Beethoven: Fidelio

Nina Stemme, Jonas Kaufmann, Lucerne Festival; Claudio Abbado
Decca 478 2551
*****

Most opera-lovers who regard Beethoven’s Fidelio as a work which, however flawed it might be in some respects, is still an indisputable masterwork of the human spirit, will not be content with one recorded performance. To the irreplaceable Klemperer version with Jurinac and Vickers they will want to add perhaps the febrile, dramatic Bernstein recording with Janowitz and Kollo, Karajan’s heroic account with Vickers and Dernesch, or even the wonderfully moving 1953 Vienna recording under Furtwängler, with Martha Mödl as arguably one of the most expressive and intelligent Leonores of them all.

As if the choice weren’t wide enough already – and I haven’t mentioned Halász, Harnoncourt, Fricsay, Mackerras and Laufkötter (with Flagstad) – there comes from Decca a new recording which bids fair to be as significant in its way for the first half of this century as Klemperer’s was for the second half of the last. It’s something of a miracle that it was made at all, for just as Klemperer’s career was almost ended by a stroke, eleven years ago 78-year-old Claudio Abbado lost most of his digestive tract to a rampant carcinoma. Happily, he is still at work, and celebrated particularly at the Lucerne Festival, where last summer he conducted two concert performances of Fidelio.

Perhaps the first thing to say about the recording of that event is that Beethoven is placed centre-stage, and allowed to speak directly to us without his music being ‘interpreted’ either by singers or conductor. This is not a performance every bar of which is stamped by the personality of the conductor – it is direct, forthright, and as one critic has written ‘goes like a bolted arrow directly to the heart of the matter.’

The cast is a fine one. Understandably, much attention has been focused on Jonas Kaufman’s performance as Florestan, and indeed it is a fine one, with the singer’s distinctive timbre perfectly matched not only to the despair of ‘Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!’ but to the heroic triumph of ‘O namenlose Freude’ (the latter surely one of the most difficult duets in all opera to bring off with conviction, passion and musicality). The Swedish soprano Nina Stemme can command a wonderfully dark tone which gives her a great advantage as the courageous Leonore, and the artistry which wowed the Covent Garden audience when she premiered the part last year is happily captured here – arguably, ‘Komm, Hoffnung’ is as well sung as by any other soprano on record.

The rest of the cast is quite as spectacular. I suppose, sadly, no opera house in the world could afford to put so many stars on its stage at one time. Falk Struckmann sounds, in Pizarro, as though Wotan has dropped in from Valhalla; Christof Fischesser allows himself to be entertaining as Rocco, a part in which a sense of humour is a positive advantage; Christoph Strehl is a singer so good as to be almost wasted as Jacquino, and Rachel Harnisch is enchanting as Marzelline.

But one returns in the end to Abbado, who conducts the Mahler Chamber Orchestra as though he is accompanying Mozart: there is no posturing, no heavy emphases – from the first notes of the Overture the pace is swift and light and, yes, witty – Marzellina’s ‘O wär ich schon’ sounds almost like an aria from The Magic Flute – which is not to say that the terror of the dungeon scenes is not coldly chilling and effective, and the final triumph (can anyone claim to have sat through the closing pages of the score without weeping?) quite as exhilarating as any performance of the Ode to Joy. This is a performance of Fidelio which, once heard, everyone will want to own. – Derek Parker