If you believe musical performance fundamentally is an expression of freedom, then “Fidelio,” Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera, is your über text.
The famed work is now at Lyric Opera of Chicago with the superb South African soprano Elza van den Heever in the starring role, with Lyric favorites Brian Mulligan and Russell Thomas beside her as Don Pizarro and Florestan, respectively. It is set in a state prison. Its most stirring moment comes when a massive chorus of prisoners, their crimes unspecified but their personas subjugated at the pleasure of some governor, somewhere, sing “O welche Lust, in freier Luft” an ode to the joy of finally being able to breathe fresh air.
“Oh heaven! Salvation! Happiness!,” the detainees cry, in a thrilling kind of overlapping harmony. “Oh freedom! Will you be given us?” As you might imagine, sitting in the dark on Wacker Drive listening to the scores of singers in the grand Lyric Opera Chorus sing of such primal feelings, their characters ever fearful of being shoved back inside, is worth sacrificing whatever else you planned to do for an evening.
That cry for freedom, of course, has ricocheted across time and place, the human repression of humans being a historical constant. In this staging, directed by Lyric’s own Matthew Ozawa and first seen at the San Francisco Opera in 2021 (and also at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto last year), the setting is contemporary.
I suspect, given the chronology of this staging, that the development period in California was infused with pandemic-era challenges and feelings. How quickly we forget that just a smidgeon ago, we all dreamed merely of assembling unmasked and taking big gulps of fresh air.
The “Fidelio” setting, designed by Alexander V. Nichols, is a giant, transparent cube that rotates, offering various views of the prison, from its administrative front to the conversations at the side to the cells at the rear. It’s a massive, visually dominant piece of scenery and you either go for it as the right vehicle for this opera or you do not. I’m ambivalent, frankly.
The set does not move in silence, so there is that, although Ozawa and conductor Enrique Mazzola work around it. I just find it tonally uneven; the front part looks more like the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in “The Office” than a place in the imprisonment business, and while you later see a representation of the cells, faces peering out, you don’t get a powerful visual of Florestan, the most feared prisoner by the establishment, being stuck in the deepest cell of all. There is something about the set’s constant transparency that fights with the opera’s contrasting images of darkness and light.
I suspect Nichols and Ozawa were reacting to how Georg Friedrich Treitschke’s libretto itself shifts tone as it goes. Massively so. At the start, we get a romantic plot wherein Marzelline (Sydney Mancasola), the daughter of the governor Pizarro, fights off the comedic romantic ministrations of a fellow worker named Jaquino (Daniel Espinal) and falls instantly in love instead with van den Heever’s Leonore, thinking she is a man. Leonore has disguised herself as a male security guard to try and free her husband, Florestan. But by Act 2 (Lyric is performing the two-act version from 1814), the opera has cast aside these romantic trivialities and engages instead, both musically and dramatically, with larger themes of justice, tyranny, oppression and despair. One can rationalize that, perhaps, as a manifestation of Beethoven’s evident lack of comfort with the form; there is a reason why this is his only opera.
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But “Fidelio” is, nonetheless, a highly compelling experience. One is, after all, listening to Beethoven. Moreover, van den Heever is a formidable star, face set and hair hidden away under her security guard’s uniform but a moral and vocal force unto and of herself. Fans of Thomas hardly will be surprised by his resonance and gravitas and Mulligan strides around, Midwestern governor-like, singing the tune that the nervous oppressor invariably sings, his vocal performance aptly shot through with contrasting timbers of force and insecurity.
But in “Fidelio,” the most important character is the whole. The prisoners — young, old, somewhere between — appear to be shoved into every corner of the cube, staring hungrily at Mazzola’s ever-lithe conductor baton as they grasp for collective air and sing gorgeously of their torment to the heavens.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Fidelio” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Oct. 10
Where: Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $54-$334 at 312-827-5600 and www.lyricopera.org
