Opera Today, 02 Mar 2020

by Claire Seymour

Beethoven: Fidelio, Royal Opera House London, ab 1. März 2020

Lise Davidsen 'rescues' Tobias Kratzer's Fidelio at the Royal Opera House

Making Fidelio - Beethoven’s paean to liberty, constancy and fidelity - an emblem of the republican spirit of the French Revolution is unproblematic, despite the opera's censor-driven ‘Spanish’ setting. Ausschnitt: ....Thankfully, to counter such dramaturgical turbulence there was much fine singing from the stellar cast. Though apologies were made in advance for Jonas Kaufmann, who had not attended the final dress rehearsal due to ill health, the tenor still managed to communicate Florestan’s rapture, and hit those impossibly high climaxes; if ‘Gott! Welch’ Dunkel’ and the final reconciliation with Leonore were in any way underwhelming the fault lay with Kratzer who seemed to have offered little direction to his principals, so occupied was he with rewriting the Fidelio rule book. When Leonore released her husband - heralded by a beautiful oboe solo - in addition to some awkward blocking there were music-word non sequiturs in their rapturous duet, ‘O namenlose Freude!’: ‘Now I have you in my arms’ they may sing, but on this occasion Leonore and Florestan were yards apart and looking in different directions. Georg Zeppenfeld was an engaging and warm-toned Rocco, more compelling and sympathetic than is sometimes the case with this role. Simon Neal was Robespierre through-and-through but struggled with the stratospheric demands that Beethoven requires of Pizarro. Amanda Forsythe was a clear-toned Marzelline, but she didn’t have the weight to carry Kratzer’s revisioning of the role. Similarly, Robin Tritschler’s Jaquino was vocally secure but dramatically non-descript. As Don Fernando, Egils Siliņš sang with sincerity but struggled, not surprisingly, to make a dramatic impact. The day was saved, appropriately, by Lise Davidsen who shone and soared as Fidelio/Leonora. She has a vocal presence which absolutely compels. If only she had not been, repeatedly, a microsecond behind the beat, creating a sense of labouring when Leonore should fly. And, if only she’d been given more directorial assistance by Kratzer, whose only instruction seemed to have related to inappropriate unwrapping of Leonore’s chest bindings. Antonio Pappano, conducting with a baton, unusually, was as insightful, alert to detail, and empathetic as always, but even the sterling playing of the ROH Orchestra could not overcome the directorial waywardness. The prisoners’ chorus in Act 1 was magical but had no dramatic context in Kratzer’s account. The final redemptive chorus - as the present-day observers overwhelmed the upholders of the eighteenth-century state - which draws, sometimes verbatim, on Beethoven’s Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II, should have bestowed order after the tumult of the prison scenes. Why did it not? Well, Leonore may have triumphed with her ideals of hope, fidelity and honour, but Pizarro’s knife glinted still. Picked up by the disgruntled, unreconciled, alienated Jaquino, it seemed to create a crack in the opera’s visionary armour. Perhaps Kratzer’s vision of Fidelio had finally found a ‘truthful’ thread. In an 1998 essay, ‘Opera Opposed to Opera’, which considered the relationship between Così fan tutte and Fidelio, Edward Said remarks that, ‘Every affirmation … carries with it its own negation, just as every memory of love and conjugal fidelity also brings with it the danger and usually the actuality of something that will cancel it, annul it, obliterate it.’ Wise, and sad, words.