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Expectations were running at fever pitch for the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio on March 1, 2020. Who could wait for the Norwegian phenomenon Lise Davidsen’s first crack at Beethoven’s cross-dressing Leonore, a daring seraph of compassion guaranteed to suit her to a T? Plus, the trending German director Tobias Kratzer, who staged the Tannhäuser of Davidsen’s triumphant Bayreuth debut the summer before, was onboard for his red-letter house debut. Then came Covid, kiting the stakes even higher. Shortly after the premiere, cameras captured the historic sixth and final performance—seconds, figuratively speaking, ahead of the long pandemic blackout.
In general no friend of period productions, Kratzer teleports the action from Beethoven’s Spain of the mind to revolutionary France, which is hardly a stretch at all. What with all the three-cornered hats, Act One plays like a wobbly outtake from A Tale of Two Cities. During the overture, the curtain rises to reveal a prison forecourt. Offstage, the guillotine is working overtime. Desperate womenfolk pick over a basket of severed heads to find loved ones. Amid the confusion Davidsen’s noble Leonore materializes on a less clear-cut errand, gets the bum’s rush, and quickly returns as the strapping lad Fidelio, armed with a letter of introduction.
As we either know or will soon learn, she’s after her firebrand husband Florestan (David Butt Philips), who has vanished without a trace—and she’s getting warm. In Act Two, we’ll meet him, chained to a rock in a brightly lit, spic-and-span neoclassical assembly hall, under the dispassionate eyes of a chorus of formally attired dignitaries. Videographers pick out individual onlookers’ faces, shown in giant blow-ups on the room’s blank walls. Some have read Kratzer’s imagery as a scathing caricature of the world’s power élites, who watch and pretend to suffer with those they see suffer, yet never lift a finger. Let’s recall that in 1967, a puckish Pierre Boulez said the most “elegant” solution to the dilemma of the lyric medium in our time would be to “blow up the opera houses.” Don’t say Kratzer’s not doing his bit.
Among other things, he has tossed much of opera’s original spoken dialogue, interpolating irrelevancies, out-of-place quotations, and narrative contradictions. In so doing, he manages to inflate the jailer’s ingénue daughter Marzelline (Amanda Forsythe), aflame for Fidelio but mortified to discover “his” bound breasts, into a tragedy queen of manic intensity, brandishing trumpet and pistol like the Spirit of Revolution incarnate. It’s a conceit nothing in the score will support. And what’s with her black eye?
Without so much as trying, Davidsen’s bashful yet Junoesque heroine nullifies Kratzer’s earnest tomfoolery. Her personal authority lends the retooled dialogue a sort of provisional validity even where it is most absurd. But Leonore’s determination in the face of despair, her compassion for the downtrodden, her trust in Providence, in short, her soul—all these things live in the music. Davidsen’s gravitas and the sheer splendor of her soprano convey them in real time. We hear them in her innate eloquence of phrase, her spontaneous connection of notes and words. Lucky Beethoven! To the cavalcade of incomparable Leonore avatars of the past two centuries, Davidsen adds another for our time.
