Word: fidelia
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...massive voice to bear on the torturous part, Marton demolished its fearsome technical difficulties while touchingly developing the heroine from a frigid despot into a tender, vulnerable woman. This week at the Met she takes on another of opera's superwomen, Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelia...
...near-tragic character of Fidelia, in love with the hero Manly, yet forced to conceal her feelings and her sex, has the power to make or break the play. Sarah Jane Lithgow's sensitive portrayal draws out of a potentially melodramatic part all the tragic irony of this single pure character, as she follows her rough and faithless lover through a world in which she clearly has no part. There is nothing comic in the character of a woman who is forced, in the guise of a man, to woo another woman on behalf of the man she loves...
Brad Kent, as the "unmannerly sea-dog" and hero Manly, snarls and grimaces his way through the first four acts. Rarely varying either tempo or tone, he renders the not-so-despicable hero totally unbearable. His sudden transformation into the future husband of the victimized Fidelia is, as a result, anything but credible. Both the irony and tragedy of Manly's character are lost in a flood of rage...
Last week Vienna celebrated the centennial of its baroque musical shrine on the Ringstrasse. One of the city's favorite visitors, Leonard Bernstein, opened the festivities with a stunning performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Next evening Karl Böhm conducted Beethoven's Fidelia, with a cast that included American Tenor Jess Thomas and Soprano Leonie Rysanek of New York's Metropolitan Opera. The week's musical highlight was undoubtedly Mozart's Don Giovanni, which was performed on the gala May night in 1869 when the Emperor Franz Josef presided over the opening...
...brilliant intellectual and social haut monde in Salzburg for the music festival. He is a self-conscious blunderer, but the one thing he understands far better than his indifferent friends is the true nature of Hitler's mania. The Jew and Gentile gathered to hear Toscanini conduct Fidelia cling to the illusion that Austria is protected by some ineluctable immunity. But after watching his barber preen in his new National Socialist uniform, and after seeing the troopers take over the best restaurants, Stanley knows that he must get out. He realizes that the society that obsesses him is committing...