Review: Davidsen Goes Out with a Bang in Beethoven’s FIDELIO Under Malkki

Political prisoner is rescued from dungeon by his faithful wife, only to find that she’s pregnant!

Shocking!

Not really: Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, who’s shown she indispensable in roles from Tchaikovsky’s QUEEN OF SPADES to Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS starts her maternity leave at the end of her Met run of Beethoven’s only opera, FIDELIO, on March 15. She’s proven a fearless singer but in this week’s opening of the Beethoven work, as Leonore, she also showed herself a game actor.

At the start of the second act, Davidsen, disguised as a man to get her job with jailer Rocco (bass Rene Pape in fine form) but with a baby bump, descended the steep ladder leading to the dungeon of her husband, Florestan's (the high-flying, lyric-dramatic tenor David Butt Philip) confinement. Frankly, my heart was in my throat, hoping for an uneventful outcome. (It was.) Luckily, she didn’t have to climb back up.

She was in magnificent form from start to finish. Whether singing about how her “strength lies in my love for me husband. A voice within me urges me on” in the famed aria “Abscheulicher!” or her duet with Florestan when they are reunited, the gorgeous “O namenlose Freude!” she showed why she has become a favorite at the Met since her debut (and why I look forward to her return next season as the company’s latest Isolde).

Besides tenor Philip, who provided a proper foil in his duet with Davidsen, as well as showing the stamina for his entry at the start of Act II singing “Gott!”, and Pape, whose role doesn’t provide nearly enough to do, there are the juvenile and ingenue leads.

As Jaquino, Rocco’s assistant, tenor Magnus Dietrich in his Met debut did as well as possible in an impossibly dull role. (It’s notable that the upstart Heartbeat Opera company cut out the role completely in its updated version of the opera, to no ill effect.) Shown to much better advantage was soprano Ying Fang as Marzelline, Rocco’s daughter, who has become smitten with Fidelio/Leonore, and used her beautiful voice skillfully, even when she’s abashed at falling for an unsuitable mate. As the First Prisoner, tenor Jonghyun Park did some notable singing.

The other two principals were bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny as the villainous Pizarro, governor of the prison who has unjustly imprisoned Florestan, and bass Stephen Milling as Fernando, the King’s minister, who has unwittingly allowed Pizarro to have his way.

I was somewhat disappointed in the brisk tempo of conductor Susanna Malkki’s overture, though things picked up from there and she mostly had the great Met orchestra playing at its considerable best. The opera places significant demands on the mostly male chorus and they were triumphant under chorus director Tilman Michael.

As for Jurgen Flimm’s production, staged this time by Gina Lapinski, I find it unbearably grim in its set design by Robert Israel and lighting by Duane Schuler, with odd costuming by Florence von Gerkan.

For a composer who we canonize for his symphonies, concertos and sonatas, songs and chamber music, Beethoven had only a single foray into opera territory and it was a notoriously troubled one, with lots of rewriting involved. There were several versions of FIDELIO (earlier ones known as LEONORE) before the one we have today. (Not that it’s the only opera to have such troubles.) As noted in the program, it has a “seemingly frivolous opening” before morphing into “a heroic melodrama, only to end as a cantata,” as described by critic David Cairns.

Those shortcomings didn’t stop it from being an early favorite of mine, in the classic Furtwangler recording starring Martha Modl as Leonore and Wolfgang Windgassen as Florestan. I was gobsmacked to learn when I first heard the work at the Met that there was dialogue (it's a "singspiel") that had been cut from the version I’d become so fond of.

Whatever the imperfections of FIDELIO, with Lise Davidsen at the fore, it is worth beg-borrow-or-steal-ing to witness in the opera house. Tickets, however, are as rare as a hen's tooth. The final performance of the work this season will take place on the matinee of March 15, however, which will be broadcast live on The Robert K. Johnson Foundation–Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network.

Caption: Lise Davidsen as Leonore and David Butt Philip as Florestan.

Credit: Karen Almond/Met Opera

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