Fidelio in Brighton

Please use your liberty to help us win ours.

 Aung San Suu Kyi

Hope whispers softly to me:  we shall be free, we shall find peace.

Line from the opera Fidelio

After the Study Day at Glyndebourne, I hopped on the train to Brighton to see Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio.  The semi-staged performance was dedicated to Burmese peace activist Aung San Suu Kyi.  What’s the connection between this opera and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate? Fidelio is about unjust imprisonment and the abuse of power.  (Aung San Suu Kyi has endured years of house arrest.) The Brighton Festival hopes its efforts will raise public awareness about the plight of the Burmese. 

To this end, it commissioned a new performing edition in Aung San Suu Kyi’s honor.   Fidelio, like many German operas of the time, incorporates spoken dialogue.  The music was sung in the original German, but rather than use the dialogue, a narrator filled the audience in on the plot.  It was quite effective.

Conductor Adam Fischer, and consequently the Orchestra of the Enlightenment, brought out Beethoven’s boisterous, raucous side –- except for the prisoners’ chorus.  That was sung with great delicacy.  Fischer is quite a showman.  He conducted the entire work without a score, sometimes using a baton, sometimes not. 

The evening included one of my favorite British traditions –- ice cream at intermission.  It did seem ironic to be hearing this work about freedom from oppression in a hall clearly designed to celebrate British imperialism.  The exterior resembles the Taj Mahal.  The bar’s décor mimics Singapore or Hong Kong, the lobby India and the Middle East.

Surreptitious photo of side lobby

But in the midst of this hang posters with Aung San Suu Kyi’s request:  Please use your liberty to help us win ours.  The evening does call me to use the freedoms that I have in service of others.  And it casts new light on one of the opera’s closing lines: “I let love lead me,” quietly sings the character Leonore when her efforts finally result in justice. 

Even though I should go straight to the train station, I can’t resist going down to catch just a glimpse of the sea.