The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (16 page)

Fidelio
is often said to be ‘dramatic’ rather than ‘theatrical’, and the heavy-handedness of the libretto and plot does make it difficult to stage convincingly, not least because Leonore’s male disguise is rarely plausible.
One soprano who could look convincingly boyish, the tall, slim Anja Silja, used to fling off her cap at the moment of revelation and let her long hair cascade down her shoulders.
Electrifying in the theatre, but a gesture which rather begs the question as to why Leonore didn’t cut it off in the first place!

Post-war productions by German directors such as Joachim Herz and Harry Kupfer have emphasized parallels between Pizarro’s prison and the concentration camps of modern totalitarianism, but Leonore’s disguise is much more credible in an eighteenth-century context (successfully portrayed in naturalistic detail by Peter Hall at Glyndebourne).
Herbert Wernicke (at Salzburg), Andrei Serban (at Covent Garden) and Jürgen Flimm (at the Met) have interpreted the opera in more universal terms, as a tale of the constant struggle between goodness and evil, darkness and light.
What one makes of Rocco, the decent man executing someone else’s evil orders, is another matter.

In our cynical, pampered age, we may find it hard to connect with the simple heroism and black-and-white morality at the heart of
Fidelio.
But those who lived under the shadow of war found the opera profoundly moving, and the power of great singers like Lotte Lehmann and Jon Vickers in the roles of Leonore and Florestan is still remembered with awe.

Recordings

CD: Christa Ludwig (Leonore); Otto Klemperer (cond.). EMI 55170 2

Charlotte Margiono (Leonore); Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cond.).
Teldec 94560 2

Carl Maria von Weber

(1786–1826)

Der Freischütz
(
The Sharp-shooter
)

Three acts. First performed Berlin, 1821.

Libretto by Johann Friedrich Kind

After the Napoleonic occupation, German culture was concerned to re-establish its national roots, rejecting both the elegance and symmetry of neo-classicism and the French-dominated rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment.
In their place came a fascination with more distant episodes of German history, the landscape of river and forest, and ghoulish peasant folklore – this was the age of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, the researches of the Brothers Grimm and the nightmarish imaginings of ‘Romantic’ fantasists such as E.
T.
A.
Hoffmann.
Weber’s opera is another product of this movement: a bold experiment with the
Singspiel
form, first performed on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, it cleverly took a specific historical setting (Bohemia, just after the Thirty Years’ War), used catchy folk-style melodies for the choruses, and for the climactic Wolf’s Glen scene travelled into a world of devil-raising black magic which also gave theatrical technicians a chance to show off a battery of special effects and frighten audiences deliciously out of their wits.
Such was
Der
Freischütz
’s instant and lasting success that it can be said, without exaggeration, to have set the agenda for the next fifty years of German opera.

Plot

The young forester Max plans to marry the lovely Agathe, but her father Cuno insists that he must first prove himself as a crack marksman in the presence of the Prince.
When the opera opens, Max has just lost out in a competition: he feels dogged by bad luck.
A veteran of the Thirty Years’ War called Kaspar tells Max that his rifle is cursed and that only magic bullets can break the spell on it.
After Kaspar helps him to shoot down a high-flying eagle, Max agrees to meet Kaspar at
midnight in the Wolf’s Glen, where such bullets are forged.
What Max does not know is that Kaspar has himself been spurned by Agathe and is planning revenge.

At the same moment that Max shoots the eagle, a painting mysteriously falls off the wall in Cuno’s hunting lodge, injuring Agathe.
Her cousin Aennchen attempts to cheer her up, but she is further worried by a warning of impending evil she has received from an elderly hermit.
Agathe fails to deter the overwrought Max from visiting the sinister Wolf’s Glen.

