Review: With ‘Fidelio,' the Met Opera Does What It Does Best

New York Times

05-03-2025

Opera houses tend to have their specialties. They might be havens for adventurous directors or unusual repertoire, for grand spectacles or Baroque chamber dramas. The Metropolitan Opera, at its finest, is a destination for voices.
The Met is a glamorously storied house with a welcoming audience and undeniable prestige. It hasn't always been quick to cast today's rising singers, but when it does, it holds on to them, sometimes even bending its repertory to match theirs.
And occasionally, the Met will gather its favorites in a single opera, assembling a vocal all-star team. This is what the company does best, and it can be thrilling to witness, as in the revival of Beethoven's 'Fidelio' that opened on Tuesday.
This 'Fidelio' isn't just excellently sung, including by the Met's sensitive chorus: Jürgen Flimm's fresh-as-ever staging from 2000 is also led with clarity, drive and insight by the conductor Susanna Mälkki. It's just a pity that the revival is so brief, with only four more performances through March 15.
These performances will also be the last of the season for the soprano Lise Davidsen. With a remarkably luminous sound in Wagner and Strauss roles, she has been a pillar of the Met's recent casting. But she announced in January that she was pregnant with twins and would take a break from singing after 'Fidelio.' (She is set to be back at the Met next year to star in 'Tristan und Isolde.')
A towering presence, with a seemingly unshakable nobility, Davidsen is made for roles like Leonore, the heroine who, disguised as a man named Fidelio, infiltrates the prison where her husband, Florestan, is being held and starved for his political beliefs. Her 'Komm, Hoffnung,' in which Leonore expresses worry and hope for rescuing her husband was a journey from soft-spoken determination to resounding confidence. When, in Act 2, she revealed her identity to the villainous Don Pizarro, she was shockingly fearsome, with an otherworldly strength that befits an opera in which characters are more archetypal than human.
The soprano Ying Fang has a nearly opposite sound, of Mozartean agility and precision, less powerful yet more heavenly. As Marzelline, the warden's daughter who falls in love with Fidelio, she didn't blend easily with Davidsen but charmed on her own, and she was more appropriately matched with the young tenor Magnus Dietrich as her suitor, Jaquino.
Jaquino is a thankless role; like the assault rifles he assembles and threateningly wields but never uses in Flimm's production, he is a Chekhov's gun without a trigger. In his Met debut, Dietrich made the best of what he was given, boyish in his irrational devotion to Marzelline, with a pleasantly tender and focused sound.
The other tenor role is more herculean: Florestan, sung at the Met by David Butt Philip with ardent tirelessness matched only by his dramatic bravery. He enters with a high G, exposed once the orchestra drops out after a beat. There isn't a fermata in the score, but Philip held the note, less to show off than to trace an arc of pathetic anguish to full-voiced despair.
René Pape was back as the warden Rocco, which he sang when Flimm's staging was new. After a quarter century, Pape's sound may be a bit smaller, but it was still warm, as well as appropriate for a loyal worker willing, against his better judgment, to follow the sadistic orders of Pizarro. In that role, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny had a loud, reverberating speaking voice, similarly penetrating when he sang, that slowly revealed itself as posturing bluster; he remains one of the great acting talents at the Met.
In Flimm's production, Pizarro is a vaguely defined tyrant who answers to and fears a higher, distant authority. It's deliberately unspecific, with details plucked from oppressive regimes of recent history: cold Soviet architecture; discarded shoes piled as if in a concentration camp; khaki uniforms of a banana republic; a monument, eerily of our moment, that may or may not be giving a Nazi salute.
Beethoven's opera is beautiful if flawed as theater, with political idealism that is more admirable than resonant. But Flimm, who died in 2023, found a way to make it work and, most impressively, speak to the audiences of each revival in different ways.
During the Iraq War, the toppling of a dictator's monument in the finale felt ripped from the headlines. With a rightward swing around the world today, there seems to be a warning in its 'Zone of Interest'-like juxtaposition of the mundane and the monstrous; flowers are trimmed and dinner is served as prisoners look on, in a portrait of complicity and opportunism.
Most chillingly, Flimm turns Beethoven's celebratory finale into a warning. The officers who have just obeyed Pizarro now cheer his execution, while members of the public menacingly wave knives in the air. Flimm, a German born during World War II, knew that tyrants are dangerous, but so are people who are all too happy to do as they're told.