‘Fidelio’ Review: A Harsh Sentence

San Francisco Opera new production of Beethoven’s work, set in a detention facility, might leave some hoping for an early release. 

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 19, 2021 3:15 pm

San Francisco 

Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” an Enlightenment paean to freedom and a celebration of the triumph of courage over tyranny, is regularly updated to reflect contemporary struggles. A 2018 production by New York’s Heartbeat Opera did a particularly thoughtful job, exploring American mass incarceration and recording the voices and images of actual inmates for the opera’s famous Prisoners’ Chorus. Perhaps most wrenchingly, the whole opera was staged as the heroine’s fantasy: Becoming a guard in the prison where her husband has been held incommunicado for two years and rescuing him happens only in her dreams. San Francisco Opera’s new production, directed by Matthew Ozawa, which opened last week, sets “Fidelio” in a “detention facility in the recent past or not-so-distant future.”

Alexander V. Nichols’s grim set, a huge two-level cube of steel bars and fluorescent lights, first shows offices and then revolves to display chain-link cages crammed with detainees in a mix of prison jumpsuits and modern street clothes; the armed guards herding and sometimes beating the inmates wear bullet-proof vests with “Security” stamped on the back. ( Jessica Jahn did the costumes; JAX Messenger and Justin A. Partier, the suitably gloomy lighting.) One couldn’t help thinking of detention facilities on the American southern border; the word “cages” appears in the translated supertitle text. For Act II, both levels are stacked high with file boxes. The walls of Florestan’s corner cell flash constantly with black-and-white security video of the cages, presumably as torture, and he is chained to a chair. 

These are all reasonable ideas, in keeping with the theme, but they don’t cohere together or with the opera. Who are these people? Nearly all detainees are white, so they are presumably not undocumented border-crossers; and, at the end, the liberator Don Fernando refers to them as “our citizens.” The flashing screens in Florestan’s cell turn off as this solitary prisoner starts his aria with the words “God! What darkness here!”—which is supposed to be a cry of agony, but in this case would more likely be one of relief. This is an invented facility, a mashup of contemporary prison tropes.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The clumsy directing didn’t make things any clearer. Group scenes had no finesse: When the prisoners were released from the cages, there was very little space on the catwalks for them to spread out and sing their chorus, so they filed obediently up or down staircases to get into position. Smaller scene work was similarly awkward and static, and the most dramatic moments were unconvincing: When Leonore leaped between the murderous villain, Pizarro, and Florestan, declaring “I am his wife!” she got a laugh. That is never a good sign. 

Elza van den Heever, crammed into a bullet-proof vest and cap, seemed constrained as Leonore; she was best when she was able to expand into lyricism, as she did with “Komm, Hoffnung.” As Florestan, Russell Thomas gave an intense, nuanced account of “Gott! Welch dunkel hier!”—more man-in-extremis than clarion tenor. James Creswell made Rocco, the jailer, a jocular, amiable fellow, oddly unfazed by his job. Greer Grimsley glowered and raged persuasively as Pizarro. As Marzelline, the jailer’s daughter, Anne-Marie MacIntosh’s bright, appealing soprano stood out in the ensembles; Christopher Oglesby was properly annoying as her persistent suitor, Jaquino, and Soloman Howard unfurled his opulent bass in a bit of luxury casting as Don Fernando. His sharp suit and glad-handing for the news cameras in the final scene suggested a politician on the make. Zhengyi Bai and Stefan Egerstrom were effective as the First and Second Prisoners. The San Francisco Opera Chorus sounded full-bodied and splendid. 

In the pit, Eun Sun Kim, the company’s new music director, opened the evening with a vigorous account of the overture, but afterward her conducting leaned toward the foursquare, efficient rather than inspiring. “Fidelio” is a mix of styles, ranging from light comic byplay to grand solemnity, and welding them into a whole can be a challenge. Ms. Kim brought transparency to the small ensembles, but the overall shaping of the piece felt inflexible and episodic. In the final scene, Leonore removes the chains from Florestan’s wrists and begins the ensemble “O Gott! O welch’ ein Augenblick!” This rapturous moment should seem suspended in time, but Ms. Kim pushed ahead into it, diminishing its power. 

That “Augenblick” (literally, “moment”) is the crux of the opera: We must believe that Leonore, through her devotion and courage, has liberated not only Florestan, but all the prisoners, whoever they may be. In this production, the superimposition of a contemporary setting over an 18th-century story and form was too awkwardly done to allow us to believe such a fairy tale. 

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).