Fidelio

Ever since Mozart's Cosi Fan tutte was produced at Leverett House two years ago, musical theatre at Harvard has suffered from a bad case of escalation. L'Histoire du Soldat, Don Giovanni; and The Marriage of Figaro followed-in quick succession, and one shuddered to think where Harvard musicians would go from there.

One music wonk predicted that "this was the year they would do Gotterdammerung on a card table." He wasn't far off. Saturday night the Music Club mounted what was billed as a concert performance of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio.

From the beginning this project suffered from delusions of grandeur. Fidelio is traditionally a work of which even professionals are terrified. Beethoven was not one to let the physical limitations of the human voice restrict his compositional imagination, and Fidelio contains some of the most fiendishly difficult vocal and instrumental part-writing in the whole operatic literature.

It was furthermore decided that the work would be performed in Sanders Theatre, which except for its size has very little to recommend it as an auditorium for music. Vocal sound, particularly when female, tends to get trapped in great pockets of space. The shape of the Sanders stage made it necessary to have the entire chorus stage right, facing stage left at right angles to the audience--a position not in the least conducive to projection. Moreover, Sanders is across the street from the fire station, and the wailing sirens interrupted the concert several times.

On the face of it, conductor Daniel Hathaway seemed to have limited his ambition to a formal concert performance without dialogue. Actually he failed to resist the temptation of doing Fidelio as a stage production as well.

In so doing he combined the worst of both alternatives. Bass David Ripley kept the audience informed with bits of plot summary between musical numbers. Fidelio's typical rescue-opera plot was ridiculous distilled into narrative prose and recited with a straight face. Furthermore, Hathaway had his soloists marching on and off stage, simulating the enrtances and exits of a stage performance. These movements were ill-planned, ill-timed and meaningless.

While some of the soloists moved about the stage as if they were acting, others executed their parts straight-forwardly from stand or hand-held score. The production never decided what it was going to be. As a result the audience never knew if it was supposed to be caught up in the drama of the thing or appreciating the work for its pure musical value. The awkward silence preceeding the applause after each number was a telling sign of the audience's confusion.

By all predictions Hathaway's Fidelio should have been a failure. That it was certainly not. Using the Bach Society Orchestra as a base, he managed to assemble many of the best instrumentalists at Harvard; for his chorus he drew heavily from the Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society. It is a tribute to his musicians' intelligence and ability to sightread, and to his own assiduity and seriousness as a conductor, that they got through the music as well as they did.

Hathaway's soloists were a mixed bag. Tenor James Olesen executed his brief role passionately and with excellent German enunciation. Sharon King as Marcellene was controlled on pitch but was easily overpowered by any of the other soloists. Freshman phenomenon David Ripley acquitted the part of Don Fernando valiantly but seemed to be worrying too much about getting all the notes to do anything with them. Gregory Sandow as Rocco was well, embarrassing. Sandow is one of those rare examples of a ham with stage fright. His singing is at once precious and stiff. His main problem is that he tries too hard, and his efforts to be expressive lead him to forcing and frequent lapses of taste.

Joseph Dwyer as Florestan had the task of singing what is perhaps the most difficult tenor aria in all opera. "Gott. welch' Dunkel hier" really has too many A's and and Bb's for anyone to cope with and Dwver showed severe signs of strain. Nonetheless he sand with emotion, a quality that had been lacking in the opera up to that point, especially in the men's chorus and the ensembles.

Mary Sindoni as Leonora-Fidelio was the musical heroine of the evening. As lovely vocally as in appearance, she sang the soprano role with taste, showing remarkably little strain in the high register and shifting effortlessly from one register to the other. James Parks as the wicked Governor Pizarro was dramatically the most successful of the soloists. He achieved a characterization where the others only sang well. This is not to slight his vocal capabilities--a bass-baritone, he took the high A in "Ha! Welch'ein Augenblick" and held it painlessly. The only singers supposed to be able to do that are Eberhard Wachter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

As one illustrious member of the audience said, Hathaway's Fidelio "had its moments" especially in the long second act finale. On the whole, however, the forces assembled at Sanders had to cope with so much music of such weight and difficulty that they had little chance to do anything with their parts but get through them. Much of the performance was simply dutiful and at times even boring. Beethoven's exquisite score certainly deserves more than that--that is, more than even the best undergraduate musicians are capable of giving it under the circumstances of extracurricular music at Harvard.

This performance of Fidelio shows how close Harvard music has come to decadence. For the longest time musicians here have assumed that anything is possible as long as they have enough imagination to think of impressive projects and enough gall to go through with them. If this Fidelio is not taken as a warning, the result could well be disastrous. ROBERT G. KOPELSON