Beethoven, Fidelio:   Soloists, Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, cond. Antonio Pappano. 14.6.2007 (JPr)

 

Of course I read this review of the ‘first’ cast with much interest after the performance where both principals were replacements. I thought I had been going to see performances of Fidelio for a quarter of a century, but checking some primitive records I have from the early days I note it is well on its way to 30 years. (My early Leonores were Josephine Barstow, Linda Esther Gray, Elizabeth Connell with Florestans, Alberto Remedios, Jon Vickers and James King.) Why this timeline? Well it has mainly been a search over those years for a performance I have thoroughly enjoyed or, more to the point with Fidelio, been moved or inspired by.

The good news is that this was as close to it as I can remember for all the performances in the concert hall or opera house I have seen or heard. It was not the greatest musical performance nor had the greatest singers but there was a great spirit about it and the journey it went on was quite a powerful one. Beethoven once wrote ‘Of all the children of my spirit, this one is dearest to me, because it was the most difficult to bring into the world’. His 30 year and more interest in Schiller, we all know, cannot be underestimated and at the end as jubilation sings out the chorus begins with a line from his Ode to Joy: ‘Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife, add his to our jubilation!’ This is a mighty hymn to freedom where faithful devotion and justice triumphs over tyranny and oppression.

As such the setting in which this is all played out can be transposed as here to a tyrannical, possibly South American, regime of the second half of the twentieth century. This story set against a backdrop of totalitarianism is a timeless one indeed!

Robert Israel's set designs are realistic, and over familiar, rather space consuming rather than space-saving. By this I mean that the second act particularly creates no claustrophobia of any sort of subterranean dungeon, it more like the hold of a container ship. Indeed Florestan’s ‘Gott! Welch dunkel hier!’ rings out from gloom metres back along the stage. No singer appears in evidence and it was almost as if someone had put a CD on, before bizarrely he soon turns on his own light to relieve the (endless) darkness he has been singing about! Then he is nearly off stage left for his part in the trio and for ‘O namenlose Freude!’ he is still there with Leonore nearly off stage on the other side, the millionth time a ‘love’ duet has been given this directorial affectation.

This ‘new’ (to the Royal Opera) production by Jürgen Flimm is a seven year old one from the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and was probably brought in to showcase the earlier Leonore, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila. Here the character was sung by the British mezzo, Yvonne Howard. Her undoubted nerves during Act I brought a sense of apt anxiety at her own personal peril in risking all for her husband. If not exactly looking a callow youth dressed in Florence von Gerkan’s fatigues she certainly seemed more of a convincing man than most. Her ‘Abscheulicher!’ was rather tentative and too much of an inward reflection but she came through Act II strongly and the ovation she was given was well deserved.

I do not know how much Flimm had to do with this revival though there are pictures in the programme showing him at (some?) rehearsals. As much as it all resonated with me in the end there was from pit to stage quite a bit of the ‘Hey guys! Let’s put on a show’ feel about the evening. Leonore’s gun kept falling out of her trousers too many times, the rifles and batons were wimpishly wielded when herding the prisoner’s in Act I, Rocco’s glasses didn’t fit him properly and when Florestan’s grave is excavated by Leonore she seems to carefully remove about four bricks!

This lack of directorial consistency extended across a cosmopolitan cast with Irish soprano Ailish Tynan’s shrewish Marzelline with her idiosyncratic German, British tenor Robert Murray’s cuckolded Jacquino, the American Eric Halfvarson was a very human Rocco whose well-sung ‘Gold’ aria was spoilt by him having to go through a door to get things while he was singing. Konrad Jarnot, a British baritone, as Don Fernando did not impose himself on the last scene but did not spoil anything. The Norwegian baritone Terje Stensvold seemed to bring his own scene-chewing Pizarro performance with him. Over the top acting-wise, adequate voice-wise, but I find it hard to imagine this veteran as the Wanderer or Wotan, which is on his schedule.

The earlier Florestan was Endrik Wottrich (current consort of the heir to the Bayreuth Festival Katharina Wagner). I remember him when he started as a slim David in Die Meistersinger and he appears (from photos) to have had too many bratwurst. I once asked Petra Lang why all mezzos and sopranos have to be stick thin these days and most heroic tenors have my build (short and fat), she had no answer … does any one? Here was another one, Simon O’Neill from New Zealand, he has a precise, currently too sharp, voice (in need of a bit of burnishing) and I thought he has now become a bit ungainly and seemed to have piled on the kilos. He should watch for this as we should look out for him as a tenor of some promise.

Having heard the Philharmonia in a rather cold and clinical Mahler 3 a couple of days earlier in the expansive new acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall, the orchestra at the Royal Opera House sounded like a scratch band in the pit at a West End musical.  It may be hard to believe, however it did not seem to matter about this nor that Antonio Pappano did not seem to have his heart really in it (perhaps he is stretching himself too thinly?), but you can always trust the splendid Royal Opera Chorus, so at the end when all the prisoners are reunited with their families, Leonore has freed Florestan and Pizarro is about to be hung it was undoubtedly a case of ‘Rejoice, Rejoice!’.

 

Jim Pritchard