Arts & Events

At San Francisco Opera, American director Matthew Ozawa sets Beethoven’s Fidelio in a modern detention facility with steel cages and elaborate surveillance equipment. The result, alas, is the most ridiculous fairy tale version of Fidelio one could imagine. Critics have long noted the wish-fulfilment fantasy element in Beethoven’s only opera, which portrays the unjust imprisonment of a political dissident, Florestan, who is miraculously rescued at the very moment he is about to be murdered by a corrupt tyrant, his rescue owing in part to the actions of his wife but also, and primarily, to the fortuitous last minute arrival of a benign government leader, who in this fairy tale production, not only saves the life of Florestan and arrests his would-be murderer but also frees all the detention facility’s prisoners. Wow! Could there ever be a more politically correct and totally unbelievable pipe dream version of Fidelio than this? 

Though it is nearly impossible to set aside this production’s outrageous staging, in musical terms Beethoven still manages to offer us a few moments, here and there, to make us sit up and listen appreciatively to music that moves us. The Act I quartet in canon form, “Mir ist so wunderbar,” features four voices all singing the same tune yet expressing vastly different emotions. Musically, this canon is about longing. And the longing here has for all four characters an erotic tinge that is almost palpable in the music. Marzelline, the jailkeeper’s daughter, longs for marriage with Fidelio, whom she doesn’t realise is a woman disguised as a young man. Rocco, the jailkeeper, longs to see his daughter happily married to Fidelio. Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, longs to avoid all emotional entanglements with Marzelline as she longs only to save the life of her incarcerated husband. And Jaquino, Marzelline’s boyfriend, longs only that Marzelline might yet one day be his despite her father’s intentions of giving her in marriage to Fidelio. Beethoven, who in his own frequently failed love-life, experienced many times the pipe dream aspect of erotic longing, has here in his only opera given voice, in four different voices no less, to the often chimeric aspirations of erotic longing. 

In the role of Leonore, soprano Elza van den Heever was excellent. She navigated the aria “Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin?” (“Monster! Where are you going in such a hurry?”), which contains some of the most treacherous passages in all opera, with rapturous aplomb. Soprano Anne-Marie Macintosh, an Adler fellow, was a lovely Marzelline, both vocally and in her acting the role of a loving daughter who is sincere though misguided in her longing for marriage with Fidelio. Bass James Creswell was a down-to-earth Rocco, a true man of the people, perhaps especially in his working class praise of money in the aria “Das Gelt!” Christopher Oglesby, another Adler fellow, was fine as Jaquino, though Beethoven hardly gives this character more than a few lines to sing. 

As the incarcerated political prisoner Florestan, tenor Russell Thomas was quite moving, especially in his opening lines at the beginning of Act II. Kept in chains in a dark subterranean chamber, Florestan bemoans his fate as he sings, “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen ist das Glück von mir gefloh’n” (“In the days of my spring all joy has fled”). Over and above the resonance these words have for Florestan, they have always struck me for their resonance to Beethoven’s onset of deafness even before he began writing Fidelio. When Florestan goes on to sing, “Warheit wagt’ ich kuhn zu sagen, und die Kenten sind mein Lohn!” (“Truth I dared to speak, and chains are my reward!”), this is Beethoven lamenting his own imprisonment in deafness. Minutes earlier,Florestan has exclaimed at the darkness that surrounds him and also of the “grauenvolle Stille” or“Silence full of greyness.” These words are then followed by music that suggests a heartbeat, perhaps the only sound that Beethoven, in his deafness, vaguely registered. These words and this music are doubly resonant both to the plight of an unjustly imprisoned Florestan and to the plight of Beethoven himself, arbitrarily imprisoned in a world of silence. 

In the role of Pizarro, the villain of the piece, bass-baritone Greer Grimsley sang robustly and was a convincingly sadistic and vengeful enemy of Florestan. Bass Soloman Howard went adequately through the motions in the role of Don Fernando, the benign government leader who makes a miraculous last-second appearance to save the day. 

Finally, a word or two must be said about the San Francisco Opera Chorus under the leadership of Ian Robertson. Zhengyi Bai sang the brief role of the First Prisoner, while Stefan Egerstrom sang the Second Prisoner. The chorus of prisoners was tightly confined in very close quarters inside steel cages in a set designed by Alexander V. Nicholas. I was struck and indeed alarmed by the fact that in a time of pandemic so many people were crammed together, unmasked, singing away. This thought was especially troubling given that the night before I attended the Sunday, October 17 matinee of Fidelio, I heard Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in a concert where the originally scheduled Schumann Requiem had to be replaced by another piece precisely because putting a large chorus onstage was deemed too dangerous during this pandemic. However, when I questioned several San Francisco Opera administrators about this use of a large, unmasked chorus, I was assured that extraordinary measures were taken, including the use of specially designed singing masks during chorus rehearsals, plus proof of vaccination for all singers, temperature checks upon entering the building, and the oversight of seven doctors specifically assigned to protect all participants in this production of Fidelio. Finally, I note in passing that in this supposedly contemporary interpretation of Fidelio, scarcely any of the prisoners were people of color, and this in spite of the well-known fact of the disproportionate incarceration of Blacks and other people of color in our contemporary society, especially here in the USA! Granted, both Russell Thomas as Florestan and Soloman Howard as the benign leader Dom Fernando were African-Americans. But this smacked of mere tokenism as yet another element in this fairy tale version of Fidelio. 

Last but not least, kudos are due to San Francisco Opera’s new Music Director Eun Sun Kim for conducting a crisp, musically engaging Fidelio even in the face of an obtrusive staging that threatened to turn this opera into something resembling a farce. 

ERRATA 

In my review of last Sunday’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s concert I mistakenly telescoped the last 10 years of Robert Schumann’s life. He did indeed suffer a serious bout of paranoia in 1846 when writing his Second Symphony. However, he lived another 10 years and wrote two more symphonies before dying in a mental institution in 1856.