Beethoven Fidelio – Haitink

There is a moment, early in the second act, when the cellos and basses begin their long crawl into Florestan’s dungeon, and you remember all over again why this score frightened Beethoven’s contemporaries half to death. Nobody had written anything like it. Not in an opera house, anyway. Haitink takes that introduction slower than most, lets it brood, and for once the murk is not a liability but the whole point.

I had forgotten how good this Glyndebourne Fidelio is. Decades on, watching it again on disc, the pleasures turn out to be sturdier than memory had filed them.

Peter Hall’s production gets tagged as conservative, and in the narrow sense it is — Spanish sixteenth century, more or less, a real prison with real stone (or the painted canvas equivalent), no commissars, no concentration-camp signifiers. But watch what Hall actually does with his singers. Watch Curt Appelgren’s Rocco during the quartet in the dungeon, the little hesitations, the way his whole body seems to be doing arithmetic: how much compromise can an essentially decent, essentially frightened man absorb before he breaks. That is not scenery. That is thought, worked out moment by moment.

Söderström’s Leonore does not have the vocal heft of a Flagstad or the sheer steel of a Nilsson, and “Abscheulicher!” will not flatten you the way it can in the best studio recordings. What she has instead is intelligence of a very particular kind. She plays the disguise as a disguise, lets you see Leonore‘s exhaustion leaking through Fidelio‘s trousers, the strain of sustained deception on a person not built for it. By the time she throws herself between Pizarro and her husband, the top is secure, if not enormous, and the dramatic truth of it overwhelms any reservations about sheer decibels. De Ridder’s Florestan matches her in this. His opening monologue, “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier,” is sung by a man genuinely undone by light and sound after months of darkness, not merely an actor miming distress with a secure B-flat held in reserve.

Elizabeth Gale’s Marzelline has real charm and a voice to match, no small thing, since half the sopranos who take this role on treat it as an obstacle between them and the interval. Ian Caley’s Jacquino is properly put-upon. Robert Allman’s Pizarro snarls without becoming cartoonish, which is harder than it sounds; the character tips into melodrama in lesser hands, and Beethoven’s own music half-invites the tipping.

Haitink I have always found an odd fit for this score, and watching the film again does not entirely change my mind. He is temperamentally allergic to grandstanding, and there are stretches, the Overture, with horns that are not quite together, the finale, shoehorned onto a stage too small for the chorus Beethoven imagined, where a more reckless maestro might have found more voltage. But the prelude to Act II is extraordinary: something genuinely symphonic happens there, weight and shadow accumulating in exactly the way Beethoven’s harmonic language demands. He never once steps on a singer. That restraint, undervalued in 1979 and probably still undervalued now, is its own kind of virtue.

The mono television sound is what it is: dated, boxy in spots, the orchestra sometimes receding as if heard through a half-closed door. Nobody buys this for sonic splendor. You buy it, if you buy it, for a Fidelio that understands this strange, structurally lopsided opera is really a music drama about moral endurance disguised as a rescue opera, and plays it that way scene after scene.

Against the studio competition, Klemperer’s granite monument with Christa Ludwig, Bernstein’s more volatile Vienna account, this Glyndebourne version cannot and should not try to compete on sheer sonic grandeur. It offers something else: the sensation of actually being in a theater where a particular company of singing actors found the human stakes of Beethoven’s only opera and refused to let go of them for two acts.