Opera
The Life-evaders
By DAVID CAIRNS
Fidelio—there is a force about it which for a time effaces the thought of all other music and which, to anyone who has come to know it well, sweeps its obvious but minor faults into utter insignificance. Once one has felt its power (and sometimes this happens only after a period of in- difference; for years I used to listen to the Canon Quartet with puzzled impatience, waiting for some modulation in harmony and mood, some glimmering of 'charac- terisation'), it is and always will be the opera of operas. Yet it used to be considered puerile to admire it. The dubious J. W. N. Sullivan preferred not to talk about it. Between the pseudo-Mozartian school which found it crude and the moralistic school which adulated Beethoven but did not believe any good could come out of the theatre, Fidelio was despised.
'Of all my children this was born in greatest labour', Beethoven told Schindler on his deathbed, in giving him the manu- script of the first (1805) version of the opera; and we sense immense struggles even in the greatly superior finished article of 1814. It was not merely that he had a lot to learn about opera and learnt it painfully. There are struggles in it purely to master the craft of writing music for the stage, but they are nothing compared with the struggles to master and mould the emotion fired in him by the subject of his first and, as it turned out, only opera. What made Fidelio a unique labour for Beethoven was the combination of an unfamiliar medium with a theme which expressed his most firmly held beliefs, mirrored his most private sufferings in a universal human setting, and answered his deepest longings. Tyranny, freedom, human brotherhood, a heroic wife (an ideal which survived the disappoint- ments of his relations with women) and the solitary, immured (whether in palpable walls or in the prison of total deafness), but unconquerable man—these explain the ten years' preoccupation, the three versions, the five separate overtures, the densely scribbled sketchbooks where fifteen pages of notes go to the making of only twenty lines of vocal music. In Beethoven's highly personal works Fidelio is the most personal. The problem possessed him; his attempts
to solve it left their tremendous mark on every bar of the opera.
Not that its weaknesses have not been greatly exaggerated. There are some trite moments, but as so often in Beethoven's music they act as a foil to the grandeur that surrounds them. In the Trio of Act 1 Rocco may go bumbling on on one note about the governor's being sure to allow Fidelio to help in the dungeons, but in the very next breath we enter a mood of sudden foreboding, with a phrase of superbly Beethovenian breadth in the violins, a surge of desolation on Leonore's part and the double basses climbing darkly above the cellos—a wonderful contrast of sonority. In the same way, the relatively conven- tional F major Allegro at the end of the Trio merely sharpens the anguish of Leonore's unexpected D flat, answered by Marzelline's naive, unsuspecting D natural —a simple piece of characterisation, but overwhelming in its truth and directness, and offensive only to the over- sophisticated.
It is only the same brethren to whom the plot is implausible. Quite apart from the fact that it follows a real incident of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, it has the ring of reality. To complain that the subplot around Marzelline is brushed aside and left a loose end is to admit to being oneself unmoved by the tide of events which sweeps her so helplessly out of her depth. The common domestic character of the opening scenes no longer seems an awkward leftover from singsplel in a world which has discovered that homely commandants of concen- tration camps can go straight home from supervising gas chambers to spend a dutiful evening in the bosom of their families. In fact, the way Beethoven places his mighty drama in a setting of ordinary everyday things, and then gradually works up to it, is masterly. We are also told that the text is banal; but the word, as so often, is only a refuge for life-evaders from the embarrassment of being confronted with emotion so naked and uncompromising. As for Leonore, while there may not have been many women in history capable of doing what she does, Beethoven leaves no doubt that she is one.
Besides, in the theatre such debates shrivel and have no meaning. Adequately done, the work seizes the spectator almost
bodily and plunges him in up to the soul. When the enormous harmonic and rhythmic tensions of the Dungeon Quartet are suddenly snapped by the sword of the distant trumpet, he weeps for the relief and joy that is his as well as Leonore's and Florestan's. At Glyndebourne the im- mediacy of the drama is quickened by the smallness of the house, as well as by the sharp tense lines of Rennert's production, with its admirable sense of the actual physical danger of Leonore's quest. The scoring sometimes suffers in Glynde- bourne's harsh acoustics; in the Allegro a Florestan's aria, for example, the offbeat horn and violin quavers, which are no more than the heartbeats of the oboe's melody, become so loud that they overpower the melody. But what is, in that sense, musical loss is dramatic gain. The audience is placed almost frighteningly close to the action. When Leonore leaps out of the shadows under the stairhead and faces Pizarro, it takes our breath away. Fidelio stands or falls by Leonore, a part for which, as Shaw said, nothing less than genius will do. It is Brouwenstijn's Leonore who keeps the performance on the heights. She may miss points of declamation, her tone production may not be always even, but it does not matter. She is a Leonore one believes in utterly. Her tall, loose-limbed athletic grace could pass for a youth's. At the same time the face is a deeply grained, unforgettable image of grief, sincerity, determination and grandeur of soul. And she sings throughout with a kind of desperate and radiant intensity and exaltation that in every phrase reveals the terrifying sight of a heroic woman at breaking point.
Such singing, and the unquenchable fire of the music freshly encountered, keep one's spirits up during a first Act in which Gui the conductor, busy as a chipmunk, is pointing out unexpected affinities between Beethoven and Rossini, and copying the externals of theToscanini style, the sawn-off, bone-dry quavers and the fierce take-it-or- leave-it manner, and ignoring the essential intensity of line and strength of rhythm. Nothing on the first night was as trifling as the overture, except perhaps the unfor- givable briskness of that monumental ensemble which should close the first Act in clouds of glory. His tempi are mostly well chosen; but tempo, like life, is what you make it. In the great 'Welch'ein Augenblick' passage Gui chooses a splendid- ly broad Furtwanglerian pulse then flabbily fails to do anything with it. But he is best where it matters most—in the dungeon, where he not only sets excellent tempi (and how rarely this happens, especially in the Trio) but achieves what has up to then escaped him, a truly deep dramatic tension; and for this his crimes may perhaps be forgiven him. There are no really weak links in the cast, and several strong ones. Richard Lewis's lying down at the conclusion of his flight of delirium has something of the character of an old cat trying out the right position on an un- familiar armchair, and would be laughed off the stage in any self-respecting amateur dramatic company; but he sings with a fine fervour. And in Fidelio, fervour is all.
Previous page
