Berliner Brings a Special Perspective to ‘Fidelio’ : Gotz Friedrich, directing the Music Center season opener, is a man who knows of tyranny firsthand

Huddling around a table with cast members of “Fidelio,” Gotz Friedrich seems calm now, even philosophical. But earlier in rehearsal the eminent German director had been scolded by his wife, soprano Karan Armstrong “for crying,” he says, “for getting too emotional” during the ultimately moving Prisoners’ Chorus.

Beethoven’s only opera--opening the Music Center Opera season on Tuesday--does that to people, and not least to a man who knows personally about its subject: the loss of human rights, “the terrible process that all Germans of my generation have gone through.”

Indeed, Friedrich was a boy when the Third Reich came to power and turned his country into a police state. By age 14, he knew the implied horrors and more, thanks to a father “who was close to the men responsible for trying to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944.”

“And where I lived (Naumburg) came at first the liberating Americans, only to be followed by the Red Army. Political oppression was then all around me. Living in East Germany until 40 years old I knew little else.”

But Beethoven, he says, sounded the call to freedom more than a century earlier--when Napoleon’s armies crossed into Austria and occupied Salzburg. Rallying against that travesty, the prescient composer tapped into what Germans have experienced in the last half century: living as a divided people.

It was 1973 when Friedrich defected from East Berlin’s Komische Oper. Since 1981, he has been director of the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin. Now, with the end of the Cold War and the crumbling of the wall, he finally is unified with the city of his artistic origins.

So how will the innovative director who sees opera as a theatrically serious and socially relevant subject stage his “Fidelio”? Will it depict East Berlin with Checkpoint Charlie still a decisive border? Or maybe he will look to something equally topical--the United States in Panama or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Just last year, San Diego Opera placed “Fidelio” in a banana-republic context.

“Nothing of the sort,” says Friedrich in a mellifluous Maurice Chevalier basso with a pronounced accent. “I know that seems strange, especially when you consider what is usual among German directors who like to set ‘Fidelio’ as a Nazi death camp or a gulag in the Soviet Union.

“In my mind, you should keep old operas in their time while doing everything to show that the same oppression could happen right here, right now. Each person in the audience must have his own inside picture of what that oppression is.

“An old story can be good and a brand-new story likewise, but opera is most thrilling when it has both the old and new story. Combining the two of them shows the humanistic message in all its permanence.”

It’s not that Friedrich minimizes the milestone of German reunification. He says that he is profoundly touched, especially because what occurred last year “was a weightless and nonviolent revolution.”

“I am amazed that not one person was killed. This is new in world history. But the danger would be to show the (“Fidelio”) prisoners as victims of the Stasi (the East German intelligence service). The fundamental message carries better without social realism because everyone knows the appellation of freedom. It covers all situations--in camps and prisons everywhere.”

The director--who brought to the Music Center Opera its inaugural “Otello,” earlier oversaw his evocatively surreal “Die Tote Stadt” and in 1988 a stylized “Kat’a Kabanova”--now asks for the freedom of abstraction.

He points to the character Leonore, who searches for, finds and liberates her captive husband.

“She knows nothing about politics,” he explains. “Why should she have a political identity? Her courage defines her. It’s such a strong, human story--I don’t need to place it in a specific location or even to teach the audience history lessons. Let them respond to the tale, which is a fairy tale, in a way, a dream/nightmare as it was in 1945, when the Nazi death camps opened.”

Even the sets, which will borrow only “a few concrete symbols,” are not tied to an actual time or place. “I want to provoke a feeling of claustrophobia, to show everyone in its grip and how the imprisonment of one person implicates all the others.”

The lunch break is over and Friedrich calls his cast back to rehearsal, the Act I finale. Now he gets the chance to illuminate his brand of theatrical truth--through characterization. A hands-on director, he searches out the motives for each actor’s utterances.

