Karen Almond / Met Opera
Lise Davidsen as Fidelio, the courageous wife in disguise and role model for standing up to autocrats.
On our drive on toward Milford and the Connecticut Post Mall, I fiddled with the car radio, turning off the drumbeat of distressing news out of the nation’s capital.
Just a day earlier, President Trump had declared at the Justice Department that political dissent must be punished; as if the First Amendment has never existed.
My tolerance level for such lunacy tends to wane; so much so that, as I have confided to friends, we have reduced our cable news watching to only 23 hours per day.
So, as we pulled into the vast parking lot of the Connecticut Post Mall, I was looking for some time off from pervasive political outrage, and to escape to the live HD Met Opera broadcast of Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio.”
Though Suzanne and I have watched many operas, including the splendid February staging by Yale Opera of Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” at the Shubert, we had never attended “Fidelio,” and knew little about it except that it plays a significant role in the repertoire.
That fact was evident when I had tried to buy tickets weeks earlier at our usual venue for the HD broadcasts, the closer Cinemark in North Haven. I learned online that the only seats available there were in the first row, which would provide an excellent view of singers’ tonsils, but not much of anything else. So the Connecticut Post Mall it was.
Not having been to it before, I was unaware that it requires a hunt to discover where the movie theater is, an adventure that might have annoyed the friendly people we asked for clues and added to the day’s stress. We arrived just as the broadcast began and found our assigned seats in the back row. No tonsils evident from there.
As we didn’t have the time to read the program, we relied on the performance, and its subtitles from the German, to fill us in.
Here’s what astonished us: We could see right off that a work that had its debut in 1805 in Vienna was, in a large sense, written for today. How so?
The lead character, Fidelio, an assistant to a jailer, is really Leonora. She has been disguised as a man (there’s a lot of that stuff in opera) for months in order to secure the job, hoping to figure a way to spring her husband from the dark and dank dungeon below where he is starved, parched, and dying.
His crime? As he reveals it himself in his first aria, he “dared to speak the truth” to power.
Oh no, I thought. Even my precious moments away from cable news have been invaded by Donald Trump’s intended prohibition of speech that offends him.
Obviously, two centuries ago in the era of Napoleon authoritarianism was just part of a pattern of ruthless power plays throughout the ages. In that sense, it could be argued that we shouldn’t be surprised at our present-day woes, or even conclude that 100 years from now it will still be a danger, assuming we haven’t yet blown the human race, all creatures great and small, and our planet to bits by then.
(Aside to readers: Have I cheered you up yet? But wait, there is good news here. So stick with me here. I don’t think you’ll mind that the following comes with a spoiler alert.)
As it turns out in the opera “Fidelio,” the strength and commitment of Leonora makes all the difference. She risks her life to spring her husband from the dungeon, and in the process also frees the other oppressed prisoners.
This was almost too much to bear — how could Beethoven write a happy ending to such hopelessness? Didn’t he know that audiences are supposed to be in heavenly despair at the end of a non-comic opera, as the way they are, for example, at the curtain of “La Boheme”?
The blue sky that emerges in “Fidelio” and the rousing conclusion may suggest to us that delivery from our present gloom is just around the corner, that we’ll all experience the thrill of a political high C. But who and what will deliver it to us. Who is the present-day Leonora?
We may of course be tempted to cite Connecticut’s own tilter at windmills (while we’re referencing the classics), U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, who has inspired many beyond our state’s borders to take on the mendacity and excesses of the Trump Administration. (U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro is no slouch at that either.)
But the hero needs to be, as in the Nixon era, someone from the president’s present inner political circle. Someone who takes big chances, imperiling his or her future and livelihood. Fat chance at that. For now, anyway.
As “Fidelio” drew to a close, we had the right kind of tears as we watched the customary reward for the lead character — standing ovation, flowers, many bows. and scores of “Brava!” — all of it well earned by soprano Lise Davidsen, our Leonora, who in real life is very pregnant with twins and who, as the action proceeded, had to climb up and down ladders, giving audience members extra anxiety. (This, in fact, was her last performance in “Fidelio.”)
Suzanne and I walked back to the car and as we drove out of the lot, we turned back on the dreadful news we missed in the meantime, but in a way we really didn’t miss. It occurred to me that perhaps Ms. Davidsen, or someone like Leonora, will one day soon rescue democracy. Or, perhaps, that it might become apparent that such a task belongs to each of us.