Journeyman Fidelio

"Of all my children," said the dying Beethoven, "this is the one that has cost me the worst birth pangs." The "child" was Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera and one of his least successful works in his own lifetime. A failure at its first performance in Vienna in 1805, it did not win an audience until 1814, when it was presented in completely revised form. The work is hampered by a naive plot, an inconsistency of style (the first act is virtually light opera, the second grand opera), and vocal parts of fiendish difficulty.

But Fidelio also has passages of unsurpassed musical grandeur. Last week Fidelio returned to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera for the first time since 1951 in a new production that did more to under, score the opera's, and the Met's weaknesses than to illuminate their strengths.

The new sets by Horace Armistead were only acceptable--broad flights of steps climbing to looming, grey prison walls inset with barred gates and slit windows. The effect was foursquare, or perhaps just square, except for one good touch: a huge grid of prison bars spanned the stage and rose slowly as the light came up on the liberation scene. But the rest of Director Herbert Grof's production was dull and conventional. As Leonore, the faithful wife, Norwegian Soprano Aase Nordmo Loevberg showed neither the vocal nor the dramatic power her taxing role demanded. In minor roles, Soprano Laurel Hurley and Tenor Charles Anthony were adequate as the jailer's daughter, Marzelline, and the turnkey Jacquino, and Bass Oskar Czerwenka contributed a strong, virile-voiced Jailer Rocco. But in their first-act quartet in the form of a canon, Mir ist so wunderbar, the four were often shakily uneven. The only real star of the evening proved to be Canadian Tenor Jon Vickers as Florestan, who sang his moving second-act aria, In des Lebens Fruehlingstagen (In the springtime days of life), with conviction and power. The orchestra under Conductor Karl Boehm was ragged, and the winds tootled some of the wrongest notes to pierce the Met air in a long while.

It was a journeyman Fidelio, a welcome but not memorable addition to the Met's repertory. The surprise of the evening was that, with the forces assigned to the new production, it did not come across as a resounding success.

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