Faithful to Fidelio

The new opera at Vienna's Theater an der Wien was a flop. The orchestra fumbled, the soprano bumbled, the tenor went flat. Critics dismissed the score as long, repetitive and gnarled with outlandish complexities. The production closed after three nights, reopened the following year, folded again after four more performances. The talented 35-year-old composer set the work aside for eight years. Then he undertook extensive revisions. "Hardly a musical number has been left unchanged," he wrote to a Vienna newspaper, "ard more than half the opera was composed anew." Finally, in May 1814, Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, Fidelia, was produced again at a different Vienna theater--and immediately became a hit.

Since then, the discarded original version has been performed rarely--and, as far as is known, never in the Western Hemisphere. But two years ago, Boston Symphony Conductor Erich Leinsdorf found a copy of the 1805 score in a Prague bookshop, was struck by its "awe-inspiring" power, and thought it would make an effective concert presentation at the Boston Symphony's summer home at Tanglewood, near Lenox, Mass. Last week, afier Leinsdorf conducted a boldly sculptured, energy-charged U.S. premiere of the work at Tanglewood, it was emphatically clear that he had been right.

Compared with Beethoven's more polished, rounded--and, some say, compromised--version of 1814, the original Fidelio turned out to be expansive and florid, bursting through its forms with a driving force that the composer was only partially able to control. Its heavy orchestration has a strain of wildness that Beethoven tamed in his later revisions; its soaring vocal lines, which he later modified, make harsh demands on singers. In all, there are significant differences from the 1814 revision on 134 of the vocal score's 276 pages.

Leinsdorf does not think the original Fidelio will find a place in regular operatic productions, but he sees it as a strong, if difficult, addition to the concert and festival repertory. "It represents the composer at his hottest," he says--and by way of proof, Leinsdorf had to change his sweat-soaked jacket at intermission. "In it, like the genius he was, Beethoven was asking for things ahead of his time which probably could not be done." As Leinsdorf, the orchestra and the singers--particularly Soprano Hanne-Lore Kuhse and Tenor George Shirley--showed at Tanglewood, they can be done now.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.