Fidelio Article

PLEASE PRINT BOOKLET AS GRAYSCALE BEETHOVEN FIDELIO Christa Ludwig Jon Vickers Gottlob Frick Walter Berry Ingeborg Hallstein Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus OTTO KLEMPERER THE HOME OF OPERA Klemperer conducts Fidelio The playfulness of youthful hope, the heroism of devoted love, the rage of the tyrant, the despair of the captive, the bursting of the sunshine of liberty upon the gloom of the dungeon are portrayed in music not merely with truth of expression as that term might be applied to other works, but with a force and reality that makes music an intelligible language, possessing an illimitable power of pouring forth thought in sound. Thomas Love Peacock, The Examiner (27 May 1832) His musicality stood like a fortress in occupied territory. Ernst Bloch on Otto Klemperer For Otto Klemperer (1885-1973), Fidelio was not so much an opera as a musical calling. No other great conductor placed the work so near the centre of his activities; none conducted it with the unflinching honesty which it both proposes and articulates. Klemperer was eleven when he first heard Fidelio. As with many opera-goers – though few, perhaps, quite so young – his imagination was first caught by the sublime quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” [CD1, 6], the moment in the opera, in William Mann’s memorable phrase, when “backstairs chat turns into the music of the angels”. Klemperer first conducted the opera in the autumn of 1912, while working as Felix Weingartner’s deputy 1 at the Hamburg Opera. His reading was variously described as animated, characterful, full of tenderness and power, “worthy of Beethoven”. But it was a turbulent time for him. The manic-depressive condition which throughout his life would alternately exalt him and cast him down, precipitated a crisis – a widely publicised elopement with his Marzelline, the enchanting but recently married Elisabeth Schumann – which was to lose him his job and, for the time being, his reputation. Klemperer’s second encounter with the work, in January 1915, was hardly less dramatic. Offered temporary work at the Strasbourg Opera by the composer and conductor Hans Pfitzner, Klemperer found himself conducting Fidelio in a fortress city newly barricaded against war. He also found himself at odds with his benefactor. Pfitzner having left instructions that his own performing edition of the opera should be used, Klemperer had no compunction about stating publicly that he greatly preferred Beethoven’s original. What is extraordinary about Klemperer’s Strasbourg Fidelio – if the local critics are to be believed – is its closeness to the reading we now know and revere: the masterly pacing of the overture (the opening bars not unduly precipitate); the intensely rapt start to “Mir ist so wunderbar”, an effect brought about in part by Klemperer’s reducing the number of strings in the eight-bar preface; the wry pointing of the march, quirky and covert, which anticipates Pizarro’s arrival [CD1, 13]; the marvellous realisation of the mood of the grave-digging scene [CD2, 5-7]; the thrilling clarity of the choral entries in the opera’s closing scene, and, throughout, the wonderfully spare but trenchant orchestral playing. Fidelio soon became Klemperer’s professional calling-card, in Cologne, Wiesbaden, and – disastrously, since the work had now begun to obsess him and he over-rehearsed it – at the Kroll Opera, Berlin, in 2 1927. Time and again critics reported seeming “to hear the work for the first time”; one Wiesbaden reviewer wrote of the powerful sense he took away of anecdote being fashioned into myth. Fashioning anecdote into myth was precisely what Beethoven himself had been concerned to do during the eleven-year odyssey (1803-14) of the opera’s making. A protracted search for a suitable opera libretto had ended with his discovery of Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal, which the French writer and lawyer Jean- Nicolas Bouilly had prepared for the composer Pierre Gaveaux in 1798. The theme of an imprisoned nobleman – a young visionary, neither anarchist nor old guard – saved by his faithful wife chimed with Beethoven’s political beliefs and with his idea of life as a moral and spiritual quest. What such a work needed – and what Leonore, Beethoven’s original 1805-6 version, too often lacked – was economy and inevitability of word and action. Matthew Arnold famously said of the style of the poet Wordsworth: “There is nothing subtle in it, no heightening, no study of poetic style; yet it is expression of the highest and most truly expressive kind.” Beethoven, too, was seeking such a style. The 1814 version (Fidelio as we now know it) is one of the great revisions of Western European cultural history, and “inevitability” is one of its hallmarks. The intervening eight years had lent perspective to Beethoven’s earlier work and he was now further blessed by the assistance given to him by the Kärntnertor Theatre’s official librettist, Friedrich