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.
Now, 40 years on, Lang has tackled some of those difficulties in a piece of his own. Prisoner of the State, first performed in New York last June, and brought to the Barbican for its European premiere, with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, is an hour-long opera for the concert hall that takes the central story of Fidelio – Leonora’s efforts to rescue her husband, Florestan, by disguising herself as a young man to work in the prison in which he is incarcerated – and gives it a timeless, universal slant. The original characters lose their identities: Leonora becomes the Assistant, Florestan the Prisoner, and so on, while the other inmates of the prison, who in Beethoven’s opera only appear for the famous prisoners’ chorus and in the final number, feature in every scene of Lang’s version, which does away with the comic elements.
Lang says his work is built on “the skeleton” of Beethoven’s version, and that he wrote his own libretto as a commentary on the texts of both the original 1805 opera (when it was known as Leonore) and the final 1814 Fidelio. What he has produced is more or less a latter-day Singspiel, with self-contained musical numbers occasionally interspersed with dialogue. But direct musical references are avoided, though the text is larded with quotes from other sources. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains” features prominently, to which in the final chorus the prisoners add the observation that: “The difference between prison and outside is that here you see the chains.” Machiavelli’s “It is better to be feared than to be loved” provides the text for an aria by the Governor (Beethoven’s Pizarro).
Yet Lang’s reworking has its own dramatic issues. The climactic confrontation between the Assistant and the Governor, which leads to the Prisoner’s rescue, seems contrived, with the Governor apparently realising the errors of his way as soon as he is faced with a gun. The ending seems, if anything, even more oratorio-like than Fidelio’s.
There is, though, some strikingly beautiful music. The tone is set in the opening number, as the Assistant (unsentimentally played by Julie Mathevet) sings of her love for her husband, while the Machiavelli aria for the Governor gives Alan Oke the chance to remind us what a compelling stage presence he has. Most of the vocal lines are suspended over spare, ostinato-based orchestral textures, sometimes menacing, sometimes consoling, while the luminosity of Lang’s choral writing harks back to the beauties of his The Little Match Girl Passion more than a decade ago.
With Jarrett Ott as the Prisoner and Davóne Tines as the Jailor completing the cast of principals, and the BBC Singers, joined by students from the Guildhall School, as the prisoners, the staging by Elkhanah Pulitzer did everything that was necessary, but whether Lang’s piece really provides a solution to problems Beethoven failed to solve is another matter.
• On BBC Sounds until 10 February.
