The clumsy directing didn’t make things any clearer. This is an invented facility, a mashup of contemporary prison tropes. Who are these people? Nearly all detainees are white, so they are presumably not undocumented border-crossers and, at the end, the liberator Don Fernando refers to them as “our citizens.” The flashing screens in Florestan’s cell turn off as this solitary prisoner starts his aria with the words “God! What darkness here!”-which is supposed to be a cry of agony, but in this case would more likely be one of relief.
These are all reasonable ideas, in keeping with the theme, but they don’t cohere together or with the opera. Elza van den Heever as LeonorePHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA The walls of Florestan’s corner cell flash constantly with black-and-white security video of the cages, presumably as torture, and he is chained to a chair. For Act II, both levels are stacked high with file boxes. Partier, the suitably gloomy lighting.) One couldn’t help thinking of detention facilities on the American southern border the word “cages” appears in the translated supertitle text. ( Jessica Jahn did the costumes JAX Messenger and Justin A. Nichols’s grim set, a huge two-level cube of steel bars and fluorescent lights, first shows offices and then revolves to display chain-link cages crammed with detainees in a mix of prison jumpsuits and modern street clothes the armed guards herding and sometimes beating the inmates wear bullet-proof vests with “Security” stamped on the back. San Francisco Opera’s new production, directed by Matthew Ozawa, which opened last week, sets “Fidelio” in a “detention facility in the recent past or not-so-distant future.”Īlexander V. Perhaps most wrenchingly, the whole opera was staged as the heroine’s fantasy: Becoming a guard in the prison where her husband has been held incommunicado for two years and rescuing him happens only in her dreams. A 2018 production by New York’s Heartbeat Opera did a particularly thoughtful job, exploring American mass incarceration and recording the voices and images of actual inmates for the opera’s famous Prisoners’ Chorus. The San Francisco Opera Chorus performing in Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERAīeethoven’s “Fidelio,” an Enlightenment paean to freedom and a celebration of the triumph of courage over tyranny, is regularly updated to reflect contemporary struggles. San Francisco Opera new production of Beethoven’s work, set in a detention facility, might leave some hoping for an early release.
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