Parents aren’t supposed to have favourites. But Ludwig van Beethoven seems to have had a particular soft spot for his only opera Fidelio, and not for the reasons we might suppose. “Of all my children, this is the one that cost me the worst birth-pangs and brought me the most sorrow; and for that reason it is the one most dear to me”, he told his biographer Anton Schindler, and there’s no question that Fidelio had a troubled youth. Its premiere, in November 1805, was a failure; nine years of revisions and rewrites followed before it achieved its final form (and qualified success) in 1814. Along the way, Beethoven grumbled that it would win him a “martyr’s crown”. Most music-lovers know that he wrote and discarded three different overtures before finally hitting the spot.
But problems can also be opportunities – and the very issues that troubled Beethoven have been a gift to modern theatre directors. The music is sublime; the basic story – a young woman disguises herself as a man in an attempt to rescue her husband, a political prisoner, from certain death – is timeless. And if Beethoven simply wasn’t very skilled at dramatic pacing, or particularly interested in his various subplots: well, there’s an opening for a fresh imagination. Fidelio is the ultimate kit of parts: a standing invitation to engage in creative dialogue with Beethoven himself.
It’s perfect, in other words, for Dutch National Opera’s contribution to the 2024 Holland Festival. The Festival is all about innovation: creating work that asks questions, and approaches even the classics in daring and sometimes controversial new ways. Last year, Philipp Stölzl and Philipp Krenn transformed Dvorak’s Rusalka into a gritty interrogation of the price of celebrity. This year, Fidelio is being reimagined by the maverick Ukrainian director Andriy Zholdak – not known for treating masterpieces with kid gloves. With the 2024 festival focusing in issues of “migration, identity, inequality”, it seems probable that the gloves are about to come off.
Luc Joosten, the company’s Head of Dramaturgy, has watched Zholdak’s staging take shape (which runs from 5th June). “If we were going to attack Fidelio – and especially Fidelio in the Holland Festival, where approaches towards opera always take a different angle – we wanted something bold. Andriy’s way of working is very unorthodox in opera. I first worked with him in Antwerp in 2016 and it took a bit of getting used to. But at the same time, the result was simply astonishing because he is... well, I usually don’t use these words, but he has something visionary in his way of telling stories. He is a bit of a crazy artist. But in an inspiring way!”
Zholdak himself takes inspiration from the movies. Born in Kyiv, he trained in Moscow, in the tradition of Stanislavsky, but takes his visual cues from the great originals of European cinema: Tarkovsky, Bergman and Lars von Trier – the contrarian Danish director whose Dogme 95 movement brought a raw, sometimes shocking emotional realism back into European arthouse. “He’s not copying them” says Joosten, “but you can feel it in a lot of things that he mentions, or references that he makes in the rehearsals”. Zholdak has also dispensed with the spoken text that – for many directors and audiences – is one of the stumbling blocks in Beethoven’s drama.
“In general, when he comes to opera, Zholdak is never interested in illustrating a story in a cynical or obvious way” says Joosten. “The story is there – the story is what it is – but he’s always approaching the opera from the angle of the music. And especially in this case, where the music is so powerful. He says that for him the music is such a powerful presence that he wants to take his inspiration in the first instance from the score, and from what happens there”.
The visuals and the storytelling might be novel, then, but the fundamentals of this Fidelio lie in Beethoven’s own soaring inspiration. And while some minor numbers are cut to clarify Zholdak’s storytelling, there have been musical gains, too. Zholdak is following the tradition (instigated by Gustav Mahler) of incorporating Beethoven’s mighty, discarded Leonore no.3 overture into the score. “Since we are working with the Concertgebouw Orchestra with maestro Andrés Orozco-Estrada, it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss”, says Joosten. With a cast that includes Eric Cutler as the imprisoned Florestan and Jacquelyn Wagner as his heroic wife Leonore, the musical side of the production is a thrilling prospect in its own right.
And Fidelio, after all, is nothing if not an opera that transcends its era. Zholdak, like Francis Ford Coppola, believes that the essence of any great drama can be reduced to a single word. In this case that word is Harmony, in both a literal and a figurative sense. “For Zholdak, Fidelio is a story of regaining harmony in one way or another: trying to escape from the evil forces that lead us to discord” says Joosten. “It’s about the possibility of coming together – and the impossibilities of coming together”. In the conflict-torn world of 2024, Beethoven’s 210 year-old problem child is still, it seems, asking the difficult questions – and offering challenging answers.
Fidelio runs at Dutch National Opera from 5th–29th June 2024.
This article was sponsored by Dutch National Opera and Ballet.
