My melomane father once told me that Beethoven composed the best music in every genre except for opera. Indeed, even the most ardent Beethovenian would have a hard time glossing over the flaws in Fidelio, with whose score the composer famously grappled for years. And yet a myriad of new productions seemingly pops up every year. The reason is simple: the story of the search for freedom from the shackles of oppression always carries contemporary resonance.
Anyone contemplating the plot could probably find analogies in their lived experience. For me it would be political prisoners in Iran – both pre- and post-Revolution. For Matthew Ozawa, producer of the 2021 San Francisco staging now brought to Canadian Opera Company, it was the images of US immigrant detention centres, where families were separated, sometimes for months (Ozawa’s own parents were interned in a wartime Japanese camp). This idea informs a brilliant stage solution, in the form of a periodically rotating cube, with chain fences on one side and the prison offices complete with boxes of files and video-surveillance screens on the other, doubling as the dungeon and Florestan’s cell in the second act.
The office is where the oft-criticised domestic opening scenes take place. This way, instead of seeking to justify the triviality of the scene, the production accepts it and treats it as it deserves: in the most banal way, yet at the same time integrated with the topic of oppression. Marzelline, Jaquino and Fidelio’s ‘love triangle’ here becomes a simple office romance, entangled with gossips beside the water-cooler. Anna-Sophie Neher makes Marzelline as sympathetic as possible, while Josh Lovell’s Jaquino is suitably pathetic.
Miina-Liisa Värelä’s Leonore (Fidelio) is depicted in security uniform disguise, together with bulletproof vest and baseball hat, which, as it turns out, conceals her feminine features. Värelä has the heroic power the role requires, but a touch more flexibility and expressiveness would not go amiss in her “Abscheulicher” aria, where she is seen alone for the first time.
The real vocal star of the show, however, is Dimitry Ivashchenko’s Rocco, whose flexible yet powerful tones (shades of the unsurpassable Gottlob Frick) bend and adapt as the character evolves from apparatchik to freedom fighter.
The visual pièce de resistance comes as the cube rotates, for the first time, to reveal the prison cells behind the offices. The arch-villain prisoner governor Don Pizarro (Johannes-Martin Kränzle, suitably curdled in tone) is introduced as a self-regarding, two-faced politician: looking for photo-ops with frightened prisoners, and meanwhile plotting to do away with his nemesis, the whistle-blower Florestan. The roughness of Pizarro and Rocco’s duet then melts into the emotional heart of the opera: the prisoners’ chorus, where the detainees step from artificial fluorescent light into natural sunshine.
By Act 2 the setting has acquired an eerie coldness. Florestan’s delirium is depicted by fast-changing images on the giant monitors that surround him. These momentarily turn into 1920s-style close-ups of Leonore as he sings his heart-rending “Gott! Welch’ Dunkel hier!” Clay Hilley’s dramatic tenor certainly captures the note of desperation, albeit at the expense of some over-forceful singing. The same quality informs his reunification with Leonore, though this time it is an excess of joy that pushes the voice beyond the bounds of euphony.
The arrival of the minister Don Fernando (a noble-sounding Sava Vemić) sets in motion the utopian scenes of freedom and celebration. Don Pizarro’s wrongdoings are revealed, and he is sent to be punished, here accompanied by scoop-hungry journalists. Then comes the euphoric hymn to freedom and praise for the woman who has saved her husband.
On opening night the orchestra took a while to settle into its best intonation and ensemble, but by the end this was not a distraction. What was off-putting was an idea apparently worked out with conductor Johannes Debus since the San Francisco production. Just seconds before the final curtain, an unrepentant Don Pizarro returns to the upper level of the scene with a Psycho-style grin on his face. The audience has barely a moment to perceive the look of surprise on the faces of the protagonists. What on earth was that? A ‘clever’ alienation effect, forcing us to think that Beethoven’s idealism was misplaced? An argument that freedom is only an illusion and that corruption prevails? Whatever the intention, there is so little time for it to register that it becomes merely perplexing for those who even notice it, and no more than a gratuitous dissonance with Beethoven’s glorious affirmation. In his filmed introduction, Ozawa promises that the audience will come away ‘empowered’. Yet this intrusive addition deliberately undercuts that intention.
