The fact that Fidelio needs to function on all five of the levels indicated in my opening sentence, and that the last three of these—”ennobled,” as we like to say, by Beethoven’s music, yet intermittently detained by the work’s rather clunky dramaturgy—add up to a revered  monumentality, makes the opera harder than most to simply run up for an occasional revival. The presence of a Nilsson/Vickers duo and a Karl Böhm in the pit (all the best in my live experience, and often heard together) may make it seem possible—sure, we can always throw in another Fidelio next week—but in the absence of such, the only potential source of realization would lie with the “production,” and most of all in the director’s work with the singers. ^(I)To attempt that kind of fulfillment, we must ask not so much what the work means or what it stands for, as what it’s about on the personal, emotional plane, and how that can most effectively be played. I can’t  formulate Fidelio‘s aboutness better than I did in consideration of Heartbeat Opera’s “re-interpretation” (see Where Are We?, 4/18/22). It’s about ” . . . the power of married love . . . as a live-or-die, love-to-the-death loyalty pact, and the willingness to risk all for it.” To be sure, it’s about freedom and justice, too. But the force of those aspirations must be conveyed through the music; they cannot be translated into convincing theatrical action. Moved as we may be (but often aren’t, because of visual incongruities) by the Prisoners’ Chorus, and for some few minutes lifted high as the day is hailed when tyranny is banished and each brother seeks his brother, it is in the building of the unbearable tension of separation, the threat of a protagonists’s death, the cliff-hanging melodrama of his rescue, and above all the exhilarating paean to a loyal and courageous wife (“Retterin des Gatten“—”saviouress of her husband,” sing all as the drama is resolved) that the emotional heart of the opera resides. And we must accept that this resolution comes about not through revolution or democracy, but from the benignity of a monarch, with the class structure of his realm not only left intact, but reaffirmed. Conjugal love is celebrated both because it carries the banner of loyalty and devotion and because it is the foundational unit of the social structure over which he presides.^(II)

The schizoid, self-mutilating nature of postmodern auteuristic production is front and center in Flimm’s conception. Its evocation of 20th-century horror—not just political oppression, but extermination, genocide— hangs over every word, every gesture, from the impossibility of the opening scene (Jaquino cannot play cutesy with a pistol at his belt) to the ejection of Pizarro in the closing one (two extras are seen beating him to death in half-hearted pantomime at the back—so much for due process under the liberal King’s jurisdiction). And the curse of a relatable reductionism is present, too, most damagingly in Florestan’s aria, where a wallet photo is made to stand in for his delirious fantasy of an approaching Leonore. Thus, in addition to the problem of conforming to the revival framework, the performers face that of the ongoing contradictions between what the music and words are saying and the stage world they’re being asked to act in. That these contradictions are now so common that they have become assumed conditions of work, pre-absorbed on a stratum that cannot be allowed to surface and that most of the audience accepts without question, is all the more discouraging. The heavily cut dialog was, so far as I could determine, unamplified—good, except that then the actors must find a way to energize their speech in a way that is natural to the room they’re in—theatrically natural. By and large, they did not. I thought Israel’s Act 1 setting was no worse a single-space solution than most to what the text envisions as a prison compound, and that the set for Act 2 was quite fine, really capturing the feel of a subterranean space with only the tantalizing suggestion of a way out.