Treitschke. In the revision, everything is picked clean by Beethoven and Treitschke: action, dialogue, orchestration, harmonic structuring. Take, for example, the opera’s principal coup de théâtre and the events that flow from it: Leonore drawing her pistol at the very moment the trumpet call is heard through to the private reconciliation of Leonore and Florestan in the 3 ecstatic duet “O namenlose Freude”. In Leonore, a poorly focused text and some uncharacteristic (and surprisingly sentimental) note-spinning by Beethoven sap the drama of point and impetus. In Fidelio, the sequence is rendered inevitable and elemental by savage cutting and skilful reworking of the spoken dialogue. Rocco’s answer to Jaquino’s announcement of the Minister’s arrival [CD2, 11] becomes a powerful punctuation point that both feeds the drama and helps to redirect it. Even more telling is the spoken exchange between Florestan and Leonore – “Oh, my Leonore, what have you done for me?” “Nothing, nothing, my Florestan!” – a moment comparable to that in King Lear when Cordelia answers her father’s troubled “You have some cause, they have not” with the words “No cause, no cause”. To all outward appearances, Fidelio is a political opera, rooted in the affairs of ordinary men and women. Its “message”, if such it is, was well summed up in the notes accompanying the original release of the present recording: that all over the world, in any time in history, injustice is being perpetrated, and it can be prevented by the convinced individual action of anybody who sufficiently believes in the human moralities, and above all in the sanctity of human life. Others have gone further, seeing Fidelio as a religious opera: a work not about rescue, but about resurrection. The offering of bread and wine by Fidelio to Florestan in the prison scene [CD2, 8] has not gone unnoticed. In the present performance, this has a particular intensity, due partly to Klemperer’s slowed tempo, partly to Jon Vickers’s uniquely affecting performance: anguished and exalted as no other on record. Does that slowing suggest that Klemperer, too, saw the opera in quasi-religious terms? I 4 suspect privately he may have done. Though his public manner was down-to-earth and pragmatic (“Bruno Walter is a moralist, I am an amoralist!”) this was to some extent a mask. A Jew who converted to Catholicism (albeit largely on intellectual grounds) at the age of 34, only to return to Judaism in his last years, Klemperer was, in the view of his biographer Peter Heyworth, the very model of homo religiosus. It is a sobering thought, given Klemperer’s immense prestige as a Beethoven interpreter, that the present recording came about partly by chance. Since the early 1950s, EMI’s Walter Legge had been determined to record Fidelio with Karajan. Even after Karajan had moved elsewhere to make his opera recordings, Legge refused to let the idea go, though it is possible that Klemperer’s own apparent disinclination to return to Fidelio was a factor in Legge’s thinking. (Since the end of the Second World War, Klemperer had conducted just one production of the opera, in Budapest in 1948.) Later, David Webster had invited him to conduct the work at the Royal Opera House, but Klemperer declined on grounds of over- crowded schedules and his dislike of the existing Covent Garden production. But Webster persisted, and had his reward on 24 February 1961, when Klemperer conducted a new production at the house. It was a famous success. Klemperer’s conducting was again admired for its sobriety, sincerity and strength of character, and there was a fine cast headed by Sena Jurinac (Leonore), Jon Vickers (Florestan), Gottlob Frick (Rocco) and Hans Hotter (Pizarro). Though Legge had appeared in the conductor’s dressing-room after Act 1 to express with characteristic tactlessness a certain disappointment with the proceedings so far, he knew the time had come to record the work with Klemperer. He announced as much to his immediate boss, David Bicknell: “If I can get this cast, we cannot fail to make one of the 5 supreme recordings in the whole history of the industry.” Legge’s cast was not, however, the one Klemperer had in mind. Where Klemperer wanted the Covent Garden cast tout court, Legge envisaged a different Leonore (Birgit Nilsson) and more international names in the comprimario roles. Though neither man had his way entirely, both were happy with what emerged. The choice of Christa Ludwig as Leonore was especially fortunate. Though the role was not one to which Ludwig thought her voice ideally suited technically, the combination of her innate musicality, fine technique and superior declamatory skills ensured that she became the Leonore of the hour. (After recording the role with Klemperer, she sang it on stage for Karajan and for Böhm.) Klemperer returned to Covent Garden in 1968 to conduct a revival of the production, this time with Anja Silja as Leonore.

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