May 4, 2001    

"When we talk about Beethoven as a composer who was concerned with expressing the ideas of liberty and equality in his music," says Music Director Daniel Barenboim, "we immediately thnk of his Ninth Symphony and its message of universal brotherhood. But Fidelio is the work in which he first explored these themes in a very personal way."

Beethoven's lone opera was the tortured and idealistic composer's opportunity to rage against tyranny, injustice, and imprisonment. In this "rescue opera," a woman (Leonore), disguised as a young man (under the name Fidelio), enters service in the evil Don Pizarro's castle hoping to find and free her husband, who has been imprisoned for resisting the tyrant's evil ways. Eventually, she finds him and rescues the imprisoned masses from the castle's dark bowels, though in the grim moments at the beginning of the second act she is forced to help dig her husband's grave.

Where its glorious music has transcended the ages, Fidelio's's unimaginative libretto often seems both silly and dated. The CSO's abridged production (courtesy of Columbia University cultural critic Edward Said's excellent new text) dispenses with much of what's unneccessary to a modern audience. Director Alexander Schulin (known for his work with Barenboim at the Berlin Staatsoper) has transplanted the opera from 18th Century Spain to a Kafkaesque bureaucratic 1920s Germany, replacing the dungeon with a sort of officious (but equally malevolent) big brotherhood, adding touches of the East German secret service and American prohibition-era mafia. Though the huge wall of files comes crashing down during the finale as the corrupt Pizarro is vanquished, this performance acknowledges that virtue has been victorious, but also asks us ominously "but for how long?"

Shortly after finding out that he would eventually go deaf -- a parallel sort of imprisonment, which strengthened his identification with the story -- Beethoven began work on the opera that would eventually become Fidelio (though Beethoven preferred to call it Leonore). The work would, however, take a decade to bring to the stage in its final form (along the way inspiring four overtures, and much of Beethoven's best music).

Inaugural performances were postponed because of difficulties with the censor. Eventually the premiere was given, but to an almost-empty house -- the French had occupied Vienna and most of the city's opera-going aristocrats (and Beethoven's best patrons) had fled. The composer succeeded in getting the opera remounted the next year (with a new overture), but withdrew it after two performances because he thought theater management was cheating him. A third attempt to run the production in Prague also failed.

It wasn't until 1814 that the opera finally had a significant run (in a considerably edited format). Though happy at its eventual success (Napoleon had just been defeated, adding the first of many new layers of meaning that would accrete as tyrants were deposed), Beethoven complained, "this whole opera business is the most tiresome affair in the world."

Even today, the piece remains a substantial undertaking for any orchestra, requiring a creative director, chorus, top-notch soloists, as well as theatre backstage folk, usually rare at Symphony Center. Indeed, the CSO has only performed the work once before, in 1970, and recorded it (under Sir Georg Solti's baton) in 1979.

To mount this production, Daniel Barenboim has assembled a team of Berlin and Vienna's best. The heroine Leonore, played by Wagnerian soprano Waltraud Meier, got the majority of applause, though her accented narration was sometimes difficult to follow and her voice perhaps not perfect for the role. Bass Rene Pape's expressive portrait of the complex role of Rocco, Pizarro's money-loving, but basically kind jailer, was particularly outstanding. Thomas Moser, though maybe not the ideal choice for the role, was a fine Florestan -- his interpretation of the famed prison aria was especially moving. Ekkehard Wlaschiha, though well-known from other appearances, was a disappointment as the corrupt businessman/tyrant Don Pizarro -- neither evil, nor incisive enoughfor the role.

Fidelio (in German, with projected English supertitles) will also be performed on Thursday, May 28 (8 p.m.) and Sunday, May 31, 1998 (3 p.m.). For more information, call the Symphony Center Box Office at (312) 294-3000.