The Los Angeles Philharmonic's reprise of its semi-staged Fidelio from 2022 in collaboration with Deaf West Theatre gives a voice to Beethoven so enormous that those with hearing impairments can surely hear. A signing actor and an acting singer is allotted to every role. Two choruses took part: the deaf performers of El Sistema of Venezuela's Coro de Manos Blancas and the Cor de Cambra del Palau de la Música Catalana. The idea for the production was originally developed by Gustavo Dudamel as a means of illuminating what he felt to be the opera’s central theme – the fight to overcome obstacles in order to discover one’s own personal freedom.
It is a profoundly illuminating, deconstructed Beethoven built on Dudamel's treatment of the score which is stripped to its sinews by an orchestra with the tight flexible low end of reduced cello and double bass sections before being reborn in director Alberto Arvelo's theatrical narrative. The recitatives are signed, not sung, which immediately puts the hearing at an unaccustomed disadvantage. And yet the marvelously illustrative power of Beethoven's orchestra in Dudamel's hands provides just the continuity needed by this unimaginably complicated mechanism, like operatic Cirque du Soleil played out on a three-dimensional chess board. The result was not Fidelio as it has been or ever meant to be. It was a voyage into the unknown.
At first a formality informs the physical relationship between the two casts, the singers in white robes of uncertain shapes and materials, the actors in colorful costumes with a commedia dell'arte flair. As the opera proceeds, they begin crossing boundaries of identity, at times interacting physically with each other. The two choruses also cover ground over and around each other and the organ and chorus lofts on staircases by Escher. The choreography and general movement about the stage by the actors was clever and often dazzling, and if it was occasionally confusing, it was more than compensated by the children running and laughing alongside the adults in the rainbow array of prisoners let into the light, making their liberation even more emotionally joyous. Along the way, all sorts of philosophical implications and human ironies are raised alongside those of devotion and courage.