Opera Holland Park’s current production of Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, received much acclaim upon its premiere in 2003.  Despite often being criticized for the longueurs of its spoken dialogue and lack of cohesive dramatic structure—surely not helped by its troubled genesis and three librettists leading up to the final version—it remains a powerful work, a hymn to freedom owning some of Beethoven’s most beautiful and stirring compositions.  Though Beethoven may not have possessed the intrinsic grasp of the stage owned by a composer like Mozart, a good performance of Fidelio is intensely moving and uplifting; if Opera Holland Park’s effort doesn’t completely succeed, some strong performances by its cast, chorus, and orchestra still manage to make one appreciate the wonders of Beethoven’s score.  

However, I couldn’t help feeling that Olivia Fuchs’s production largely tended to miss the mark.  The spare set design of Jamie Vartan was clean, straightforward, and well-conceived, stark grey floors and walls flanked by mesh gates on either side of the stage and a small office in between.  However, the decision to depict the prisoners as herded together in what appeared to be more a closet-sized meat locker than a proper jail struck me as gratuitous.  Indeed, one of the great flaws of the production was its lack of subtlety; so much is conveyed by Beethoven’s music and the quiet humanity of the piece, one does not need to drive home the horror of statism with any type of excess.  In Ms. Fuchs’s production, touches abound that drive home the violence of the place in a way that struck me as distinctly unnecessary.  A military thug wearing sunglasses is present in Florestan’s cell to cover his head with a sack and randomly strike him, despite the fact that the libretto renders it quite clear that no one other than the kind-hearted Rocco is supposed to have access to this particular prisoner.  Nicky Spence’s Jaquino is a thug who nearly rapes Marzelline and then violently beats the prisoners after they are released to take their brief walk in the sunlight.  This was utterly unnecessary, and completely undermined the fact that before meeting Fidelio, Marzelline was enamored with Jaquino.  Detracting from the humanity of Marzelline, Jaquino, and Rocco does nothing to increase the pathos of the work; if anything it moves it in the direction of blunt caricature, which is what much of the direction struck me as achieving.

There were some good performances, but overall, the virtues of the music were not enough to totally offset deficiencies of the production.  Peter Robinson guided the City of London Sinfonia with a sure hand that drew out the score dependably and at a steady tempo without ever really catching fire; though there was some wonderful playing by the orchestra, it often lacked the sense of urgency that should characterise the work.  Yet Mr. Robinson did draw out moments of great beauty, too; the overture moved along joyously, the strings swift and shimmering, especially at the thunderous ending.  The woodwinds were on particularly fine form throughout, the oboe and clarinet sailing lyrically through Beethoven’s more whimsical passages.  Despite a few slips in intonation at the beginning, the horns succeeded in echoing the reliability of the strings in most of the overture, making for a well-played and stirring introduction to the evening.  That most wonderful of quartets, ‘Mir ist so wunderbar,’ deserves singular mention, the luminous playing of the violins quietly emerging out of silence so softly and tenderly that one could scarcely breathe.  Though the rest of the piece and its vocal accompaniment grew less taut by its conclusion, Mr. Robinson guided its beginning to bring out all the sublime feeling a good performance can evoke.  There were certainly many moments to recommend the evening—and indeed, one can imagine that the odd intonation slip in the brass and lack of cohesiveness in the orchestra will settle down as the run proceeds.  

Similarly, there were some very respectable performances from the cast, and one wants to be optimistic and hope that problems marring the first performance will even out once the run is more firmly settled into.  Yvonne Howard, however, made a fine Leonore, her glowing acclaim from the last run proving mostly justified.  She played the role of the woman playing the male Fidelio commendably, and her robust soprano was one of the highlights of the evening.  Despite its relatively simple dramatic structure, the vocal parts in Fidelio are anything but straightforward, and Ms. Howard met the demands of her role’s often challenging tessitura with a bold assurance, her tone clear and radiant in the upper register.  Similarly, Stephen Richardon made a strong Rocco.  His higher range was sometimes strained and not always pretty, but his characterisation was heartfelt, his Act I aria on the virtues of money, ‘Hat man nicht auch Gold beineben’, carried off with a strong sense of humour and energy.  As his daughter Marzelline, Sarah Redgwick acquitted herself well; her tone was strong and lovely, and she managed to depict Marzelline’s naïve infatuation with Fidelio well.  Her soprano was at its best in the Act I quartet, where, along with Ms. Howard, she drew out the luminous tenderness of the piece.  Nicky Spence’s Jaquino was decent enough, if the direction left his characterisation, as already noted, far rougher and less sympathetic than would have been ideal.  

Other roles were less impressively executed.  The Florestan of Tom Randle was distinctly underwhelming, his tone grainy and often less heroic than would have been ideal.  He also suffered pitch problems upon his initial appearance with ‘Gott!  Welch Dunkel hier!’, rendering it far less moving than it has the potential to be.  Phillip Joll made for a reasonably staid Don Pizarro, his tone strong and resonant, but his upper range too stretched by the role.  His performance was often wooden, Pizarro’s villainy inadequately conveyed.  Njabulo Madlala was respectable enough in his brief appearance as Don Fernando.  Less successful was the direction during his scene, which left him flanked by American secret-service types wearing sunglasses and earpieces.  News cameras accompany his visit to the jail, and his declaration of freedom for the prisoners is carried off as at a press conference; not only does this not really cohere with the radiant ingenuousness of the music as such, it calls into question his motives for releasing the prisoners in the first place.  One could only wonder at his decision to flood the starved, malnourished prisoners in their blatant orange jumpsuits with bottles of wine before food.

Happily, the prisoners themselves were on fine form, and contributed some of the few genuinely poignant scenes in the performance.  Where individual performances lagged at the end, drawing out the tedium of the opera rather than its capacity to move, the Opera Holland Park Chorus effected a resounding ode to humanity with their prisoner’s chorus, ‘Heil sei dem Tag’.  Though the orchestral playing could have been more nuanced, it succeeded in conveying suitable exultancy while the singing itself was swelling and radiant.  The scene made a strong impression, as it should.

However, taken as a whole, in spite of some sincerely good moments, the combination of unevenness in pit and on stage didn’t completely add up.  The directorial conceit, doing away with subtlety and self-consciously presenting Pizzaro’s prison as Guantanamo Bay and Don Fernando as a self-serving American politician, is not half so clever it thinks itself to be.  Indeed, at best it is slightly silly, a case of direction trying so hard to be ‘topical’ that it detracts from the universality of the work’s far more profound cry against real despotism and inhumanity.  At worst, it’s not only erroneous in principle, but offensive, too.  It made for a thoroughly mixed evening—though with some genuinely good performances and playing by the City of London Sinfonia, it certainly has the potential to improve drastically as the run progresses. 




John E De Wald
Opera Britannia