Word: fidelio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...merciless ideals, but who relinquished all royalties on his works so that an edition of Bruckner could be published; a man who said just before his death that "poor Schoenberg will have no one left"; a man who spent all of his precious years perfecting his interoperations of Tristan, Fidelio, and The Magic Flute; a man who read Kant aloud to his wife during Children. The following tentative remarks are intended only to be suggestive, hopefully with minimum distortion, for to slightly alter Artur Schnabel's dictum, "Great composers are greater than they can be explained...
...productions of some rarely heard operas. Emilio de' Cavalieri's The Representation of Body and Soul (1600), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona (1733), and Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne spell Von Karajan's controversial production of Don Giovanni, and Beethoven's Fidelio under Karl Böhm's baton. The classics-heavy on Mozart, of course-will be given their due by the Vienna Philharmonic...
...chauvinistic critics will concede that artistic standards at New York's Met and Milan's La Scala are at least as high. More exciting days, though, may be ahead. Next year Bernstein and the Viennese stage director Otto Schenk will collaborate on a new production of Fidelio. Also scheduled are expensively mounted revivals of Verdi's Macbeth, Gluck's Iphigénie and such relatively little-known works as Smetana's Dalibor and Gottfried von Einem's Der Prozess...
Compared with Beethoven's more polished, rounded-and, some say, compromised-version of 1814, the original Fidelio turned out to be expansive and florid, bursting through its forms with a driving force that the composer was only partially able to control. Its heavy orchestration has a strain of wildness that Beethoven tamed in his later revisions; its soaring vocal lines, which he later modified, make harsh demands on singers. In all, there are significant differences from the 1814 revision on 134 of the vocal score's 276 pages...
Leinsdorf does not think the original Fidelio will find a place in regular operatic productions, but he sees it as a strong, if difficult, addition to the concert and festival repertory. "It represents the composer at his hottest," he says-and by way of proof, Leinsdorf had to change his sweat-soaked jacket at intermission. "In it, like the genius he was, Beethoven was asking for things ahead of his time which probably could not be done." As Leinsdorf, the orchestra and the singers-particularly Soprano Hanne-Lore Kuhse and Tenor George Shirley-showed at Tanglewood, they can be done...