Vol. 19 No. 21 · 30 October 1997
pages 25-28 | 6385 words
On ‘Fidelio’
Edward Said
‘Fidelio’ is the one opera in the repertory that has the power to sway audiences even when it is indifferently performed. Yet it is a highly problematic work whose triumphant conclusion and the impression it is designed to convey of goodness winning out over evil do not go to the heart of what Beethoven was grappling with. Not that its plot is complex, or that, like many of the French operas of the day which influenced Beethoven and whose brilliance he admired, it is a long and complicated work: Fidelio’s success in the theatre derives in part from its compactness and intensity – in the course of two extremely taut acts, a devoted wife rescues her unjustly imprisoned husband, foils a tyrannically cruel Spanish grandee, and manages to release all the other prisoners arbitrarily imprisoned in his dungeons. Unlike most other operas, however, Fidelio is burdened with the complexities of its own past as well as the huge effort it cost its composer before he was able to present it in its ‘final’ form in Vienna on 23 May 1814. It is the only work of its kind he ever completed; it caused him a great deal of pain; yet despite the attention he lavished on it, he failed to get the satisfaction from it, in terms either of popular success or of aesthetic conviction, that his efforts entitled him to.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From Rod Jones
Edward Said’s essay about Beethoven’s Fidelio (LRB, 30 October) provides a useful perspective on recent productions of the opera and the problems it evidently poses for those who feel less than comfortable with the idea that culture and politics can be spoken of in the same breath. John Eliot Gardiner’s ideologically motivated preference for the earlier Leonore, which derives from the distinction he makes between the rich and complex world of individual human lives that it represents and the arid world of politics represented by Fidelio, is a case in point. There is worse. The wholesale stripping out of politics and their replacement by an uncompromisingly religious reading, complete with giant cross, in an earlier ENO production, for example. But problems can arise elsewhere. The neat, social-realist closure represented by the off-stage shooting of Don Pizarro at the conclusion of WNO’s recent production runs counter to the opera’s radical openness and complex lack of definition and certainty. To get to first base with Fidelio requires, as Said so cogently argues, full recognition of and engagement with the challenges posed by its complex and contradictory intersection of musical forms and dramatic structure, with its radical discontinuities, strange emotional intensifications, frustrating silences and lack of convincing and reassuring resolution. Because of this we can be sure that Fidelio will outrun and exhaust the next and all subsequent attempts to encompass it – which is as much a measure of its greatness as of its difficulty.
Rod Jones
Usk, Monmouthshire
