Beethoven: Fidelio (Akkord-Film, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I looked for a “different” DVD to watch last night and found it in an seven-disc boxed set of Walter Felsenstein’s productions at the Komische Oper in what was then East Berlin (he lived until 1975 but missed the comedown of the Berlin Wall by 14 years). The box featured seven opera productions, and though all the pieces were sung in German only one was originally written in German: Beethoven’s Fidelio, the one we watched last night. (The others in the box were Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Offenbach’s Bluebeard and The Tales of Hoffmann, Verdi’s Otello -- hardly a “Komische Oper” in the literal sense of the term! -- and Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.) I forget what order the operas originally came in in the box but I decided to rack them in the order of composition, and we’ve been screening them in that sequence.

What surprised us about this Fidelio is that -- unlike the Mozart operas, which were straight-up telecasts of live performances -- it was an actual film, shot on realistic locations and with actors on screen while different people sang the roles on the soundtrack. Richard Holm, the Florestan, was only one of a few people in the cast who got both to act and sing his part, and the character of Leonore -- Florestan’s wife, who disguises herself as a man, calls herself “Fidelio” and takes a job as a guard at the prison where Florestan is being held as a political prisoner by the principal villain, Don Pizzaro -- is played by three people: Claude Nollier (a woman in reasonably credible but not totally convincing female-to-male drag) on screen, Grete Zimmer as her speaking double (Nollier probably needed one because she was French) and Magda Laszlo as her singing double. The film was made in 1956 and shot in black-and-white and, according to imdb.com, was actually an Austrian production. The credits listed the Vienna Symphony and Vienna State Opera Choir but Charles and I had assumed the soundtrack was recorded in Austria and the movie filmed in East Germany, but apparently this was an Austrian production all-around and that early in the Cold War (five years before the Berlin Wall was built) Felsenstein was allowed to work in the West.

This is particularly interesting because the plot of Fidelio is a tale attacking political repression of all kinds: the hero is not only being imprisoned, but Pizzaro has kept him locked up in a secret cell and is starving him. What’s more, when Pizzaro learns that Florestan’s friend, royal envoy Don Fernando (Erwin Gross, whose voice double, Alfred Poell, was one of only three cast members I’d previously heard of), is on his way to the town of Seville where Florestan is being held, Pizzaro (Hannes Schiel -- whom Charles thought looked like Barnabas Collins, the vampire on the 1970’s horror soap opera Dark Shadows -- voiced by Heinz Rehfuss) decides to kill Florestan outright and enlists the help of the basically decent jailer, Rocco (Georg Wieter, with Wolfgang Hebenstein as his speaking double -- did he sing it himself but need help with the spoken dialogue?). Rocco refuses to commit murder but agrees to dig the grave for the mystery prisoner Pizzaro is planning to kill. There’s also a romantic triangle that plays kinkier than it no doubt did in Beethoven’s time -- another jail guard, Jacquino (Fritz Berger), is in love with Rocco’s daughter Marzelline (Sonja Schoner), but she’s formed a crush on Fidelio -- while Fidelio him/herself doesn’t need the added romantic complication of a lovestruck girl interested in “him” when she’s focused on finding Florestan in the prison and rescuing him before Pizzaro can kill him.

Fidelio has been a problematic opera ever since Beethoven wrote it in 1805 in a radically different version from the one usually performed today; he wrote it as a Singspiel (literally “song-speech,” the German term for a musical drama with spoken dialogue between the sung numbers: the Austrians call it an operetta, the French an opera-comique and we call it a musical) and went through three versions (1805, 1806 and 1814) before finally arriving at a version that more or less satisfied him. Because Fidelio is the only opera Beethoven completed (though at one point or another he contemplating setting Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Coriolanus and Goethe’s Faust as operas) it’s hung on in the standard repertoire even though it has a lot of problems. It starts out as romantic comedy, suddenly turns into music drama with Pizarro’s big aria announcing what he’s going to do to Florestan and Leonore’s even bigger scena when she overhears him and screws up her courage to save her husband before Pizzaro can kill him. Then the final scene, after Don Fernando arrives, Florestan is freed and Pizzaro is arrested, is a great cantata of forgiveness and joy.

Musically, this performance was a good if not great presentation of Fidelio -- the cast was generally adequate and Rehfuss as Pizzaro better than that, though I’d rather hear a more butch Heldentenor-ish Florestan than Richard Holm. The weak link in this Fidelio musically is its conductor, Fritz Lehmann, who’s professionally competent but way too slow, bringing a poky listlessness to a score Arturo Toscanini in his 1944 recording (the one I learned Fidelio from) turned into a gigantic start-to-finish energy rush. (Toscanini also had truly dramatic voices in the leads: Rose Bampton and Jan Peerce.) What makes this movie interesting is the visual component: Felsenstein (who directed and also co-wrote the script with Hanns Eisler, usually a composer and collaborator with Bertolt Brecht) seemed to be modeling his film on the movies Mexican directors were making in the 1930’s and 1940’s about their country’s 1910-1917 revolution. Most of the scenes are shot with red filters, and in the great scene where Fidelio, behind Rocco’s back, orders the prisoners to be released in the exercise yard in hope she can spot Florestan among them, in this version they come out not into a dreary prison yard but into a park, where they sing the praises of freedom and how they long for it before Rocco catches on, he orders them back into their cells and they sing another choral lament (one of the pieces Beethoven added for the final 1814 version) over the loss of sunlight.

I get the impression Felsenstein was throwing so many natural outdoor images into the movie to pay tribute to Beethiven’s well-known love of nature, and also for symbolic reasons: lightning flashes criss-cross the sky as Pizzaro sings of his murderous intentions. At the end clouds drift over the scene as Felsenstein pulls back his camera for a crane shot showing the size of the crowd in the final scene of forgiveness. Fidelio is an opera that transcends its rather murky origins (it was part of a sub-genre of “rescue operas” popular in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, and indeed Beethoven and his first librettist, Joseph Sonnleithner, ripped off the plot from a French play that had already been set as an opera by at least two other composers, the sort of thing you could get away with in those pre-intellectual property days. Heard today -- and especially in a performance that crossed the Iron Curtain (and with a well-known leftist like Eisler as co-writer) -- Fidelio emerges as a powerful human drama as well as a political proclamation of the need for freedom and justice and the desire of certain people in any society to rule arbitrarily by fear, intimidation and repression. Elements of this story are being lived today in places as far-flung as Hong Kong and Washington, D.C.!