Word: fidelio
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...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...
...Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. Mozart's Don Giovanni and Britten's The Turn of the Screw: this year it was hard to decide whether to be more impressed by Leverett's production of The Marriage of Figaro or the Bach Society-Music Club concert performance of Fidelio. The more ambitions these projects become, the more time, money and professional assistance are necessary to carry them off. Sometimes one of these works is lucky enough to get the intensive study and careful preparation is deserves, as in the case of Figaro. Occasionally, however, rehearsal and recruitment of performing forces...