The scene begins with Jonathan Mack (Jacquino) remonstrating his impatience with Marzelline. She doesn’t want to marry him, preferring that nice Fidelio (who is really Leonore disguised as a man).

The ruddy-complexioned, rather paunchy director sits back and watches, fumbling for a cigarette. He lets the episode finish, then slowly gets up, shuffles onto the playing area and stands next to Mack. Lapsing into English--the main rehearsal business is all in German--he declaims Jacquino’s line:

“Even if she doesn’t love me, at least let her marry me,” he hollers, banging his fists on his thighs and gasping in exasperation. He pads back to his seat and observes Mack’s improved repeat. “Ja, wohl,” says the director.

But when Michael Devlin fails to appear on cue, Friedrich calls out to the singer, who is standing behind the bleachers: “You will not be issued a special invitation to be on stage for your sung parts.”

The tone of gentle sarcasm is mock-gruff. Friedrich is not really-high strung or temperamental. Later, he shows Devlin, as the villain Pizarro, how to inject vitality into a small exchange between himself and Rocco (Matti Salminen). A cross-examining Pizarro, suspicious of Rocco’s possible sympathy for the prisoner, listens to the lowly jailer absolve himself.

As Pizarro, Friedrich moves up brazenly close to Rocco and gazes right into his face. Then he turns away and speaks aloud his observations of Rocco: “Oh, he’s smarter than I thought. This is no little dog. He’s at least a buffalo.” A new dimension has been added.

By the time Karen Beardsley (Marzelline) arrives, the action is considerably more intense. The director makes her translate her lines because he feels they sound too much like generalized bluster to mean anything. Afterwards she goes back to the German and he issues an appraisal:

“It is better, but not good. I almost understand one word,” he laughs. “But that’s progress, my love.”

Sometimes a director’s concept fails to make itself known to audiences and critics. But if Friedrich has his way, unification will come about as surely for “Fidelio” as it has for Germany.

The two-act opera, commonly regarded as problematic, sits uncomfortably between the category of rustic little household conflict and paean to soaring idealism, replete with highly charged, transcendent music.

“However, I don’t think of ‘Fidelio’ as a Singspiel (light opera) that progresses to a drama,” he says earnestly, while fumbling again for a cigarette. “What seems so trifling in the first scene is only a cover for terror, which I show by using a shortened form of the dialogue, with pauses between lines.

“All of the characters--Marzelline, her father Rocco and his assistant Jacquino--know at some level that they are prisoners too.

“I even have my doubts that Florestan (the principal prisoner) is saved at the end. As for Leonore, she wants to rescue everyone--not just her husband.”

Friedrich, who learned his craft under the legendary Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper, says he had to save himself some 20 years ago from an oppressive regime.

“In order to gain just the ordinary human rights that the West takes for granted, I had to rebel. Like Don Quixote, I could not exist with the terrible border that had been imposed.”

At the time, he gave interviews citing “artistic freedom” as his reason for defecting. “But that was inaccurate,” he says now. “My real goal was to gain political freedom. I couldn’t admit that then, however, without risking the penalty of criticizing the system. The DDR (East German Republic) would have chased me for uttering such bad words.”

When he returns home, Friedrich will face an entirely different dilemma: a newly unified Berlin that must administer three opera companies--his own Deutsche Oper, the State Opera and the Komische Oper. With the economy already in an upheaval because of the East-West disparity between jobs and technology, the arts are equally up for grabs.

“The decisions will be momentous,” he says. “Does Berlin need three opera companies and 20 theaters and separate houses for operetta? Which of these belong to the central government, which to the state of Berlin and which to the city of Berlin? It’s so complicated I don’t want to even think about it.”

Judgments must be made, he says, and they involve ranking of the different companies as well as allocating monies based on the ranking.

“I do not hear any of this with pleasure,” Friedrich admits. “But I’ll have to get into the fray just to fight such categorization. All these years we were liberal in the best tradition of free art. What irony that with the great opening of our world the arts are in jeopardy.”