Review: FIDELIO, Royal Ballet and Opera

The original outing of Tobias Kratzer’s production of Fidelio was cut short courtesy of a Covid-induced lockdown. How pertinent for an opera whose most famous aria is its prisoner’s chorus: “Oh what joy, in the open air. Freely to breathe again!”

Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio is hard to pin down. Strip it down to its bare bones and you have a romance, but it wears the flesh of a political thriller. The cross-dressing protagonist could garner farcical potential, but it’s played down in Kratzer’s intellectually elusive production. Just as you think you’ve got a handle on its rich philosophy, he pulls the rug from underneath you.

The first act pays faithful service to the opera. Revolution-ravaged France; a grime-lined prison yard. Fidelio has won the trust of the prison warden and caught the eye of his daughter Marzelline. But it’s a ruse. Fidelio is really Leonore in disguise, plotting a prison breakout for her husband, in-mate, Florestan. The clock is ticking. Fiendish Don Pizarro wants Florestan dead by daylight: tricorns and treachery under the dangling Tricolour.

But the second act devilishly collapses in on itself. The curtain rises. Florestan’s prison cell is flanked by an on-stage audience decked in modern dress. With crisp white walls its either purgatory or a runway at Paris fashion week. As Fidelio frees her husband, political subterfuge becomes its own theatre. We, the real audience, watch the act of watching. How could Beethoven have foreseen the social media age where every fibre of current affairs is stratified through a screen? There’s a haunting prescience regardless, one that metastasises intrigue into philosophical heft.

Alexander Soddy conducts with pugnacious vivacity. There’s life in every nook and cranny of the music to parallel the zigzagging narrative. Jenifer Davis’ Leonore commands the space with gutsy melancholy opposite Eric Cutler’s sonorous Florestan. Jochen Schmeckenbecher relishes Don Pizarro’s villainy, strutting with proto-fascist arrogance supported by a cavalcade of black shirted goons. They crash together in a wave of revolutionary zeal and chest pumping politics.

But Christina Gansch’s Marzelline cuts through the melodrama. Her dilemma is the opera’s emotional fulcrum. Betray Leonore or stay faithful to the person she thought she loved? Gansch conjures poignant bittersweetness; for all the big ideas here, her unrequited love is the most resonant.

Fidelio plays at the Royal Ballet and Opera until 26 October

Photo Credits: Tristram Kenton

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