Chicago: Operas Everywhere

Big credit to Chicago Opera Theater for giving us an ongoing feed of little-known operas, which we will not find anywhere else. Leonora (from Ferdinando Paer, 1804) is not going to be staged at Lyric Opera of Chicago, because almost nobody has ever heard of it.

(Also, opera-goers who want to know about the main characters, Leonora and her husband Florestan, on this particular weekend, can walk over to Lyric to see Beethoven’s Fidelio instead, and that’s always going to be a bigger draw.)

Chicago Opera Theater appears to aim for both brand new operas, and also those which have not been seen before in Chicago, or not in North American (Leonora, for instance). Very much worth keeping an eye out for these productions, while the big stages grind on with periodic showings of Traviata, Bohème, Carmen, the Wagners, and the rest of that tattered, over-used list.

While we’re here, let’s note that a third local opera company, the Opera Festival of Chicago, presents another series of unusual operas every summer, and a fourth, Opera in Focus, stages short versions of well-known operas using puppets.

Fading Away with Auber

It seems that Beethoven knew about Paer’s Leonora, and admired the far less famous composer, but he worked up Fidelio just one year after Leonora opened, and it shot to enduring popularity, while Paer, Leonora, and his 54 other operas were mostly forgotten.

Paer staged his first opera, the obligatory Orpheus and Eurydice, in 1791, and quickly ramped up to a rate of three to six operas per year during the Mozart era.  He was still going strong in 1810-20, and he overlapped our guys Auber and Spontini, while Rossini stepped up and overshadowed them all.

A great deal of what Paer had to offer was comedy – opera buffa, opera giocoso, and farsa, with a few serious stories scattered in. No doubt this funny stuff paid the bills, but it’s not the sort of thing that keeps its edge for 200 years.  The only one I can find on video is Agnese (not a comedy), but it has no English for me.

I will keep looking for more from Paer, for the same reason I want to hear more from Auber: this music is pretty good, nicely constructed, appealing to those of us whose musical development is stuck in the early 19th century. Listening, I heard Mozart, and I heard Rossini, and even some Beethoven, so let’s find tickets for Agnese somewhere.

Strong Performance, Weak Script

It’s good!  It’s not great, but once in a while we need something new and different, in a medium-sized venue, with a medium-sized ticket price. COT got Jane Glover to conduct, and landed Vanessa Becerra and Edgardo Rocha for the leads – good so far. And these are two compelling sets (Act1, Act 2), simple enough, but they do the job as well as any. Fun to watch, a rewarding evening, and an entirely new composer for your life list.

The mis-step, in my opinion, was made 220 years ago by Paer and his librettist, Giovanni Schmidt, and it was that they couldn’t settle on whether their Leonora was going to be a melodrama or a comedy.  (Beethoven chose drama, so, all good over there.)

Their compromise, it seems, was to make a moderately funny Act 1, a frighteningly serious start of Act 2, and then a really hilarious finale. It doesn’t work very well, if you ask me.

The comedy character is Marcellina, the jailer’s daughter, and she’s funny because she keeps rejecting her co-worker’s innocent, boyish pursuit of her attention, while she herself is hot after Fidelio.  We know, but she does not know, that Fidelio not a man; he is really the married Leonora, with her long hair up in her hat. The higher voice, the wider hips, the deeper interest in the man in the dungeon – Marcellina doesn’t notice any of this, and it is kind of funny. Sad, too, but I guess these things can happen.

Rocha starts out Act 2 as Florestan, in very bad shape indeed, and he sings his fabulous tenor solo from the depths of the dungeon, delivering top-quality emotion and voice control with his last bits of life. This is the crux of the opera right here: he’s about to die, and he knows it, but powerful love for his missing Leonora is keeping him on this side of the grave.

Then the honchos hatch a very credible plot to shoot and bury poor Florestan, and his wife makes her way downstairs to try to help, but the situation doesn’t look good. This could be a tragedy, for sure, and we’re on the edge of our seats, hoping that Leonora/Fidelio can resolve these dire straits somehow.

But who cares about melodrama? Not Paer and Schmidt! They bring the airy Marcellina, still nuts about her “guy”, right down to the dungeon, and here, with assassins approaching and lives on the line, she wastes a lot of time with jokes and chatter about true love and marriage – to Fidelio.

I didn’t think it was that funny, in this context. Sure, if that were the story, in isolation, then there you go, one more happy, funny opera about disguises and misguided romance. But it’s not isolated; it’s part of the high-tension and touching story of how devoted Leonora saves her loving husband (and herself) from death in the darkness.

Maybe if someone had chained Marcellina to the blocks, and moved on with their serious business? I don’t know – it’s hard to think of how save such a wildly split story-line.

Romance and Despair: The Enduring Combination

As we know, Beethoven (with a gang of librettists and editors) did not make this mistake.  Fidelio is a pretty heavy drama, and it doesn’t need silliness from Marcellina to make it work. In Beethoven’s version, Marcellina doesn’t even end up with her jilted co-worker; she just goes away sad.

Last night, several hundred of us heard something new, and learned about a nearly-forgotten composer, and we applauded Chicago Opera Theater for bringing Leonora to this continent for the first time. And tonight, several thousand of us will see how Lyric does with the far more famous, far more serious Fidelio; this specific production and performance are all that’s new, because we’ve already seen Beethoven’s offering again and again. 

We’re keeping an eye out for the puppet version, when it comes to town.