A Fidelio for Yesterday

Faced with a twelve-hour drive, with wife and dog, from Manhattan to the idyllic Brevard (North Carolina) Music Festival, I threw some CDs in the car.

I chose Fidelio
because I had been eager to re-experience Beethoven’s opera since encountering
David Lang’s Fidelio-for-today, A Prisoner of State, premiered by the
New York Philharmonic as a season finale concert opera. This minimalist
distillation ignited a standing ovation. But I wanted to go back to the real
thing.

The Fidelio
I own is the famous 1962 EMI
recording, conducted by Otto Klemperer, with Jon Vickers as Florestan and
Christa Ludwig as Leonore. I hadn’t heard it in decades.

I skipped act one because act two is better. Agnes
silenced her cell phone. Teddy was asleep in the back seat.

Florestan was one of Vickers’ signature roles. His specialty was the outsider. I knew that re-visiting his aching rendition of Florestan’s dungeon aria, beginning act two, would grip the car.

But I was unprepared for the rest. Beethoven tinkered for years with Fidelio, struggling to get it right. But, as I now discovered, act two proceeds with an inexorable logic, rising from blackness to refulgent light. Wondrously, Beethoven ascends by degrees. Then, when the arc is at its peak, he peaks some more: “O Gott! o welch ein Augenblick!”

The sudden linchpin in this progression is when
Leonora exclaims “Tödte erst sein Weib!” (“First
kill his wife!”). The moment – the lad Fidelio is revealed to be the heroine
Leonora — is transformational. Agnes began passing me paper towels to dab my
cheeks as we rode into West Virginia.

In general, I mistrust studio recordings of
opera. But this Fidelio is alive at
every moment. And it isn’t just Vickers and Ludwig, as the unconquerable
husband and wife. Gottlob Frick, as Rocco, bears unforgettably humane witness,
deploying his sepulchral bass (an increasingly rare species) at half voice.

When it ended, I struggled to speak. All I managed
to say was: “It’s over.” Agnes understood that I was referring not to the disk
in the CD player. I meant Klemperer, Vickers, Ludwig, Frick, Beethoven – an
aesthetic experience overpowered by empathy. There will never again be a Fidelio like this.

In 1927, Klemperer was asked how best to
celebrate the Beethoven Centenary. “Don’t play any Beethoven for a year,” he
answered.

We have another Beethoven anniversary coming up – 2020 marks 250 years since his year of birth. I think I know how PostClassical Ensemble will celebrate. We’ll invite our patrons to communally experience that 1962 Klemperer recording.

That I cannot imagine a more compelling
Beethoven experience in the year 2020 says it all.