume constitute one of the few contemporary opera settings that actually works well. The prison yard in the first act is slightly too austere and its triple-tiered jail cells leave the upper prisoners awkwardly stranded at times. But the second act dungeon set—a deep basement with high concrete walls and piles of old shoes and luggage in the corners—is perfect. It is also a challenge for the singers, who must climb down a ladder from the prison door 25-feet above the stage. This is an awfully dare-devilish moment for the Met, and we breathe a sigh of relief when Fidelio sets foot on solid ground.
The music is frequently extraordinary, and conductor Sebastian Weigle proved himself at the outset with a superbly up-tempo rendition of the overture, occasionally sloppy but with great enthusiasm.
The high point was undoubtedly the canon quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” (“I feel so wonderful”), in lilting six-eight time. It is one of the most beautiful moments in any opera. First the warden’s daughter, then Fidelio, next the warden, and finally the warden’s assistant all sing from the same line of music, each entrance set apart by eight bars. Each character sings with a different mood: joy, panic, contentment, sorrow. The resulting canon weaves a fabric with Mozartian grace but incomparable depth.
Distinguished Wagnerian bass-baritone Greer Grimsley appears as the evil prison governor with just enough malice to make his point without overdoing it. And soprano Adrianne Pieczonka in the title role is superb and—it must be said—does well as a man with high voice. Soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller makes her Met debut as the warden’s daughter, with an angelic voice and yet a little too much pathos: this transforms what might have been a comic character into a semi-tragic one. And the warden’s assistant, played by tenor David Portillo, bears the brunt of this un-comedy. His character acquires an unpleasant edge: The effect is dramatic, but wrong.
Falk Struckmann, another Wagnerian bass-baritone, was so engaging and delightful as the compassionate prison warden that much of the success of this production rests on his charmingly portly frame. His playful step on the steeply raked stage, his gentle nuance of gesture and expression, his perfectly judged emotion, all show how an ordinary part becomes extraordinary in the hands of an extraordinary performer.
Fidelio was Beethoven’s only opera, and it is much more Beethoven than opera. Fortunately, Beethoven was as great a composer as the greatest who ever lived: tied with Bach, just a half-step above Schubert. As long as you go to the opera expecting to hear Beethoven, you won’t be disappointed.
