Two Versions of ‘Fidelio’ That Sound ‘Important’

Beethoven’s “Fidelio” is a conductor’s opera: a work in which icons make statements; a companion, after a fashion, to the Beethoven symphonies.

“Fidelio” is furthermore an opera that deals with freedom, tyranny and domestic fidelity among its high-minded concerns. It is also difficult for a conductor to harness its patchy structure, while being surpassingly difficult to sing, given its composer’s notorious lack of regard for the human larynx.

Two recently arrived, but hardly new, recorded performances have important written all over them. In each case, the cover bears the image of only a single participant, the conductor: Wilhelm Furtwangler (1886-1954), the German icon of icons, in a production taped live at the 1950 Salzburg Festival (EMI 64901, 2 CDs), and the Hungarian Ferenc Fricsay, a cult object after his death in 1963 at age 49, who leads a 1957 studio job (Deutsche Grammophon 437 345, 2 CDs).

While both use virtually the same materials, Furtwangler’s is the longer by some 25 minutes. But the differences are not only in tempo.

From the start, Furtwangler is ponderous and willful. In the opening scene, after a sloppily executed--by the Vienna Philharmonic--texturally thick overture, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, as Marzelline, has no opportunity to indulge her own well-oiled mannerisms. She is too busy indulging the conductor’s less predictable ones, and it’s a tribute to her musicianship that she suffers no mishaps, even producing a semblance of a lyric line without choking on the ever-shifting, usually slow, tempos.

Taking the same music as a microcosm of two vastly dissimilar interpretive stances, Fricsay, leading his scrappy Bavarian State Orchestra through a terse, airborne overture, is all bristling energy and textural clarity. He therefore sets his Marzelline, Irmgard Seefried, a different if more predictable set of obstacles. She, too, emerges unscathed, if out of breath.

The central roles of the faithful Leonore, a.k.a. Fidelio, and the long-suffering Florestan are for Furtwangler in the starry hands of Kirsten Flagstad, then 54 years old, but whose vast, vaulting soprano has never sounded more sumptuous and commanding, and Julius Patzak, who may not by nature have been equipped for Florestan’s heroics, but who uses his reedy tenor so cannily that he makes us believers.

It is in their big solos, Leonore’s “Abscheulicher” and Florestan’s “Gott, welch’ Dunkel hier,” that Furtwangler shows his legendary stuff, shaping and controlling these huge structures with a master’s hand while acknowledging his singers’, and Beethoven’s, expressive needs.

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EMI’s production might be regarded a successful presentation of “Fidelio’s” Greatest Moments, while the DG set is certainly all of a piece, if not a piece that will appeal to all tastes. With Fricsay, “Fidelio” emerges a domestic drama of Classical proportions, as opposed to Furtwangler’s proto-Romantic epic.

Fricsay’s Leonie Rysanek is a mercurial, youthful-sounding Leonore, momentarily defeated by the grueling “Abscheulicher” cabaletta but elsewhere powerfully in control. Ernst Hafliger is as light in weight, if grainier in timbre, as Patzak--sounding, not at all unappealingly, like a character in a Baroque religious drama.

As Pizarro, Paul Schoffler’s black baritone and chilling portrayal of evil are able to stand up to Furtwangler’s eccentricities, while Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s more excitable characterization of the heavy fits perfectly with his conductor’s views.

As the paternal Rocco, Gottlob Frick is a vocal and dramatic paragon for Fricsay, while the likable Josef Greindl is sabotaged by some of his conductor’s most laggard tempos.

There is enough wrong with both productions--not least DG’s silly use of actors, with voices dissimilar to the singers’, to speak the recitative--that one might think them non-competitive with other recorded representations.

Nothing of the kind. They are both worthy of the listener’s most serious consideration, Fricsay’s slenderized edition being fascinatingly prophetic of today’s historically informed performance practices, while the grandest moments of the Furtwangler recording, with Flagstad, Patzak and Schoffler sharing in the glory, are simply incomparable.