‘Fidelio’ returns

Lyric, cast rise above flawed Beethoven opera

The Chicago Tribune
January 19, 2005

By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic

“Fidelio” has been missing in action at Lyric Opera for nearly 24 years,
much too long for a flawed masterpiece that once held sway on Wacker
Drive whenever the great tenor Jon Vickers was available to sing the
punishing role of Florestan.

Beethoven’s only opera attempts to translate the high-flown democratic
ideals he later developed in his Ninth Symphony into credible theatrical
form. He didn’t fully succeed despite his heroic labors. But dramatic
awkwardness finally bows to the music itself: a great score driven by
noble sentiment.

Much of that noble sentiment was recognizable in the radiant Finnish
soprano Karita Mattila’s thrilling portrayal of Leonore, the opera’s
courageous, larger-than-life heroine, at the Lyric’s first performance
of the season Tuesday night at the Civic Opera House.

But the Lyric also did itself proud with its casting of the other roles,
all of them strongly filled.

Whatever inconsistencies of concept marred German stage director Jürgen
Flimm’s updated production from the Metropolitan Opera (taken over in
his absence by his assistant, Gina Lapinski) were more than offset by
the splendidly idiomatic conducting of Christoph von Dohnányi, returning
in triumph to the theater that gave him his U.S. operatic debut 36 years
ago.

Flimm sets the opera in a squalid prison in a totalitarian banana
republic, where crates of automatic weapons are unloaded almost within
reach of the caged inmates. Robert Israel’s drab sets, with their
water-stained concrete walls and junk-filled dungeon, emphasize the
oppressive tyranny Leonore (disguised as the youth Fidelio) must
overcome to rescue her husband, the captive Florestan.

The point is made early on: Unjust political imprisonment knows no one
time or place. A cliché, perhaps, but clichés work when there’s keen
dramatic motivation behind them.

Also, it must be noted that some of the director’s more bothersome
revisionist touches were removed soon after his “Fidelio” bowed at the
Met in 2000. Here the villainous Pizarro (Falk Struckmann) is spared the
hangman’s noose, while the deus ex machina governor, Don Fernando (Alan
Held), is back to being a good guy.

One further plus is that the cumbersome spoken dialogue is cut to the bone.

Mattila’s Leonore is no goody-goody “rescue” heroine but a desperate
housewife fully capable of stealing money, packing a firearm and
deceiving the lovesick innocent, Marzelline (the shining soprano Isabel
Bayrakdarian), to get what she wants.

The Finnish diva is Leonore to the life, hair cropped and shoulders
resolute, totally believable as a young man, as opposed to the usual
overweight diva in drag. No wonder poor Marzelline is fooled into
believing she’s a he.

Mattila sang with full, luminous tone, her “Abscheulicher!” quivering
with horror and outrage. Tough yet vulnerable, she made opera’s first
feminist icon a real person, not a singing abstraction.

Here was another winning performance to set beside her deeply moving
Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” earlier this season.

The first sound we heard from Florestan was a soft high G, a cry of
despair rending the subterranean darkness; Kim Begley lofted it like an
arrow to the heart. If this admirable British singer lacked the vocal
amplitude of the Met’s Ben Heppner, his firm, unforced singing made this
notorious tenor-killer role sound almost easy.

The exemplary René Pape brought a robust, sonorous bass to the
bespectacled, bumbling jailer, Rocco. As the evil governor, German
bass-baritone Struckmann ranted and snarled like Mussolini in a
three-piece suit.

Australian tenor Steve Davislim, in his American operatic debut, sang
sweetly and elegantly even when Jaquino had to wield an Uzi.

Once past a somewhat unsettled overture, Dohnányi invested the orchestra
with the rhythmic drive, tensile strength and harmonic depth of
authentic Beethoven. Wisely, he refused to interpolate Beethoven’s third
“Leonore” overture between the dungeon duet and the final scene, which
invariably makes the jubilant final chorus sound anticlimactic.

The orchestra gave of its best, while the male choristers were deeply
moving in the Prisoners Chorus.

Florence von Gerkan’s costumes stressed khakis and charcoal for the
principals, correctional white for the prisoners.

Lyric’s “Fidelio” plays through Feb. 21; phone (312) 332-2244.

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