A compelling harmony of stage and pit in a radically trad Fidelio at Garsington

This Fidelio started as it meant to go on. As Music Director at Garsington and conductor of this revival, Douglas Boyd exerted authority over both the score and the band of The English Concert from the opening bars of the Overture: weighty and momentous, not pushed or straining for effect. Perfectly pitched horns in their perilously exposed duet inspired further confidence, and proved a harbinger of consistently first-class playing.

We have come a long way, almost unrecognisably far, since the days when the enjoyment of period-instrument Beethoven might involve a calculation of pros and cons. The drama of Fidelio spreads up and outwards from the orchestra – maybe one reason why it’s still treated as a “problem” opera – and on this count, there were no cons, and very many pros, in the throaty violas and other inner parts emerging into the sun like the Act 1 prisoners.

John Cox’s staging, too, revived here by Jamie Manton, is so radically trad, so uncomplicated in the telling, as to spring new surprises on those of us now accustomed to Beethoven’s “problem” being solved by rewriting, reinvention, resetting, all the rest. It turns out that the score as Beethoven finally left it alone in 1814, linked by judiciously pruned original dialogue, still does the job.

The action opens with Marzelline potting plants, in a nod to the country-house surroundings but no less resonantly to the domestic setting envisioned by Beethoven and his librettists. This improbable and perilous harmony between then and now, there and here, which could have struck so false a note, rises to a sublime peak when the prisoners clamber out of their cistern below stage and into the garden beyond. An unforgettable moment.

Gary McCann’s set presents us with half a panopticon, in the circular design for a “modern” prison made by Jeremy Bentham a couple of decades before Beethoven’s opera first reached the stage, and latterly adapted by Michel Foucault as the blueprint for a coercive society. The implication, not insisted upon by any tiresome fourth-wall breaking but there all the same, is that we, looking on, form the other half, as complicit witnesses.

No less ingeniously, this panopticon proves entirely fitting for a transformation into a Masonic temple for the opera’s concluding choral tableaux. Just as Marzelline’s flower-potting and Boyd’s agile pointing of rhythms had laid a trail of breadcrumbs for us to read the opening scene as a rewriting of Mozart’s Figaro, so the finale gives meaningful life on stage to Beethoven’s well-attested love for The Magic Flute.

The cast of singers served the drama, and served it very well, without presenting any outstanding vocal highlights. Leading them, Sally Matthews sang an intensely sympathetic Leonora, not without squally moments where a phrase lost focus. Jonathan Lemalu’s grave but warmly sung Rocco was nicely contrasted with the muscular but never caricatured Pizarro of Musa Ngqungwana.

Likewise, Oliver Johnston’s buoyantly articulated Jaquino paired sensitively with the charming, cornflower-blue soubrette of Isabelle Peters as Marzelline: more Magic Flute echoes here in the strong definition of “higher”- and “lower”-born couples, completed by the heroic ring of Robert Murray’s Florestan. His chains clanking around him, he reflected on his inhuman plight with superhuman fortitude – “But God’s will is just” – in one of those autobiographical lines which Beethoven surely contributed to the libretto, and which may still shock us now, just as they stand, without updating or further analysis.