Tonight the audience is on best behaviour, none of the booing that greeted Tobias Kratzer’s iconoclastic Fidelio in 2020. The shock of the new, his act two staging, has been absorbed and it is cheers that hail the curtain call. He is exonerated.
His clever concept is of making us, the audience, complicit: we are the people who keep our heads down when evil deeds are done. The lights and cameras are on us as we enter the auditorium, we are projected on to the scrim… not that everyone notices—the young man in the front row is totally absorbed in his phone.
The light comes up on us at the end, too, as the chorus sing "Heil seI dem Tag", glory to the day when good triumphs. We can rejoice in Beethoven’s oratorio second act. The music is glorious, passionate, moving, Wagnerian before Wagner.
Kratzer, with dramaturg Bettina Bartz, has shone light, bright light (lighting designer Michael Bauer), onto Beethoven’s first opera, which did not come easily to him (three attempts), and its dark world of Robespierrean terror, the revolution eating its own. Beethoven was nothing if not volatile in its composition.
The first seventy-five minute act is late eighteenth, early nineteenth century period, a prison yard with Liberté, Egalité Fraternité ironically emblazoned on the curtain. Prison governor Don Pizarro (Jochen Schmeckenbecher) has kept nobleman Florestan (Eric Cutler) in prison secretly for several years, slowly starving him to death. Does that remind you of any one?
Florestan’s wife, Leonore (former Jette Parker Artist Jennifer Davis), disguises herself so well as a man, Fidelio—to gain entrance into the prison director Rocco’s employ—that his daughter, Marzelline (Christina Gansch), falls for him / her. Pizarro now wants Florestan dead, and Leonore / Fidelio persuades the pragmatic Rocco, who likes his gold, to take her with him. Rocco (Peter Rose) is not quite as bad he seems and can’t kill the man, but Pizarro says they can dig the grave and he’ll do the deed. She is in.
Act two, fifty-five minutes long, is a jolt, but its holy mission is loud and clear: “whoever thou art, I shall save thee”. After the grey, grim prison high walls and the ragged prisoners let out for a breath of fresh air (the chorus in great voice) and guillotined heads in a basket, we seem to have gone through a time portal.
The curtain rises on a stage flooded with blinding bright light, white walls and a black rock centre stage on which a Promethean man is chained. Sitting around this central focal point is the chorus in modern dress. Studying this specimen from centuries ago. How the past invades the present… It is not even the past.
What does distract a little is Manuel Braun’s video capture projected large on those pristine white walls. It’s impossible not to watch the larger than life faces eating chocolate or drinking water or reacting. It’s all black and white, literally and metaphorically, and the protagonists, Florestan and Leonore, Rocco and Marzelline, look tiny against that technical wizardry.
But Beethoven now lets all his passion free to rouse the passive into action. The ears have it over the eyes. Their impassioned singing keeps our focus, and the people’s. When Marzelline storms the stage with gun and bugle—Liberty Leading the People—the people, finally, turn on Pizarro and his men. Fidelity and light have triumphed. Not only literal light over darkness, but light over the darkness of the mind, faith over cynicism.
Mozartian first act, Singspiel, second act oratorio, the singing is stunning from all—that wunderbar quartet, solo and duet arias superlatively sung, the two sopranos voices complement and blend. Davis, who has sung in many Mozart operas, is vocally comfortable in the first act, but does she raise the forte in the second. Her duet with tenor Cutler is skin-tingling.
Amazing how a man on the verge of death can find his voice when the time comes—his first aria so moving. Kratzer seems to be saying we, too, must find our voices in this most cynical of times. Prison gatekeeper Jaquino (Michael Gibson), rejected by Marzelline, can’t quite make that transition. He is left standing in his period dress amongst the liberated with a knife in his hands. Let that be a warning.
Conductor Alexander Soddy—Antonio Pappano a hard act to follow—has the orchestra in his firm grip. And how the music illuminates the narrative and stirs the emotions. On second viewing, I am even more convinced of my first reaction to Kratzer’s conceptual vision, letting light into Beethoven’s. The programme is worth purchasing for more illumination.