Editor’s Note: Although this production does not feature Canadian artists, this review is provided since the production will be available in cinemas across the country on March 15, 2025.
A top-notch performance of a great but far-from-perfect opera in an even-less-perfect production – that’s what the Metropolitan Opera is offering in its brief run of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
I’ve loved Fidelio since my teens, but its flaws aren’t hard to spot. The comic, Singspiel domesticity of the opening scenes sits uncomfortably alongside the high drama that follows, and graceful vocal writing was never this genius composer’s forte – Leonore’s big scena, for instance, pairs a fine, expressive recitative with an awkwardly wrought aria. Still, it’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement and, at the finale, the sheer joy of a good performance, and on March 7th, the Met’s revival provided a very good one indeed.
Its centerpiece was – as it should be – its Leonore: Lise Davidsen, making her last stage outings of 2025 before taking a pregnancy-dictated hiatus for the rest of the year. (She’s carrying twins.) It was a welcome return to her most comfortable operatic turf, German opera, after worthy but ultimately unconvincing turns in Verdi and Puccini. Here, the voice – bright and glowing, a little weight-deficient at the bottom but blooming thrillingly up top – served Beethoven admirably, even when he wasn’t exactly returning the favour. And her physical presence was ideal for the dramatically tricky role of a mature woman disguised as a young man. She made, in fact, the production’s best male impersonator since its very first, Karita Mattila, a quarter century ago. Davidsen may lack Mattila’s unique charisma, but she has a quieter, less assertive radiance that’s entirely her own, and she made a luminous Leonore.
Photo Credit: Karen Almond / Met Opera
Leonore disguised as Fidelio (Lise Davidsen) with Rocco (René Pape) and Marzelline (Ying Fang) in Fidelio
The Met surrounded her with high-end colleagues. As Florestan, David Butt Philip somehow conveyed the toll of two years of solitary imprisonment while singing with stalwart, handsome heroic-tenorial tone. The always-delectable Ying Fang was a pearly-toned delight as the misalliance-prone Marzelline, with German lyric tenor Magnus Dietrich making his effective Met debut as her ineffectually persistent suitor, Jaquino (in the Met’s production, as addicted to firearms as he is to her). As the dastardly Pizarro, Tomasz Konieczny sang with a seemingly built-in snarl, winning no points for bel canto but scoring many for vivid portraiture. René Pape, back at the Met after a three-and-a-half-year absence, inhabited “Vater” Rocco much more easily than he had in 2000, when, a little too young, he originated the role in this staging. And as deus ex machina Don Fernando, Stephen Milling exuded the proper benevolent gravitas.
Susanna Mälkki, in the pit, launched this excellent musical show with an overture that properly adhered to boundaries more modest than any of its Leonore predecessors’. If her first act finale seemed a bit disjointed, her ensuing Act Two lacked nothing in pulse and drive.
Jürgen Flimm’s production transposes the action to a vaguely Eastern European country in the aftermath of World War II. I’ve liked it less with every revival. It’s wildly overbusy (poor Leonore is saddled with a whole evening’s worth of business in “Abscheulicher!” alone), and the dungeon scene is badly underlit – it’s supposed to be dark there, yes, but not at the expense of theatrical clarity. The prisoners’ entrance in Act One is mistimed to the music, and Leonore’s rapturous reunion duet with Florestan couldn’t have begun more tepidly, with husband and wife at least 20 feet apart. (Flimm died in 2023, and Gina Lapinski took charge of the revival.)
All the same, many of the staging’s defects are likely to be minimized in the upcoming Live in HD transmission, and anyone with an affection for Beethoven’s intensely lovable problem child should find the price of a ticket to be money well spent.
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Patrick Dillon, a native Detroiter, grew up with Canada just across the river, and later launched his career as a classical-music journalist at The Globe and Mail. Now a longtime New Yorker, he’s lucky enough to live just across Broadway from the Met.
