Barbican, LondonDavid Lang’s short reworking of Beethoven’s opera, conducted here by Ilan Volkov, gives it a universal slant – even if it fails to dispel its dramatic problems
Beethoven spent almost a decade getting his only opera right, and even the final, 1814 version of what he called Fidelio has its problems. When composer David Lang saw it on stage for the first time in the 1970s, he was struck by some of those, and how they compromise the impact of the glorious
music in Beethoven’s score, whether it’s the way the buffo sub-plot of the early scenes seems to belong to an entirely different work from the deadly serious exploration of love and freedom that provides the opera’s soaring climax, or whether what begins as a Singspiel, following on from Mozart, ends as something much closer to an oratorio.