The cast includes tenor MichaelHendrick as Florestan, a political prisoner; and soprano Christine Goerke in the role of his wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as a man in order to infiltrate the prison and free him.

by David Weininger, The Boston Globe

One of the difficulties of assembling a new opera production is that “we’re always dealing with things that are hundreds of years old,” says Thaddeus Strassberger, the director of Opera Boston’s new version of Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” The lengthy performance history of most repertory operas means that a director usually works in the long shadow of those productions that came before.

But there is, he continues, an opposing and concomitant demand: “You also have to forget everything that you know and look at it as a new piece,” Strassberger says during a conversation at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion between rehearsals. “You have to sort of split yourself into two different directors – it’s something that has a huge amount of history and expectation, and something that should be looked at completely fresh.”

That intertwining of tradition and innovation is something that Strassberger has aimed at in his “Fidelio,” which opens tonight at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. The cast includes tenor MichaelHendrick as Florestan, a political prisoner; and soprano Christine Goerke in the role of his wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as a man in order to infiltrate the prison and free him. Opera Boston’s music director, Gil Rose, leads the orchestra in the pit.

“Fidelio” is Beethoven’s sole opera, and because themes of freedom and tyranny are interwoven throughout – Florestan has been imprisoned for exposing the crimes of the prison’s governor, Don Pizarro – it often lends itself to contemporary settings. Yet in conceiving the Opera Boston production, Strassberger decided against this gambit. “If I chose to set Fidelio in Guantanamo Bay, you already have a polarized audience the minute they walk in the theater – what side of the political spectrum they’re on, how they’re going to vote in this next election.”

Instead, he set the action during the Spanish Inquisition, a more remote but only slightly less provocative backdrop, and one that gave Strassberger the chance to explore the interaction of politics and religion. The action takes place in a bishop’s palace, resplendent with visual luxury and signs of the unbroken lineage of religious authority.

One reason the setting works, Strassberger explains, is that it has contemporary relevance as well as an air of timelessness. And in a surprising way, it keeps faith with the opera’s first production, which took place in 1805 in Vienna, where censors were loath to allow revolutionary ideas on the stage. So Beethoven and his librettist changed the setting from contemporary Spain to the 16th century in order to get their creation before the public.

The director admits that the concept has taken some getting used to. “The cast has been very surprised in the first few days. . . . Everyone was like, `Whoa, this isn’t anything like how we imagined it to be.’ And every day, people would come back and sort of say, `All right, I thought about what you said and it’s just a matter of flipping it around.’

“Because I think it’s really unfair to put a cast in a situation where they’re doing an action that they don’t understand or it doesn’t fit with the music,” he continues. “If you’re going to wallop someone in the face, you need to do it with conviction, and well executed, as well.”

Conventional wisdom about “Fidelio” holds that however great the music – and it is, by general agreement, magnificent – its theatrical deficiencies, including stock characters and a lack of dramatic flow, keep it from being top-tier opera. “I think if you see it through a prism of late-19th-century opera you might say it’s not as tight as late Verdi,” Strassberger allows. But he loves those moments, usually ensemble numbers, in which the action stops and a new emotional world briefly opens up.

As an example he cites the Act 1 quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar,” in which the misplaced romantic feelings of four characters overlap, in music of sublime delicacy. “Immediately, the text comprehension goes way down, your understanding of the characters goes way up,” Strassberger explains. “That’s where the power of this piece lies. I find it absolutely thrilling that there is one beautiful texture after another that is telling the poetry around the narrative, even if it is not illustrative in the way that some other composers write.”

As for the supposedly one-dimensional characters, the director cites Pizarro, “a man who’s running a corrupt prison who’s going to murder [Florestan] with his own hands – that doesn’t sound very one- dimensional to me. Someone wouldn’t be doing those things, and wouldn’t have achieved that position of power if he weren’t an incredibly complex person with a story behind it. And that becomes our job – the singers, the conductor, me as the director – to figure out ways to find that variety.”

Throughout the conversation, Strassberger speaks with a thoughtfulness and confidence that testifies to his long list of accomplishments yet belies his 34 years. Only a question about what he wants the audience to take from his production gives him some pause.

“I think the approach to opera in general can be that [it’s] a viscerally, sensorily satisfying experience that is in service of making you think about the themes that are contained within it,” he answers. “It’s not just entertainment. It’s a cultural dialogue. It shouldn’t just be looked at as something that you’re receiving information from the singers and the conductor and the design and the direction, but that you should feel that you have a response to it, and that you can form an opinion about it. It’s like going to a museum and not reading the big plaque at the beginning telling you what to think about it, but to go and respond to it and then blog about it and engage and believe that it matters.”

www.operaboston.org

David Weininger can be reached at [email protected].

BEETHOVEN: “FIDELIO”

Presented by Opera Boston

At Cutler Majestic Theatre

Tonight and Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m.

Tickets: $29-$171. 617-824-8000, www.aestages.org

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