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Friday 18 July 2008

Feeble Fidelio

Fidelio
Teatro Real, Madrid

For all its glories, Madrid is not a city that one associates with great opera performances, as one does Barcelona. Perhaps it’s not surprising: it’s only 11 years since the new Teatro Real opened, after delays on a British scale. The previous house had sunk in 1925, and the new one encountered every kind of problem before it opened in 1997. The wait was worthwhile. I was shown over it by the extremely helpful press lady, and was stunned by its sophistication, size, the number and quality of its facilities, and the attractiveness both of the exterior and the interior — not to mention being impressed and impoverished by the opera shop, which has every operatic CD set, commercial and ‘private’, that the most addicted collector might want or dream of. The auditorium is shallow, acoustically wonderful, and at first had only 1,000 seats; then a precipitous gallery was added, with a further 600 places for non-sufferers from vertigo. The State rooms and the restaurant, the latter low-lit, richly upholstered, serving luxury food at luxury prices, complete the picture of a no-expenses-spared-or-wasted place. The schedule of performances is impressive, too, though there is generally only one opera on in any given few days, receiving several performances and then disappearing. There are themes, such as Orpheus, when familiar works, such as those on that subject by Monteverdi and Gluck, can support less familiar ones, in this case by Krenek.

I went because I wanted very much to hear Claudio Abbado’s latest enlargement of his operatic repertoire, Beethoven’s Fidelio, with which he is touring, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. That was being given three performances as part of a Beethoven cycle, with Leonore and instrumental, chamber and orchestral concerts. My hopes were astronomically high, and were miserably dashed. The wonderful tenor Jonas Kaufmann, scheduled to sing Florestan, is injured and unable to sing — this has been a quite frightful season for illnesses and accidents among the operatic plutocracy, and no one would be well advised to travel any distance to see a particular favourite performing. Serious alarm bells began to ring when I saw that Chris Kraus, a young German film director, was ‘making his first incursion into the world of opera’, as the programme puts it. Another of them — and no doubt about to be hired by the new Bayreuth management for the next production of the Ring there. This production was unbelievably bad; every time I think I’m now blasé enough not to lose a night’s sleep over the utter betrayal of a masterpiece, another ignoramus is invited to desecrate one and duly obliges. This production, obviously travelling light from Italy to Spain to Germany, had as its only substantial piece of scenery a guillotine. When the curtain rose, after a superbly played and conducted overture, shapely, urgent and dramatic, Marzelline was discovered not ironing, as she should be, but giving the guillotine blade a nice shine, and evidently enjoying it. The thuggish Jaquino, well sung but feebly acted by Jorg Schneider, not surprisingly had little appeal for her. Perhaps his acting was intentional, for when the jailer Rocco appeared, the experienced Giorgio Surjan, he seemed to have been told to behave as if he were in the hammiest of silent movies. Then Leonore’s appearance, a heart-stopping moment, was ruined by Anja Kampe’s almost not bothering to pretend to be a man, and strange articulation of non-standard dialogue. The great canon quartet was notable for precision and clarity rather than for the Time Stands Still aura that one rightly expects from it.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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