Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ Moves Into the 20th Century With San Diego Opera Production

With its production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” which opens Saturday at Civic Theatre, San Diego Opera makes its belated entry into the heady world of contemporary opera production.

From a local perspective, moving the setting of “Fidelio” from 18th-Century Spain to the Nicaragua of today’s newspaper headlines may be seen as a bold move. In the January issue of Subscriber Notes, a newsletter the opera company sends to its subscription audience, a carefully worded article defended the company’s updating of Beethoven’s only opera.

From an international perspective, however, this approach to opera production is only slightly more revolutionary than replacing the theater’s gas lamps with incandescent bulbs.

“Honestly, after my five years in Europe, what I’m doing here in San Diego is mild compared to what is done in your average European theater,” said Robert Tannenbaum, director of San Diego’s “Fidelio.”

A member of the Cologne Opera’s directing staff, Tannenbaum spent his formative years in the early 1980s at San Diego Opera, where he was former general director Tito Capobianco’s protege. When he left the Capobianco nest, he went directly to West Germany, where he joined the staff of the Wuppertal opera house.

Slowly proving himself restaging other directors’ works, Tannenbaum earned the opportunity to show his own craft in devising new productions. Last season he directed a new production of Benjamin Britten’s “Rape of Lucretia” for Cologne Opera.

“It used no sets and costumes, just street clothes,” Tannenbaum said. “We did the whole production with 10 chairs, four black walls, and professional lighting. It won (the German opera monthly) Opernwelt ‘s award for one of the 10 best productions in Germany last year.”

Next year, Cologne will see his new production of Thea Musgrave’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Tannenbaum acknowledged that the European opera houses’ heavy governmental support gives them a programming freedom unknown to their American counterparts, where there is no cushion from the financial disaster of an experimental production that bombs at the box office.

“Here, you’re so chained in by the middle-of-the-road, conservative expectations of the opera audience, that you cannot take chances,” he said.

And what about the controversial productions of America’s enfant terrible Peter Sellars, who has set Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” in New York’s Trump Towers and gave the protagonist in Wagner’s “Tannhauser” the persona of a defrocked television evangelist?

“Peter Sellars was very lucky in the beginnings of his career, and he was accepted in that direction. But he is an exception. Why cannot we do that in mainstream opera? Not that everybody has to do crazy productions--they just need to be true to the emotional

and psychological makeup of the piece.”

Tannenbaum, a voluble and demonstrative advocate of his own theories, was vehement in stressing that he has never advocated novelty for its own sake.

“That does not mean taking chances by putting three flagellating nuns on the stage in the middle of ‘Rigoletto,’ ” he said. “That means taking chances where the piece is a visual representation of the psychological conflicts in the piece.”

Nor is Tannenbaum uncritical about the trends of contemporary European opera production.

“There is a lot of junk in Europe. To be 100% honest, there are a lot of European opera houses that do just like the Met, but instead of putting up velvet drapes and chandeliers, they put up black leather and yellow pyramids. That doesn’t mean that the music theater is any better.”

San Diego Opera acquired its “Fidelio” set, designed by Neil Peter Jampolis, from Houston Grand Opera, where it was first seen in 1984. To fit both the larger dimensions of the Civic Theatre stage and Tannenbaum’s concept of the opera, several changes have been executed by the San Diego Opera set shop with Jampolis’ blessing.

“This set is a more fully realized presentation of my original ideas,” said Jampolis, who explained that he had been limited by budget constraints for the original Houston production, which also had to accommodate productions of “Tosca” and “Simon Boccanegra” that season. Now that he has seen the results of the San Diego reconstruction, Jampolis applauded the changes.

“I think it works better than the original,” said Jampolis, who has been working with San Diego Opera since the opening of its current season.

According to Tannenbaum, the original Houston production attempted to create a more generalized approach to its Central American setting. In fact, the Houston Chronicle’s review of the opening-night performance, the Chronicle critic was uncertain whether the location was supposed to be Cuba, South America, or Africa.

“I wanted to make the situation more specific to the situation in Nicaragua--the conflict between the Contras and Sandinistas, as well as the issue of outside intervention in the internal politics of other nations,” Tannenbaum said.

“For example, in the first scene of the opera, the way it was done in Houston, a laundry rope was tied across the stage, and Marcelline was hanging out wash. For me, that gives too much of a friendly, Donna Reed-at-home-doing-the-laundry atmosphere. It doesn’t make the point that this is a 17-year-old girl going on 50, because she has to cook, clean, and wash for her father and the guards. I’ve redrawn the first scene so that the visual impact will be mountains of work--that this girl, regardless of what she does, always has more to do.”

Also, most of the costumes from the Houston production were lost and needed to be replaced.

“The costuming will be a little different from Houston,” said Tannenbaum, “because I want the feeling of the sticky, humid atmosphere, and the cheap polyester Goodwill clothes that the people have to wear.”

But Tannenbaum is concerned about more than scenic details; his own political agenda will color the final scene.

“What I am doing in the last scene is also totally different than what was done in Houston. They did not try to take in the modern-day realities of puppet governments, media hype, and all of the things that play a part of politics today. In the last scene, I’ve brought those elements to the forefront.”

Because Tannenbaum did not want to destroy the element of surprise, he was unwilling to describe the manner in which he has realized this political vision at the opera’s climax. But he was quick to assure traditionalists that his alterations will do no violence to Beethoven’s opera.

“I haven’t changed a thing about the story,” he said. “That’s the wonderful opportunity I’ve had with the piece. The piece itself does not need any adjustments to fit into Nicaragua.”

Does Tannenbaum think that his particular political vision is what Beethoven had in mind when he was composing “Fidelio” in 1805?

“Honestly, no,” he said. “But I think that Beethoven had this in the back of his mind.”