Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 2 - Fidelio

27 | Lyric Opera of Chicago that deprives its inmates of fresh air and movement is horrible; and that the deliberate starvation of a prisoner is even more horrible. More generally, that human beings should be protected in their freedom to breathe and use their voices (Enlightenment freedoms of expression, association, and of the press are essential supports for that idea). In making Leonore the linchpin of the plot, the opera also insists strongly on the agency of ordinary people in bringing about political change. It thus has a democratic element. Beyond this, the work is compatible—and is intended to be compatible—with many accounts of political authority, from constitutional monarchy to law- governed and not minority-oppressive democracy, and it is no surprise that it has been staged to great emotion at many different moments when the yoke of arbitrary power has been thrown off, notably at the reopening of many German opera houses after the defeat of the Nazis. One might object that Fidelio was also performed under the Nazi regime. Thomas Mann wrote from exile, “What obtuseness it took to listen to Fidelio in Himmler’s Germany without covering one’s face and fleeing the hall.” But conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler replied in a letter to Mann, “ Fidelio never has been presented in the Germany of Himmler, only in a Germany raped by Himmler.” In other words, performing the opera was the ultimate anti-Nazi gesture, reminding everyone of the noblest values of German culture that the Nazis had suppressed. The opera is a call to conscience for audiences wherever it is performed, whether in pretty good or pretty horrible regimes. The work’s third puzzle is its sudden happy ending. The famous offstage trumpet call initiates an abrupt reversal in the fates of all the characters. Leonore has already foiled Pizzaro temporarily, but she succeeds only because of an event so unexpected, so almost random, that the characters would hardly be justified in relying on such an event for their future happiness. When Leonore and Florestan embrace in the duet “O namenlose Freude” (“Oh nameless joy”), their music is appropriately feverish, cascading upward with no secure basis, striving at the limits of their vocal range, with no stable confidence, with words suggesting that words have given out (“nameless” joy, “unnameable woes,” “overlarge pleasure”). The finale itself is more sedate, in the confident key of C major. Everyone joins the final chorus, and the King’s messenger seems to be all that could be wanted, although we have absolutely no idea who this monarch is or what his regime is like. Justice is done, the villain punished, Florestan unchained. And yet: what are we really to make of this fairy tale, this sudden exaltation? It is a moment, an Augenblick . And human lives do contain surprising moments of wonder and joy. But that very word, Augenblick , so often repeated in the opera (as Joseph Kerman reminds us in an insightful article), can’t help reminding us that Pizzaro too has his moment: his aria of sadistic revenge begins Corey Weaver / San Francisco Opera Elza van den Heever as Leonore and Russell Thomas as Florestan in the San Francisco Opera production of Fidelio . It thus has a democratic lement. is done, the villain punished, Florestan unchained.