Opera Leonore (Albert Hall)
Room for improvement
Michael Tanner
‘..../f the four great religious operas, Die ZauberflOte, Fidelio, Tristan und lsolde, Moses und Aron, only one is perfect and it isn't Beethoven's. Not that one would wish for much to be altered in Fidelio: so far as I am concerned, only Rocco's 'gold' aria remains a blot, and that should be simply eliminated. Once having reached the exalt- ed level of the Canon Quartet, it is intoler- able to have to descend to the level of the first two numbers again, or something even more quotidian than they are. One of the opera's many glories is its showing how heroism and the possibility of tragedy arise out of an environment of ironing boards.
The faults, otherwise, are elements of implausibility and gaucherie which don't occur to you as you see and hear the work, but only put you off if you think about them before you know the piece well. If you go on raising them as objections after you get to know it, that is a sure sign that you are judging it by the wrong criteria, that you share Rocco's view of the world rather than Leonore's.
A preamble because the Prom semi- staged performance of Leonore, Beethoven's original 1805 version of the work, raises issues of general import which might easily be overlooked in the interests of concentrating on what was wrong with this particular rendering of it. Anyone encountering Beethoven's opera for the first time on this occasion might well never recover from it.
So far as one could tell, the musical per- formance was very satisfactory; but one couldn't really tell, thanks to the decision to use the arena as both orchestra pit (cen- tral) and stage (peripheral). Movements on• the part of the singers meant that their voices came and went in a way that was dis- astrous rather than just disconcerting. A sensible person dashing to listen to Act III on the radio found that matters hardly improved. More bewilderingly, the excel- lent interval talk referred to 'the dialogue we have just heard', but we hadn't heard any dialogue, and wee only to hear that which obligatorily occurs in the melodrama after Florestan's aria.
That was what really sunk Leonore on this occasion, apart from its inherent flaws. Listening to a recording, it is just about possible to fill in the gaps with one's mem- ory and imagination. Seeing and hearing a live performance it isn't, and the whole sublime experience lapses effortlessly into farce. A fine, young and self-sacrificing set of singers were unable to make the impact they deserved to. And the audience, realis- ing they were watching an unnecessarily staged oratorio, applauded after many numbers, even after Florestan's aria, vindi- cating fully Beethoven's decision to write for it, for Fidelio, an orchestral postlude so long that no one would remember any longer what they were going to clap for. Leonore was originally scheduled to be sung by Charlotte Margione, a great Fidelio Leonore who was presumably wise enough not to ruin her voice by taking on this ver- sion. Hillevi Martinpelto, as selfless as the character she portrayed, won an ovation for the hair-raisingly hard original version of Leonore's great aria, which, however, only demonstrated the miraculous extent to which Beethoven improved it. Kim Begley's Florestan had a much less difficult number I'm sony — I thought you were a mime act.' to sing than the final version of 'Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!' but made an effective prisoner. Together this team made some- thing extremely moving out of the scene between the dungeon Quartet and their huge, expansive duet: in this first version Beethoven has them unsure whether the rescue bid has worked or not, and there is a long passage of recitative which is well worth hearing.
Even so, all talk, including that of the conductor, about 'two equally valid works' is harmful nonsense. Fidelio is, in some ways a fragile work: the tiniest suspicion of irony wrecks it. And in giving a different perspective on it by providing us with the callow, prolix and uncertain original does exactly that.
It is disappointing to read David Cairns, who has often written so eloquently about Fidelio, pointing out the innumerable ways in which it is superior to Leonore, writing in the Proms book that the latter 'demands to be heard'. That is the exact reverse of the truth. Of course we can hear Fidelio as often as we like, and of course it is part of our culture to be interested in the concep- tion and growth of great works, a subject without which many academics would be hard put to it to know what to do with their time. We still need to ask whether it is an aid to appreciation of a finished master- piece to have in one's consciousness what it was like in its earlier stages. As someone who can't read The Waste Land now with- out recalling the catastrophically bad origi- nal opening, I feel keenly about this matter. Every single change that Beethoven made in Leonore to turn it into Fidelio was an improvement. Even the lengthy passage I referred to earlier is too lengthy, out of scale with the rest of the work.
Fidelio is an extraordinarily compressed piece, and becomes more compressed as it reaches its climax. Indeed, the climax arrives and passes so soon that one might almost think it wasn't there — one of Fide- lio's fragilities. To provide a kind of 'real time' stretch of recitative after it, and before the unimaginably ecstatic duet, is to emphasise the unsureness of touch which Beethoven manifested in the face of writ- ing a sung drama, unrivalled master as he was of purely instrumental ones. The first version was domestic, then political, the domestic holding its own to tiresome effect. The final version is domestic, then religious — at least so long as the dialogue is retained, in which the references to Provi- dence are so numerous. It deals with issues too momentous to mock, the easy reaction which Leonore can only encourage.
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