Music

Fidelio: Irish National Opera sends us home exhilarated

Review: An ingeniously staged, persuasively sung production of Beethoven’s sole opera

Fidelo: under Fergus Sheil, the Irish National Opera Orchestra captures the composer’s familiar musical language, which here beautifully underscores the story’s triumphs for love and for freedom

Michael Dungan
Mon Nov 8 2021 - 12:59

FIDELIO

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Beethoven wrote just the one opera, set in a state prison. His hero is not the whistleblower, held secretly in solitary confinement by the corrupt prison governor intending to murder him. Rather, it's the prisoner's wife who, hoping for an opportunity to free him, infiltrates the prison service by disguising herself as a man: Fidelio.

Beethoven wants us to admire this hero, and we do: for her courage, loyalty, inner strength. And her compassion: uncertain whether the broken human before her is her husband, she sings, “Whoever you are, I will save you.” And we think, That’s what I would do.

Not so fast, Beethoven says, and provides another character in whose blending of flaws and qualities we are more likely to recognise our imperfect selves. This is Rocco, the chief jailer. For Irish National Opera, director Annabelle Comyn devotes most of Beethoven's seven-minute overture to establishing Rocco's likable ordinariness. In his morning routine he is first into the prison's little office – bang on as a slightly shabby present-day in Francis O'Connor's set – pouring an instant coffee, shedding his homely jumper to put on his prison-service shirt, checking names on a whiteboard against those on a printout.

The soprano Sinéad Campbell Wallace brilliantly walks the tightrope between selling her Fidelio persona to her fellow characters while providing the audience with a window into her emotional state as the heroic wife, Leonore

Combined, the direction and music make us like Rocco, sung with great warmth and physical presence by the Australian bass-baritone Daniel Sumegi. Unlike Fidelio, he is pragmatic rather than romantic – career-conscious, insisting that marriage depends on money as well as love – and fearfully subservient to authority.

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He is a foil to the desperate and single-minded hero. The soprano Sinéad Campbell Wallace brilliantly walks the tightrope between selling her Fidelio persona to her fellow characters while providing the audience with a window into her heightened but necessarily suppressed emotional state as the heroic wife, Leonore.

In the second half the little office morphs ingeniously into an imposing modern prison on three levels, lit coldly yet never harshly by Paul Keogan. Continuing its ongoing commitment, INO peoples this world with Irish singers in secondary roles and as prisoners and guards, all very convincingly costumed by O’Connor. When we finally meet him, the tenor Robert Murray is persuasive as Florestan, the vulnerable victim needing rescue, and the American baritone Brian Mulligan earns boos as Pizarro, the villainous governor.

And it's Beethoven! Under the conductor Fergus Sheil, the Irish National Opera Orchestra captures the composer's familiar musical language, which here beautifully underscores the story's triumphs for love and for freedom and sends us home exhilarated.

Continues at the Gaiety Theatre on Tuesday, November 9th , Wednesday, November 10th, Friday, Nov 12th, and Saturday, November 13th