Losing faith in new ‘Fidelio’

Rocky night for Opera Boston

October 25, 2010|Opera Review, Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff

Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,’’ took quite a toll on its creator. “Of all my children,’’ he famously observed, “this is the one that caused me the most painful birth pangs and the most sorrows.’’ It tells the story of the ever-faithful Leonore, who disguises herself as Fidelio to gain work in a prison where she hopes to rescue her unjustly persecuted husband, Florestan. Even after all of Beethoven’s birth pangs and revisions, “Fidelio’’ remains a dramatically unwieldy and musically taxing work that presents myriad difficulties to singers and directors alike. But when it’s done right, the sublime beauty and humane power of the music can make it devastatingly effective in live performance.

Unfortunately, Friday night was not one of those experiences. With an oddly heavy-handed staging and an atypically shaky musical performance, Opera Boston’s new production of “Fidelio’’ ultimately did more to muffle the work’s potency than project it.

This staging sets the action in the Spanish Inquisition. Overall, director Thaddeus Strassberger, who scored a victory this summer at Bard College with his staging of Franz Schreker’s “Der Ferne Klang,’’ seemed stumped by the challenges of “Fidelio.’’ What was needed was direction that creatively focused this work’s abstract themes and brought the anguished plight of Leonore and Florestan into sharp relief. Instead, Strassberger seemed more interested in darkening the opera’s subtexts and ratcheting up its violence. To that end, he lavished attention on Florestan’s antagonist, Don Pizarro, portraying him as a corrupt sadist and forcing us, for instance, to watch him torture a writhing prisoner with a red-hot poker in Act I.

The opera was sung in German but this production renders the spoken dialogue in English translation, which consistently seemed to break any spell that the music had conjured. At other moments, the staging flouts the libretto in ways that undermined the drama with little or no compensatory gain. One of the opera’s most chilling lines comes at the beginning of Act II when Florestan, who has been wasting away in a dungeon, makes his first entrance with a primal, Jobian cry: “God! What darkness here!’’ On Friday, he did so on a half-lighted stage.