Fidelio at the COC

I went to see the COC’s Fidelio production yesterday afternoon. I took the GO train to Union Station, accompanying most the the crowd who headed to the Rogers Centre for the final Blue Jays season game.

I should say, at the outset, that I enjoyed the show a lot and even though I’d read a review was surprised by the production. I’d encourage anyone, opera fan or not, to get down to the Four Seasons Centre before Fidelio closes.

We’d PRVed a European production of the opera which I watched about a month ago. It was recorded from the Mezzo network so there were no subtitles but I found a synopsis of the opera on line easily enough. It was traditional, period production and a decent introduction to a staged version of the opera which I had only known previously through excerpts and the overtures.

There are good reasons Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, is not produced as often as one might expect with the composer being so high in the pantheon of “classical” composers. The story is a combination of domestic comedy and high melodrama involving truly horrifying torture and murder. The ingenue is unbelievably naive and gormless. The villain is a raving monster. Other operas, however, are more often performed even though they have similar shortcomings.

The problem with Fidelio is that its composer was not a man of the theatre. Many of the numbers in this singspiel are structured like instrumental pieces. Beethoven’s forms are often based upon exposition, repetition and variation. I can imagine the composer playing his music over on the piano and recognizing that, formally, whole sections of the arias and ensembles needed to be repeated. We accept this, expect it, in concert music. 

The problem is that once the text has been covered once or perhaps repeated a couple of times for emphasis its dramatic purpose has been served. However in this opera, even though the theatrical role of the text has already played out, Beethoven’s music hasn’t finished so the music carries on to its formal conclusion.

Stage director Johannes Debus deals with this inherent problem with Fidelio effectively. The set is a huge, square two-level building on a turntable that rotates the sides and back turning to face the stage providing, in effect, four different sets. Moreover, a scene can be playing out above while the music’s drama happens below.

Debus’ jail is a busy place. There are other staff in the office that is the set of most of the first act and they get on with their jobs while the principals play their parts. When the music becomes repetitive there’s other stuff going on elsewhere on the stage, something else to look at while listening to the beautiful music. Only in the second act, set in the dungeon, is all still elsewhere on the stage.

The opera opens with the young tenor (and office manager in this production) repeatedly begging his boss’s daughter, the ingenue, to marrying him. She also works in the office and refuses his appeals over and over again. We learn later in the scene that it isn’t that she doesn’t like him but rather that she likes her father’s assistant better and would rather marry him. 

I expected the ingenue to be a soubrette soprano and the tenor a light lyric but both Anna-Sophie Neher and Josh Lovell have bigger voices than that. Once we encounter the leading singers soprano Miina-Liisa Värelà and tenor Clay Hilley the casting becomes clear. They are both Wagnerian singers with big voices. Värelà has sung Ortrud and Sieglinde. Hilley has sung Siegfried at Bayreuth.

Since there is lots of ensemble singing in Fidelio and all of the voices have to be able to balance those of the leading singers. A regular soubrette or light lyric tenor would be inaudible.

The singers were uniformly excellent. Johannes Martin Kränzle plays an almost cartoonishly evil Don Pizzaro, spot-lit, standing alone on the edge of a staircase on the outside of the stage in a white shirt and tie, raving and singing up a storm.  

The big chorus was very impressive and, with the addition of numerous supernumeraries, filled the stage in the crowd scenes. There are also big TVs in the set, projections and effects that bathe the players and sometimes the audience in light.

There are five more performance. https://my.coc.ca/overview/2066