OPERA REVIEW : San Francisco Does Justice to Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’

The cast was hardly perfect. The evening began with a major miscalculation. The English supertitles distorted the integrity of the German text. But the San Francisco Opera still managed to define and project the essential pathos of “Fidelio” Saturday night.

That isn’t an easy achievement. The creaky old melodrama that forms the libretto of Beethoven’s only opera--an idealistic ode to liberty, sacrifice and universal brotherhood--defies 20th-Century sensibilities at every contrived turn. The score--a fusion of lofty rhetoric and folksy platitude--demands a sensitive virtuoso in the pit and a dauntless cast.

Even when the resources weren’t quite right at the War Memorial Opera House, the communal spirit was emphatically willing. And, crucially, the leadership--both musical and dramatic--was enlightened.

Donald Runnicles, San Francisco’s new music director, stressed lyrical introspection wherever possible. Although he rose nobly to the mighty climaxes, he tended to avoid bombast in favor of dynamic subtlety and textural transparency. This would be a telling, legitimate approach under any circumstance, but it made particularly good sense given the generally lightweight voices at his disposal here.

He could not make the hard-working San Francisco orchestra sound like a great symphonic ensemble. Nor could he always make a rough chorus sound smooth.

He could not convince the listener that Beethoven was wrong when, in 1806, he discarded the third “Leonore” overture. The piece is so long, so grand and so profound that it makes much of what follows seem trivial.

Still, Runnicles sustained an aura of sweeping conviction, even when beginning the evening with the wrong overture. He remains a reassuring presence in the pit.

The theatrical elements were equally well served by Michael Hampe, who returned to direct the production first seen here in 1987, and by John Gunter, whose sets delineate both mood and locale with perfect flexibility and point.

Hampe ventured no innovations, offered no interpretive gimmicks. He did, however, allow the plot to unfold with uncommon simplicity and clarity. Text permitting, he toned down the potential bathos (he might have toned it down even further in the overwrought Prisoners’ Chorus), and he tried valiantly to make the period conventions seem plausible.

For once, Marzelline did not turn instantly to Jacquino, her previously rejected suitor, upon the awkward discovery that her fiance was really a woman.

Gunter’s bleak prison dungeon--dark brick walls flanked by ominous towers--was transformed with magical speed and apt symbolism to a blindingly sunny courtyard for the final scene. There was no need to lower the curtain, no excuse to interpolate any time-filling tone-poem.

For once, the entrance of the deus ex machina , Don Fernando, was not an anticlimax.

No performance of “Fidelio” can succeed without an inspired singing actress in the title role. Hildegard Behrens is just that.

At this relatively late stage of an all too strenuous career, her vocalism is sometimes marred by technical blemishes. But she sings with fearless abandon, acts with well-focused intensity, and inflects the text with tones of muted agony. Vulnerable rather than heroic, she makes the preposterous figure--a woman masquerading as a boy--more credible than any modern viewer has a right to expect, and more poignant.

One wishes she would omit the self-conscious device of removing her cap to reveal a cascade of feminine locks at the vital cry of “Tod erst sein Weib.” This was a startling effect when Anja Silja did it for Wieland Wagner in Germany 25 years ago. Now it is a cliche. It also is one of the very few jarring details in Behrens’ immensely sympathetic performance.

Next to this Leonore, Gary Lakes seems a particularly dull and superficial Florestan. The huge junior-heldentenor turns out to be vocally competent as the starving prisoner (the strain at top range is mostly Beethoven’s fault), and physically absurd.

Ekkehard Wlaschiha is forceful in the evil posturing of Pizarro, but he brings an Alberich baritone to a task that ideally requires a Wotan. Hans Tschammer musters a pleasant, small-scale Rocco.

Ann Panagulias looks adorable and sounds a bit threadbare as Marzelline. Perhaps it was dangerous for this very young soprano with a very fragile voice to begin her career as Berg’s Lulu. One worries, in any case, about the prospects for her Gilda and Pamina at the Music Center this season.

Michael Schade introduced an uncommonly compelling Jacquino, Alan Held a reasonably imposing Don Fernando. A young tenor named Stephen Guggenheim attracted special attention as the first prisoner, seconded by Magnus Baldvinsson.

The distracting supertitles, prepared by Christopher Bergen, stubbornly reduced poetry to prose and inspired some inappropriate laughter in the process. They also falsified much of the specific Germanic imagery. There must be a better way.