Chaos in the Underworld: Andriy Zholdak directs Fidelio at Dutch National Opera

Written in the roil of revolution and premiered in Vienna barely a week after Napoleon’s invasion, Beethoven’s only opera began as a cry of liberation and quickly became a vision of hope in the darkest of times. In the last theatre standing in the ruins of Berlin in September 1945, it was the story of Leonore’s resistance to tyranny that inspired a defeated people with an origin story that reached further into the human psyche than national socialism.

If every generation has its own crises, then Fidelio’s enduring power ought to be that it shows humanity’s perennial urge to get back on its feet. However, if director Andriy Zholdak’s re-visioning for Dutch National Opera is “Fidelio for the 21st century™”, then may God help us all.

“I decided not to tell the story,” he announces in the programme – always an interesting move in what is essentially a narrative form – instead taking an expressionist approach born of an inner truth discerned from Beethoven’s score, which is then relentlessly articulated by way of a new spoken text so ear-bleedingly banal it is up there with Vogon poetry. The premise for this particular three-hour hellscape is that we are – possibly – at a space conference organised by robots and contemplating the approach of a black hole. I found myself wondering if the black hole might have a bar.

At least the orchestra was spared the stage. Pity the singers, just trying to get through the notes as they wandered about, lost, dead, alive again, with wings or without, sometimes in a hat, sometimes a dog’s head, Nicholas Brownlee’s pedestrian Pizarro, dressed as Karl Lagerfeld, drooped over from time to time by creatures from the pages of a hobbit fantasy colouring book. Sometimes they stepped out of two enormous stone grottoes either side of the stage, but sometimes they didn’t, which begged the question couldn’t the budget have been better spent on a more thorough treatment of the central through-the-looking-glass theme, heavily expounded in the programme notes but only represented on stage by some terrible “oh, it’s a wall!” mime and a small mirrored door on wheels. 

At one point – and who knows at what point it is in this ADHD fever-dream – two Karl Lagerfelds stand by matching trundly doors as Eric Cutler’s Florestan lopes sadly between them carrying a large plastic fish. A ballet-dancing nymph appears briefly with a shotgun and puts some minor winged characters (who were they?) out of their misery, at least giving those in the press seats the brief pleasure of scribbling TURKEY SHOOT! into our laps, but the winged fauna soon get up again and merge with the inexplicable pile-up of dead dogs, expired parents, and miserably air-guitaring opera singers.

If there’s one element of the original that survives the chaos – and then only by the skin of her teeth – it is Jacquelyn Wagner’s Leonore. Wagner’s poise was unshakeable and she managed the evening’s only moment of dramatic coherence as she delivered the aria that closed the first half, though even then she had to hold her own (and a heavy, flaming torch) against Karl Lagerfeld setting light to a row of cardboard ladies behind her. 

On one of Amsterdam’s precious few sunny evenings this year, the audience waited – and waited – in painful silence for liberation from the Ukrainian director’s awful underworld. I wouldn’t have brought Zholdak’s nationality into it, as tyranny and war versus hope and liberation as a universal experience is usually very much the point of Fidelio. But Zholdak brought it, by way of draping himself in in his country’s flag at the curtain call for no other reason than to deflect the chorus of boos he must have known was coming to him. There aren’t many artists who would choose nationalism over professionalism. The very least he could have done was to applaud all those people on stage and off it whose talents and time he had squandered.