Fidelio

A Vancouver Opera production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday, March 22. Continues March 27 and 29

On Saturday afternoon, more than a few operagoers must have witnessed the noisy protest against China’s brutality in Tibet stopping traffic along Granville Street. We got a lesson in how little the world has changed that night at the opening of Fidelio, when such strikingly similar images and issues filled the Queen Elizabeth stage.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera has aged well—at least in the hands of Serbian director Dejan Miladinovic and a dramatically gifted cast of performers. So often when you see an old work of art given a contemporary spin, you’re painfully aware of anachronisms. But here, in Miladinovic’s resetting of Fidelio from late-1700s Spain to Iron Curtain–era Berlin, you easily forget that it was written in the early 19th century instead of the mid-20th. The idealistic Beethoven valued liberty, and his story lends itself well to the milieu of East German interrogation rooms, underground prisons, and popular uprisings. It also bears uncanny resemblances to today’s tyrannies, whether at work in the streets of Lhasa or the cells of Abu Ghraib.

During the Vancouver Opera Orchestra’s rendition of Fidelio’s well-known overture, we see Florestan (Richard Margison), a photographer, being arrested by agents of the Stasi—a stylized gang of men on black bicycles, wearing berets and trench coats to match. The rest of the opera follows his devoted wife, Leonore (Carol Wilson), as she goes undercover as the male prison guard Fidelio to try to free him.

Miladinovic overcomes a lot of the opera’s stagnant, declarative sections with imagery. The set is sparse, but he uses the background’s imposing, Berlin Wall–like brick to great effect: shadows stretch oppressively across it, and photos of riot squads, burning vehicles, and Communist rallies are often projected onto it. There’s just one misstep: during Leonore’s ode to her husband, a montage of Wilson and Margison’s forest frolicking recalls a K-Tel Hooked on Romance commercial.

Still, the central duo is one of this production’s greatest strengths. Soprano Wilson exudes energy, bounding about the stage in her coveralls and proving she’s a strong actor who’s also endowed with a voice of rare purity. On the other hand, Margison must spend most of his time lying around, but the Victoria-born artist brings an emotional intensity to the music that shows you why he’s one of the world’s most sublime tenors. He soars above the complex orchestration without ever sounding forced. His daunting “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier” aria builds believably from the soft tones of a near-dead prisoner to sweet yet ecstatic heights. Other standouts include Thomas Fox, the star of 2001’s The Flying Dutchman, who wows crowds again as a truly imposing Pizarro.

Fittingly, the most lasting impressions come from the larger group numbers, especially the haunting Prisoners’ Chorus, when a bedraggled band of bandaged men crawl out into the sunlight for the first time in months. And Miladinovic has turned the final uprising into a frenzy of revolution. It’s a scene not so different, in its riot of sound, movement, and human resistance, from the rally that stopped Granville Street for a few hours on Saturday—a rally Beethoven himself might have supported.