In scary times, opera has the power to cut through and set us free

Julian Glover
Bill Cooper

The journey from the strangest underground station that has ever existed to the red and gilt of the Royal Opera House is shorter than you might think. It began on October 7, 1989 when, with my father, I used my school German to talk my way through Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse subway tunnels. They formed a sinister Cold War frontier. To reach it from the West you rattled in the darkness through disused ghost stations, cut off in the communist East of the city, before showing your passport in a section of the station full of guards, watching through one-way mirrored glass.

It was as if the toughest border in the world had been built in something like the passageways between the Bakerloo and Northern lines at Piccadilly Circus: but that day even this bizarre German station seemed less extraordinary than the scenes we stumbled across in the streets above. East Berlin’s rulers were celebrating the 40th anniversary of the foundation of their communist state — but the people weren’t playing along.

The official celebrations had huge red “40 Jahre DDR” banners and free beer, but instead of people we saw only open trucks of scared young soldiers with guns waiting to deal with protesters. In side streets we saw small handwritten signs calling for democracy and listing people who had been arrested nearby. The dictatorship was crumbling and one of the famous symbols of its fall was seen for the first time that Saturday I crossed the border: a new production of an opera, Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Fidelio is also a sell-out show at the Royal Opera House this week. On Tuesday I was lucky enough to have a £22 seat in the slips for a performance with some of the best singers and one of the best opera orchestras in the world. But in 1989 the sensation of a production in the East German city of Dresden was even greater. The opera includes a famous chorus of prisoners who arrive blinking in the daylight, singing of their joy. In the Dresden staging, they came onto the stage dressed in the common clothes of ordinary East Germans. The message was unmistakable. Like Beethoven’s prisoners, East Germans were captive but would soon be free. The production made such an impression that it is still being staged in the same city this spring, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Julian Glover
Daniel Hambury

I love opera. When it works I think it has more power than any other form of art to grab your emotions. It can be loud and soft, beautiful and bleak. But does its meaning go deeper?

If any opera is political it would have to be Fidelio, currently a sell-out show at the Royal Opera House

If any opera can be political, then that would have to be Fidelio, which Beethoven wrote and rewrote as the French revolution became a catastrophe. Much of the music is compelling but there are problems with the drama, as its composer knew. For a start, the two acts don’t hang together. What starts as almost a domestic comedy with a woman dressed as a man ends as a cry for liberty — the sort of thing which encouraged revolutionaries in Dresden but which has been used by regimes of all sorts to justify their cause. Herbert von Karajan even conducted it in 1938 to mark Hitler’s birthday.

The new Royal Opera production makes the best of things by staging the opera as two separate pieces, which some critics dislike but I thought was clever and effective. There’s a dark, traditional first act in which the best sight on stage is a real-life horse, which starts stamping its feet impatiently as it hears the music that marks the moment it has to exit the stage. Then there’s an up-to-the-minute second act under bright white lights in which the prisoners sit in a semicircle, as if they were in a corporate meeting of middle managers wearing suits.

They look like many of the people in the audience. Maybe London’s Fidelio is making a point. Are we meant to be prisoners, too? Perhaps. But you don’t need to think like this to enjoy the evening. I suspect that a lot of what we think of as political art is really a symbol, not a cause of change. It catches a following wind from events already underway. The revolt against East German communism was already happening when Fidelio reached the stage there.

Much is sometimes made of the role Verdi’s operas played in the political movement which unified Italy in the 1860s, but the revolution came first and the link with opera followed.

That doesn’t take away from music’s deep power to lift our hearts and hopes. But we project onto it what we want to feel. In London right now, there is an anxiety about epidemics and the political and economic future.

It does us good to hear the Royal Opera’s brilliant chorus sing about liberty. We can relish the show’s stars, Jonas Kaufmann as Florestan, and Lise Davidsen as Leonore, who dominates the evening with a voice of breathtaking power and purity. And you don’t have to pay a lot: tickets are scarce for the next performance at the Royal Opera House tonight, but it is being shown in cinemas all over the country on March 17.

Opera as good as this is more than just entertainment. We are so, so lucky to have it. In frightening times, the power of the human voice cuts right through. Just don’t rely on it to change the world. It is we who must do that.