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Atlanta Opera’s ‘Fidelio’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OPERA REVIEW
Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” The Atlanta Opera. Thursday evening at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center. Repeats Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. www.atlantaopera.org.
Early in Beethoven’s jailhouse opera, “Fidelio,” four characters sing about love in the quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” (“So strange I feel”).
It gets complicated. Rocco, who is the jailer but also a decent guy, hopes to marry off his daughter, Marzelline, to one of his assistants, a young lad named Fidelio. Trouble is, Fidelio is really the cross-dressing Leonore. She is trying to free her husband, a political prisoner. The fourth voice in the quartet, Jaquino, another assistant, hopes to finally win Marzelline’s fickle heart. Everyone feels anxious about their future. Meanwhile, silent prisoners, rotting in their cells, watch them from all sides.
William Fred Scott, who is ending his 20-year artistic directorship of the Atlanta Opera, conducted the quartet with the aching sadness we usually associate with the Mozart Requiem or a Mahler adagio.
Frozen in time, it was the outstanding moment of this stark new production, which opened Thursday evening at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center.
The Atlanta Opera, recovering from several years of artistic and financial turmoil, needs to cut costs. To keep the budget balanced this season, the opera shelved plans to rent a fancy “Fidelio” set. Instead, four levels of bare scaffolding serve as the prison cells, with a courtyard in the middle.
In scene after scene, Ken Yunker’s effective lighting turns the intimidating edifice into a ghostly hell. As soldier march along, their faces remain in shadow, even as the scaffolding metal throws a harsh glare. We see the darkest dungeon through a chain-link fence, projected onto the scrim.
The costumes are the only way to date the events. The street-wear styles evoke a bleak 1950s East Germany, or maybe the retro-nerdy fashion of today.
Although Lorna Haywood’s “director’s notes,” inserted in the program, finds parallels between “Fidelio” and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, her stage direction was thankfully free of pantomimed torture.
Still, she put the evil/goodness and dark/light dichotomies in context. Thus the playful domestic scenes at the beginning — complete with Beethoven’s sunny music — properly contrasted with the heroic life-and-death struggles at the opera’s climax.
On this last point Scott ran into trouble. His conducting had a sameness throughout. In addition, while the orchestra can play with spunk and polish, one sensed that this Beethoven (as with Wagner) was beyond their collective abilities.
Happily, the singers, an appealing bunch individually, meshed well in ensemble numbers. As Marzelline, soprano Angela Turner Wilson created the most three-dimensional persona on stage, coquettish, inquisitive, vulnerable. With a pleasing, bright voice, she made you pay attention to her, right to the end. How would she, above all, react to Fidelio’s unmasking? (Haywood’s direction contributed to Marzelline’s personal soap opera.)
As Rocco, bass Kurt Link was a terrific character actor-type. His “money buys happiness” aria was believable, comic, at once rough but tender. Tenor George Dyer sang a fine Jaquino, as a likable drip with a standard-issue voice. (That’s why he is still single.)
With a black leather trench coat and patent leather motorcycle boots, Donnie Ray Albert’s Don Pizarro came straight from Central Casting, villain division. His baritone was dark and firm but small for the cavernous civic center. The orchestra often overwhelmed him in his comic-book “Vengeance” aria. Ryan Smith had good presence as the First Prisoner. The chorus of prisoners sang with such freshness and nuance — prepared by chorus master Walter Huff — one couldn’t believe these convicts had endured any hardships whatsoever.
Clifton Forbis sang Florestan, Leonore’s husband, in powerful declarations, with the confidence of an innocent man. Bitterness in his timbre seemed appropriate for a man kept in isolation for two years.
The moral climax of the opera comes when Leonore/Fidelio sees a decrepit prisoner of unknown identity. He might be her husband, but she pledges to save his life no matter who he is. At that small moment, her heroism magnifies from the individual to the universal, from saving one man to saving all mankind. Here Leonore, like Brunnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring,” becomes a female Christ figure.
Beethoven doesn’t make this universal moment the crux of his opera — top billing goes to Leonore holding Pizarro at gunpoint, with Judgement Day trumpets blaring — but her selfless decision best captures his humanist world view.
Dramatic soprano Frances Ginzer clearly believes in the importance of the role. In her famous act one aria, “Komm, Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern” (“Come, Hope, Let the last star”), she offered so much — vocal power, theatrical presence, interpretive maturity, a range up to a high B — that it seems ungrateful to complain of the wobble, the strident tone and, as the evening progressed, the shrieking. (For the Saturday performance, soprano Aimee Willis, who sang the Atlanta Opera’s Salome in 2003, replaces Ginzer.)
One final note. With Scott’s farewell at hand, many of his fans were expecting a special event. Before the music began, Scott accepted a conductor’s tradtional pre-performance applause from the audience. More energized than usual, the ovation prompted a few people to stand in appreciation. But Scott cut short any limelight basking by turning to conduct the overture. According to opera management, the official goodbyes will come after Sunday’s performance.
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