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the arts desk, 02 March 2020 |
by David Nice |
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Beethoven: Fidelio, Royal Opera House London, ab 1. März 2020 |
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Fidelio, Royal Opera review - fitfully vivid singing in a dramatic void
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Davidsen and Kaufmann don't disappoint, but Beethoven's
music-theatre goes for nothing |
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Emblazoned on a drop-curtain in front of a mirror-image of the auditorium,
the three great tenets of the French revolution seem to be mocking us right
at the start, above all the second of them: equality, really, given the
make-up of the Royal Opera stalls? But the last, more bitter laugh is on
both the audience and the director, Tobias Kratzer, who cheats Beethoven's
admittedly lopsided liberation opera of its significant events and,
ultimately, some fine singers, above all the eagerly-awaited Lise Davidsen
and Jonas Kaufmann, along with their conductor, Antonio Pappano, of what has
to be true music-theatre if it is to involve and move us. The serious
inequality is between what we hear and what we see.
The premise isn't
a bad one: start at the end of the 18th century, with a supposedly realistic
panorama of life in a French prison run by revolutionary forces –
Beethoven's move to Spain was, after all, a matter of evading the censors -
and surround the characters in Act Two with a contemporary ring of
spectators (the chorus, as us – scene pictured below). Designer Rainer
Sellmaier's mobile mix of dark prison yard and jailer Rocco's rooms couldn't
be faulted, while no-one would object to the outwardly glaring lighting from
Michael Bauer when the imprisoned Florestan's darkness is the hell within.
Dramaturg Bettina Bartz explains all this admirably in the programme, with
just a few loopholes (Beethoven is, after all, still following the rescue
plot when she tells us he has opened up from drama to oratorio). Alas,
Kratzer botches every possible correspondence between music and drama.
The misalliances start with business accompanying the overture to the
revised and final opera of 1814, as opposed to Leonore Overtures 1, 2 or 3
(I hope we're going to get the radically different 1805 original before
Beethoven anniversary year is out). This one is a mostly blithe dynamic
journey to a significant rhythm, so a basket of heads dished out to
newly-widowed women doesn't correspond. There is little clarity in the
relations between Leonore disguised as "Fidelio", jailer's daughter
Marzelline in love with "him" – Amanda Forsythe's light soprano can't carry
the weight of character Kratzer wants to give her, though Elizabeth Watts,
who played the role in the last Royal Opera staging might have managed it –
Marzelline's suitor Jaquino, supposed I think to be a bit of a brute, but
Robin Tritschler is way too nice, and Rocco himself, a role that has
surprisingly little impact here despite the keen bass of Georg Zeppenfeld
(pictured below with Davidsen).
If you're going for realism at first,
stick to it. Would a 1790s Marzelline, however traumatised, strip off in the
room next door from her dad and attempt to unbutton her intended's trousers?
Why try and convey military governer PIzarro's furious vengeful nature by
having him take Marzelline's canary out of a cage, stroke it and throttle it
– fine when the Beadle does it in the melodrama of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd,
random here? Something was, in any case, wrong with Simon Neal, pitchy with
Pizarro's top notes, never suggesting the uncontrollable rage. Was Pappano
keeping down the orchestra to try and help him? The beautiful horse on which
he entered riveted all eyes, but, as the epitome of calm grace, the polar
opposite of what the scene demands. The tension never rose here, after a
promising start with plenty of deft orchestral colour for Beethoven's least
successful music in the early stages, where he tries to be Mozart and fails.
Dialogue is always a problem, but especially so when delivered with low
energy and eked out by Kratzer with extra lines. We never begin to be
involved in the story; even when Davidsen, after another pitchy start in the
tricky Canon, and a bit of behind-the beat heaviness in the slow section of
the magnificent aria, hit her stride with unavoidable shades of Birgit
Nilsson in the middle range and a warm top register, the whole was and at
every performance will be undermined by her unstrapping and being caught in
the act by Marzelline. The choral prisoners sing beautifully, but where's
the real context – do we perceive the release from darkness that's in the
music?
So – great set, lovely horse, young soprano living up to
expectations, zero drama. Would the stricken vocal entry of Kaufmann's
Florestan, presented as a circus animal inspected by today's bourgeoise
(shades of the dining-room scene in Ruben Östlund's unsettling satirical
film The Square), fulfil the new energy of the orchestral introduction to
Act Two? We were told to cut him some slack; he'd missed the final rehearsal
and was still "under the weather". He never sounded it, and even carried off
the insane high-register vision of Leonore as angel at the end of the aria,
as very few tenors do. But there was to be precious little sense of who
Florestan is or was, or much interaction with the wife who's dared
everything to come and save him. When we should have been focusing on the
trio with Rocco, large video projections of chorus members as audience
looking artificially stricken or producing a bar of chocolate and eating it
(as the lady on the left, pictured below, had seemingly been wanting to do
all along) achieved – what exactly, Brechtian alienation? And how do you
mess up the dramatic moment when Leonore pulls a pistol (actually nothing
here) on Pizarro, declaring "first kill his wife"? Kratzer flunked that too.
Davidsen was vocally magnificent, but had no directorial help at this
crucial point, and dramatic plausibility was further stretched by more
unstrapping. Guess what - it's Marzelline who shoots at Pizarro before
spouting Grillparzer. Calixto Bieito's English National Opera Fidelio
hampered its singers with an impossible-to-negotiate set but had many of us
in tears when reunited husband and wife share a moment of calm as a string
quartet descends in cages playing parts of Beethoven's Op. 132 "Song of
Thanksgiving". Pure interpolation, but absolute theatrical magic. Nothing of
the sort here, only the onlookers overcoming the guards of two centuries
earlier and welcoming the ennobled couple into their circle. Jaquino left
behind? Did anyone care? Not I. It's hard to say you have ever sat through
Fidelio completely dry-eyed, but there's always a first time, and, for me at
any rate, this was it.
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