That yearning for freedom, and the evil of unjust incarceration (“I dared to speak the truth, and chains are my reward,” sings Florestan) are unquestionably important themes in this opera. But even they are subservient to another, namely, the power of married love—married love as a live-or-die, love-to-the-death loyalty pact, and the willingness to risk all for it (“Kill first his wife!,” Leonore sings at the crucial moment of revelation). Fidelio, oder der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe is the piece’s full title, following the source in Bouilly’s Léonore, ou l’amour conjugal. Leonore’s almost unthinkable courage in disguising herself as a man and apprenticing herself to the jailer Rocco in the seemingly chimeric hope of finding and saving her husband, matched by Florestan’s vision, in his darkest moment, of his wife appearing as angel to bear him to a higher realm, are the emotional spine of the work, and their two highly developed, accompanied recitative-and-double-aria monologues bracket the Prisoners’ Chorus. That this deep love is heterosexual is a given. It is underlined by the disguise device and highlighted by the Singspiel courtship interplay of Jaquino and Marzelline, and the latter’s confused crush on “Fidelio.”

As Mac Donald points out, though, in the Heartbeat rewrite Marzelline (“Marcy”) is a uniformed prison officer with a crush on not the woman Leonore disguised as the man Fidelio, but on an openly female Leonore (“Leah”), also in uniform. Her Dad, “Roc,” genially suggests that Leah might like to date Marcy, thus hinting at pandering his daughter to an already married female  lover. To secure Marcy’s co-operation for the rescue mission, Leah openly flirts with her. That implies that Leah is herself bisexual and/or a shameless sexual manipulator. So much for the ideal of loyalty in marriage. This gratuitous queering of characters is far more subversive of Fidelio‘s moral core than cross-racial casting. It comes off not as virtuous, but as cynically opportunistic. (Fire brings us this same “intersectionality”—but there it is a central given of the original work, so no objection on principle is called for.) And while even our major international opera companies are hard-put to cast leading roles of dramatic calibre with singers of any ethnicity (if there is another Leontyne Price or Grace Bumbry, et al., out there, let her show herself forthwith), a respectable Jaquino is not hard to find anywhere above amateur status. He is sacrificed to the conceit, not a cause of it, and Heartbeat went out of its way to worm this theme into the scenario.

There was, for a company of Heartbeat’s resources, an admirable level of talent and invention involved in the effort. The orchestral reduction (arranged and conducted from the piano by Daniel Schlosberg), while inevitably far short of the depth and beauty of the original, was ingeniously contrived and played with skill and energy. All the principals acted with sincerity and commitment while singing, but less so while speaking the dialogue. That’s true in many a “traditional” Fidelio or Zauberflöte, but here the performers (especially the two leads) were stuck with passages of soapbox spouting of propaganda-leaflet quality, which the likes of Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance could not have made plausible. The most accomplished of the singers was the “Roc,” Derrell Acon. Though he’s not a true bass of the best Rocco sort (but, then, neither is Georg Zeppenfeld, the Rocco of the recent Pentatone recording), his secure, well-formed baritone sat well on the music. He guided the line with aplomb, and at the end of the Gold Aria threw in a nice upward cadential embellishment (the only such that I detected in the performance, and on that account a little lonely-sounding). Kelly Griffin, the Leonore, sang attractively in lower and/or quieter passages and musically throughout, but her voice tended to lose centering as pitch or volume heightened. The Florestan/”Stan,” Curtis Bannister, with a dark, husky-toned voice lacking in tenorial timbre, nevertheless surmounted the demands of his great solo scene with more room to spare than many, and performed with moving intensity. Victoria Lawal had “Marcy”‘s music well in hand, though her typical girlish soubrette moves during “O wär ich schon” looked odd on a uniformed lesbian security officer. Lashed on by a fearsome accompaniment in which a slapstick was prominent, Corey McKern drove his covered baritone repeatedly sharp in “Ha, welch ein Augenblick,” but settled down thereafter.