FIDELIO (Royal Opera)****

 

By Megan

Link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000l9rq/beethovens-fidelio-the-royal-opera

Available until: July 2021

Beethoven only wrote one opera but he worked really hard on it. There are three slightly different versions of the opera and four different overtures. Some of the music was written for a different opera which Beethoven didn’t finish. The overtures are played quite often in concerts by orchestras and sometimes Leonore Overture 3 is played in the second act but nearly all the performances are of the last version of the opera. There is a really good recording of the first opera which is conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner but I have never heard the second one.

It says on iPlayer that the director is Rhodri Huw but I think he did the TV direction. I think the opera was directed by Tobias Kratzer. He set Act 1 during the French Revolution but in Act 2 the Chorus wear modern clothes and the main characters are still wearing their French Revolution clothes. I thought this was quite confusing and it made it look a bit like a play within a play so it felt a bit less real.

Some of the story has been changed a bit too. Leonore dresses up as a boy called Fidelio and nobody is supposed to know till the end but her employer Rocco’s daughter Marzelline is always spying on Fidelio (she wants to marry him) and she catches him/her not properly dressed and realises Leonore is a girl. It is a good idea but it is quite confusing because I don’t know why she doesn’t tell Rocco. Then she arrives at the end and does something I won’t say because it is a big spoiler but that was confusing too. There are extra lines put in the libretto so these bits made more sense. Maybe I don’t understand properly but I think maybe if it doesn’t work with the libretto maybe it shouldn’t be part of the story? But there was a lot I didn’t understand. There was a film projected on the back wall of the stage too but I don’t know who the people were.

I thought Rainer Sellmaier did some really good set designs. Rocco and Marzelline lived in a really nice house but then the prison looked really dark and dirty. It must be interesting being a set designer. If you’re an artist you have your own style but if you’re a set designer you have to think about the story and the characters and what the director wants.

I did enjoy it though because the music is so good. Antonio Pappano was the conductor and the orchestra sounds wonderful. Lise Davidsen who plays Leonore/Fidelio has a really beautiful voice. She is very beautiful too and I thought she acted Leonore’s emotions really well. She has really good vocal and physical agility. But I don’t know how Rocco and Marzelline thought she was a boy because she really looks like a lady. It isn’t Ms Davidsen’s fault. She didn’t choose her hairstyle (which I really really liked, she looked beautiful) but it wasn’t very boyish.

Florestan has been locked up for 2 years and David Butt Philip moves a bit like an animal at first, crawling on his hands and knees and then turning really suddenly like he heard something. The first note of his recitative is almost like a growl but a very musical and beautiful one. He isn’t in the opera till Act 2 which is more than halfway through but he has a long aria to make up for it. Mr Butt Philip performs it really well, not just his singing but his acting too. He is actually an understudy, it was supposed to be Jonas Kaufmann as Florestan.

Mr Butt Philip used to be a Jette Parker Young Artist and one of the current Young Artists Filipe Manu is First Prisoner. I bet it was exciting for him to work with Mr Butt Philip and realise he might get a chance like that one day. Mr Manu and the Second Prisoner Timothy Dawkins both have really good voices.

Marzelline and Jaquino are played by Amanda Forsythe and Robin Tritschler. They are usually quite funny characters but they were more serious this production. They did it really well and I liked their voices too. Rocco was played by Georg Zeppenfeld. He had a lovely rich bass voice and he seemed like a kind man. Simon Neal makes Don Pizarro really nasty and Elis Silinš played Don Fernando as a clever man who cares about people.

I don’t think I understood the production properly but I liked it because of the singing and the orchestra.