Kaspar has made a devilish bargain with Samiel, the Black Huntsman.
In return for three years of life, he promises to deliver Samiel three human victims – Max, Agathe and Cuno.
Samiel agrees to let Kaspar forge seven magic bullets: six will hit whatever target their marksman aims at; the seventh is Samiel’s.
Max appears, terrified by the spookiness of the place.
Despite visions of his dead mother and Agathe drowning herself, he watches Kaspar casting the magic bullets, attended by all manner of supernatural horrors.

Between them, Kaspar and Max fire six of the bullets, leaving Max the seventh to shoot at his trial before the Prince – he does not know that it belongs to Samiel.

Nightmares have terrified Agathe, and Aennchen’s further efforts to laugh off her forebodings are to no avail.
The painting falls off the wall again, and a bridal box turns out to contain a funeral wreath.
Agathe decides that at her wedding she will wear roses given to her by the Hermit instead.

Max’s trial begins.
The Prince tells him to shoot at a dove.
Agathe begs him to hold back, crying out that she is the dove.
Max shoots anyway, but Agathe is protected by the appearance of the mysterious Hermit and it is Kaspar who is felled by the seventh magic bullet.
He dies cursing Samiel’s trickery.

Max confesses his involvement in Samiel’s sorcery, and the Prince angrily banishes him.
The Hermit intervenes, however, persuading the Prince to soften the harsh sentence, and Max is finally allowed a year to prove himself, after which he may return and marry Agathe.
The opera ends with a chorus affirming the wisdom of following God’s commands.

What to listen for

The superb overture is not so much a medley of the opera’s tunes as a capitulation of the drama, stating several of the recurrent musical themes.
Throughout the opera, the orchestration is notable for dark, rich colours, a startlingly original use of the clarinets and horns, and the tendency to use the lower register of the strings and wind.
Agathe has two deliquescent arias; the second, an exquisite prayer which is placed at the start of Act III, ‘Und ob die Wolke’, is a showpiece for any lyric soprano, its slow tempo and long line mercilessly exposing any impurity of tone or unsteadiness of intonation.
The third-act choruses are also of outstanding interest: the bridesmaids and huntsmen sound authentically rustic, even though the tunes are Weber’s, while in the last scene the entire community rises to an almost Beethovenian solemnity and grandeur.

But it is in the sensational Wolf’s Glen scene that the opera breaks all the rules and makes its greatest impact.
The hellishness of the scene is depicted musically by the chord of the diminished seventh associated with Samiel, shuddering tremolos, screeching piccolos, and the use of a purely speaking voice for Samiel (today invariably further distorted by electronic amplification).
Such is the startling power and energy of this scene that it seems to cast its pall over the rest of the opera – ‘a metaphor’, in the words of John Warrack, ‘for how evil lurks within human beings and can rise up suddenly to destroy’ – leaving something unconvincing about the assertion of normal Christian values in the last scene.

In performance

Directors like to see this opera as a fable symbolic of the German soul and its tragic descent into Nazism – in David Pountney’s production for ENO, the apparitions in the Wolf’s Glen were gas-masked First World War soldiers rising up out of the trenches.
Kaspar is often portrayed as Max’s
alter
ego.

For designers and the special effects department, the
Wolf’s Glen scene offers tremendous opportunities, and even today, when the cinema has realized all our worst nightmares, the combination of evocatively horrible images with Weber’s daemonic music can still send a frisson through the most jaded audiences.

Recording

CD: Luba Organosova (Agathe); Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cond.).
Teldec 97758 2

Richard Wagner

(1813–83)

Der Fliegende Holländer
(
The Flying Dutchman
)

Three acts. First performed Dresden, 1843.

Libretto by the composer

Wagner liked to claim that his inspiration for this opera was his own experience of a stormy crossing of the North Sea, but the ghostly Flying Dutchman was also part of traditional nautical lore, and the tale had been retold several times in the early nineteenth century – notably by Heinrich Heine, who saw the situation in an almost comic light.
Wagner’s first idea was to set the opera in Scotland, but he was obliged to change the location to Norway to avoid accusations of plagiarizing a contemporary French operatic version.

Plot