Fidelio, Dutch National Opera 23.06.24

by Susana Puente Matos

Andrij Zholdak’s production of Fidelio for the Dutch National Opera was so terrible it may or may not have cost me a burgeoning relationship. I don’t know. The last I heard was that he was going offline and had absconded to the woods.

         The opera hung over our dates like a storm cloud, although of course I was blissfully unaware of this. I had bought the tickets months and months before I had even met him. They seemed perfectly harmless: two central second-row orchestra seats for a Sunday matinee which couldn’t be longer than two and a half hours, including intermission. This wasn’t Wagner. This was Singspiel, and Beethoven, and one of opera’s finest overtures.

            June was busy and I wasn’t reading Dutch news, so I didn’t know that Zholdak was booed off the stage after the opening performance, Ukrainian flag above his head be damned. An email sent by the opera house to ticketholders the day before my matinee was the first I heard of near-unanimous one-star reviews in the press. The email read:

Many reviews state that it was difficult to follow director Andrij Zholdak’s vision during Fidelio. Because we want to make sure that visitors better understand what they will see during the performance, we recommend that you read the information page on our website.

         Uh oh. I clicked the link and started reading Hein van Eekert’s explanation of the production. “There are two issues that seem to make this production complicated,” he began:

1.     Director Andrij Zholdak replaced the dialogue with his own dialogue (and removed part of the music, but that does not affect the storyline)

2.     The director left the libretto to the musical parts intact. The words to the music are now meaningless.

         So there was a new, spoken, surrealist storyline in English wrapped around the original sung, 18th century-Spain storyline in German. I stared at the ceiling and sighed; stopped reading and shut my computer.

         The next day we cycled to the opera house under a rare blistering Dutch sun. Already the tides were turning on this excursion: I wanted bad weather for a matinee, not terrasje weer, as the Dutch say. What set designs could compete with boat-watching along a glistening canal under the shade of an elm tree? I stopped breathing every time we climbed a canal bridge, fearful that my Manolos would explode from the pressure of pushing down on the bicycle peddles. Surely they were not made for this.

         The overture would sustain us through whatever Zholdak had done with the opera, I thought to myself as we settled into our seats. I tried to remain optimistic. Then a low-resolution projection flashed against the closed curtains on stage: INTERNATIONAL COSMIC DAY SPACE CONFERENCE, it read, (“cosmic” in pink).  My cheeks burned with embarrassment. Soprano Jacquelyn Wagner approached the podium in a pink suit. Three men sat with their backs toward the audience in cheap plastic chairs to her right. In an affected, Twin Peaks monotone, Wagner said something about a black hole nearing the earth. I twisted my wrist in my hand. Where was the overture? The budget cosmic conference ended and a movie screen rolled down showing Wagner stepping into a cab through extremely close up, Peep Show style shots. I shifted awkwardly in my seat. There was still no music.

         We watched Wagner go to church, then to bed with Florestan, whereupon she was introduced as his wife Leonore. A portly man carrying a snake crept through the mirror in their bedroom and ushered Florestan back through with him, leaving the snake on an arm chair. Leonore woke up to discover her husband gone. She rushed to the mirror. After fifteen interminable minutes, the conductor raised his baton and began to quell the rising tides of embarrassment within me by at last commencing the overture.

         But there was so much happening on stage during the overture that it was reduced to soundtrack: Leonore left to put on a red, Dora the Explorer back pack for her school trip to hell. Effete Satyrs popped out of grottos hauling rolling mirrors on and off stage. Demons (?) waltzed about with crumpled wings, as if they had been stored poorly and the costume team had no time to iron them out. I was so busy trying to make sense of what was going on and whether any of it could possibly be important enough to distract from the overture that I hardly heard the music at all.  

         Zholdak inserted so much of his own dialogue that the total run time of the opera, including intermission, was three hours rather than the normal two and a half. At some point Zholdak robbed us of several precious minutes of sunshine by forcing us to watch in silence as a robot-man glacially traversed the stage for no obvious reason. An insertion of Beethoven’s third symphony was wasted on a scene change – more rolling mirrors. I pitied the singers, whipping out fuzzy wolf masks and setting things on fire, as if their hard-trained voices and Beethoven’s music were not enough.

         I gave up and retreated into my own thoughts. I recalled a visit to Vienna in May 2023, when Sigmund Oakeshott and I decided to skip out before the curtains rose on the Goldberg Variations set to modern dance at the Wiener Statsoper. We feared having the image of thumping, fleshy dancing emblazoned on our retinas forever whenever the Variations would be performed. What was more important: our money or Bach’s music? We made a dash for Sacher Torte instead.

         I tuned back in just in time for the closing of Act I. Nobody clapped. At intermission I asked my guest if he wanted to leave.  We debated it until the bell chimed for reentry.

         “What time is it?”

         He checked his watch. “Three-thirty. When does it end?”

         “Five,” I said.

         “An hour and a half more...” he drifted off, glancing courageously in the direction of our seats.

         The last time I had seen Fidelio was a decade earlier, on December 10, 2014 at La Scala in Milan. At the very last minute before curtains rose, it was announced that Florestan would be performed by a stand-in, Jonas Kaufmann. I will always remember his voice piercing the silence of the hall from his prison pit in Act II. His voice had something of metal and earth in its outer tin and inner warmth. Gott! Welche Dunkel hier. I remember complaining about the costumes: dreary, grey-toned and timeless. I retract this complaint after Zholdak’s Fidelio. They didn’t distract from the music.

         Less than a week after the disastrous opera, I’m relieved at how much of it I have already forgotten. A small part of me regrets leaving, since I now wonder how much damage forgettable productions can inflict. But I didn’t want to witness Florestan sing that aria for no reason. Nor did I want to scare my guest off opera forever. I worry about the other newcomers in that theater who felt obligated to see it through to the end. I hope they will return to the opera, consoled by the improbability of seeing something worse.

         As for my date, even though we did leave early it was probably already too late. The experience might have triggered a sensory overload, forcing him into radical retreat. Perhaps Zholdak’s Fidelio did penetrate an Ur-Germanic chord of Beethoven’s opera. What could be more German, after all, than inspiring one’s audience to go offline and embark on a Jüngerian Waldgäng?