Opera
Fidelio (English National Opera)
Beethoven sold short
Rupert Christiansen
Opera producers do make life difficult for themselves — even sensible, practical ones like Graham Vick. His new staging of Beethoven's Fidelio flops because he has insisted on knotting and tripping himself up in a redundant piece of updating which only confuses the dramatic issues. Leave the scenario in its original setting (as Peter Hall so conclusively did at Glyndebourne), and the premise of Leonore disguising her- self as a boy and sneaking into the back- yard of a provincial Spanish prison is perfectly plausible. The plot is based on an actual incident, after all. Audiences have a certain amount of historical imagination, they are capable of making links and allowances, they don't need to see every- thing happening here and now in order to believe in it — so why risk a modern set- ting, with its inevitable bathetic echoes of Porridge and Prisoners of Cell Block H? '
At the London Coliseum, the camp snig- gers became even more hysterical as Kathryn Harries's Leonore emerged in startling resemblance to the celebrated les- bian chanteuse k d lang, costumed as a clippie. This activated a totally irrelevant sub-text to Marzelline's infatuation with Fidelio, further confused when Leonore (quite unnecessarily) removes her jacket to reveal a level of womanly breast which would have excited even the least prurient to speculate on her irregular hormonal development. And, by the way, what sort of prison is this exactly, with its lax security and liberal dress code? Well, are we meant to be taking this for real or not?
Not altogether. Vick also has a half- hearted bash at a symbolic agenda. Paul Brown's set consists of a huge wooden cross which sits horizontally on the stage, rising via pulleys to reveal the prisoners huddled beneath. Visually, it's a neat and simple concept, but quite how the Christian imagery it implies relates to the unambigu- ous theme of the opera — Leonore's brav- ery in rescuing her husband from the tyrannical Pizarro, 'the Triumph of Mar- ried Love' as the sub-title insists — I have no idea. The overall effect is null.
Perhaps this would all have mattered less if the action had been rendered with more melodramatic conviction but that was sadly not the case. There is a nicely sensitive staging of the 'Mir ist so wunderbar' quar- tet, but Vick seems to have little interest in the idea of the opera as a thriller — which Beethoven certainly intended it to be. There is no sense of Leonore's risk or moral isolation, no sense of dank horror in Florestan's dungeon. The great climaxes of recognition in the second act were scarcely registered, with 'Er sterbe' becoming, as so often, complete nonsense — why does Pizarro not simply push Leonore out of the way and get on with the murder? All the waving and grinning in the last scene could not cheer me. Beethoven's Fidelio has been sold short again.
Musically, there were consolations. Like Christa Ludwig and Jessye Norman, Kathryn Harries is that interesting phe- nomenon, a tre quarti soprano. As Leonore, she reveals more wool than steel in her voice and she can't rise to the top of the role, either physically or spiritually, but she skilfully negotiated the appalling difficulties of the `Abscheulicherr scena (those slow ascending scales across register breaks are absolute killers) and sang with warmth and stamina. Equally, Anthony Rolfe Johnson is not one of nature's Florestans. He had to push his beautiful tenor to the edge of a bleat in his big aria, but he is such a fine musician that he just about got away with it. Strong support came from the splendid chorus and the never less than competent Gwynne Howell as Rocco, while Mary Plazas and Philip Sheffield as Marzelline and Jacquino played their opening scene charmingly. As Pizarro, Peter Sidhom shouted in 'Ha welch' ein Augenblick', and to make matters worse shouted flat.
For me the greatest pleasure of the evening came from the conducting of Richard Hickox. The first-night perfor- mance earned him some pretty scathing reviews, but I heard him on the second, and greatly admired the lyrical flow he brought to music which in the wrong hands can seem very stop-and-start and full of Beethoven's fabled clumsiness. Perhaps he missed the white hot intensity that Colin Davis brings to the second act — those opening chords didn't ring out in stark anguish as they should — but the passage where Leonore throws away Florestan's chains was absolutely sublime and he man- aged to purge the final chorus of all unwanted Revivalist bounce. Now that Paul Daniel has announced that he is leaving I've also got a book inside me, some underwear and a shirt ' Opera North to take up the music director- ship at ENO, I hope that Hickox is being considered for the vacancy.
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