Fidelio and Marriage Liberation Theology

There's one more performance of Portland Opera's Fidelio coming up on Saturday; it's well sung, with performers familiar to Seattle Opera fans: Greer Grimsley (the vengeful prison commander Pizarro), Arthur Woodley (good-hearted jailer Rocco), Jay Hunter Morris (the political prisoner Florestan). Lori Phillips (above) sings Leonore (aka Fidelio).

The rented Seattle Opera production updates the action to a razor-wire fenced prison, with automatic-rifle-wielding guards. You'd think in Portland you'd get Gitmo references, at a bare minimum, but no, nothing so political in an opera about political prisoners.

Still, in one of those unplanned artistic reverberations we found ourselves thinking about California's Proposition 8. For most of the opera, after all, it's the brave young man Fidelio (Leonore in disguise) who's out to rescue his (her) husband, and it's the fervency of his (her) belief in the loving bond of marriage that gives him/her reason to engage in the civil disobedience of trying to spring Florestan from prison.

Beethoven wasn't preaching standard fight-the-power agitprop, of course--Fidelio's drama is due to the cruel Pizarro's machinations, hidden from the King. Justice is the natural course of things, and here it has been waylaid, temporarily. In that case, the god that is love demands that you restore justice. It just makes good, Germanic sense.

Stage director Helena Binder doesn't seem to have had any of this in mind; in fact, the direction is consistently a stock-gesture-verging-on-mugging throwback. Actions are are inexplicably motivated--moments after her ecstatic reunion with Florestan, Leonore breaks off to wrestle with a pulley that's holding open a grate--"Just a little housekeeping here, hang on a sec, Florestan, it's been two years, a few more minutes won't kill you."

You wonder who could stand the delay at that precise moment.