Beethoven Fidelio
October 2005 Reviewed by: Wes Marshall Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Pity poor Ludwig van Beethoven. He lived in an era when instrumental and orchestral composers weren’t considered important until they had managed to produce a hit opera. Straddling the Classical and Romantic eras, he was just a little too early for the heart-on-the-sleeve chamber sighs of Chopin or the rock-star theatrics of Liszt. Instead, he was caught in the epoch between Mozart and Rossini, and as great as he was, he still had to produce an opera to be considered a truly significant composer.

He certainly had the ability to write memorable tunes and dramatic music. But he was lacking one significant trait common to successful opera composers: patience. Whether with singers, conductors or hyper-inflated impresarios, Beethoven’s temper and perfectionism (not to mention his growing deafness) threw a big damper on his relationships with the people he needed to make an opera a success.

His first and only opera, then titled Leonore, was completed in 1805. But just before the premier, the French invaded Vienna and all of Beethoven’s fans fled the city. The opera played to empty houses and was largely forgotten. The next year, Beethoven made significant changes to the opera and was ready to show it to the returned Viennese. But Beethoven got into a shouting match with the impresario after the second performance, took his scores, and left.

Eight years later, Beethoven retuned the work, now called Fidelio, with substantial changes to the orchestral parts and a new overture. This time, the work met with approval, partly because Beethoven, by 1814, was famous. Despite the tinkering and the years of work, this is not the classic you would expect from the man who wrote the Opus 130 String Quartet or the 32nd Piano Sonata. Alas, Fidelio is second-rate Beethoven, but second-rate Beethoven beats most others’ first-rate work.

The story has to do with a prison and a wife’s hope to free her husband by entering the jail incognito as a man working as a jailer. A lot happens and the plotting is part of the fun, so I’ll let you discover it for yourself.

The present performance is from a European-TV release last year. The orchestra is not famous, but it plays with energy and precision. It is under the baton of one of the world’s great conductors, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who provides dramatic tuttis and gentle, floating pads of sound in the more emotional arias and duets. Listen especially to chapter 17, "Abscheulicher," for his masterful control of balance and emotion. That’s also a good time to hear Camilla Nylund, as Leonore (masquerading as Fidelio). Conductor and singer fit together perfectly as she floats quiet notes over the hall then jumps into stark emotional outbursts. The singers are all fairly unknown, but that shouldn’t stop you from buying this set. They are, to a person, superb.

The set design, sadly, reflects what we so often see in European circles these days. Minimalism is supposed to equal cool, detached intellectualism with a soupçon of ironic disdain for us bourgeois operagoers who still love the "Grand" in Grand Opera. Certainly, we are dealing with prison life, and I’m not asking for gowns or chariots, but please. This becomes pathetically stupid in chapter 20, when Harnoncourt is drawing some of the most sublimely gorgeous sounds I’ve ever heard from Fidelio as the prisoners sing en choir. Close your eyes and listen, because if you watch, you’ll fall off the sofa laughing.

The picture is good, if slightly fuzzy, and the sound is very good, with the DTS track being the best. As is becoming numbingly common, there are no -- zero -- extras. Come on, people. You could at least film a rehearsal! Or how about finding a good music professor to give an illustrated talk about the opera?

There are two other Fidelios available on DVD, each with its detractors. All three try to do something to jazz up the opera, whether it’s through odd staging or weird directing. Here’s what I’d like to see: a conductor like Roger Norrington, who digs through original manuscripts to find the truth in a piece, aided by some classicists in the realm of art and stage direction who want to re-create Beethoven’s vision. Then give them some good singers, a sharp orchestra and a film director who knows how to be invisible. Then we’ll have our Fidelio. Until then, this one will do.

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