After a nearly two-decade absence, Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio is returning to the Lyric Opera of Chicago for five performances starting Sept. 26. It’s staged by gay Japanese-American director Matthew Ozawa, who has reset the 1814 opera in a maximum security prison.
“When you present Fidelio fully in a past historical 18th/19th century context, it’s easy for audiences to remove themselves,” said Ozawa, noting that the work would have felt very contemporary to Beethoven’s original audiences.
Ozawa has directed five Lyric Opera of Chicago productions since 2016, and joined the company’s artistic staff in the newly created position of Chief Artistic Administration Officer in 2022. But despite his past Chicago history, Ozawa said there was no guarantee that the Lyric would remount his production of Fidelio that was originally created for San Francisco Opera in 2021.
Fidelio tells the tale of Leonore, a wife who disguises herself as a male guard to infiltrate a jail where her political-prisoner husband, Florestan, is being starved to death. Fidelio was part of a trend of “rescue operas” of the time, including an earlier take from 1804 on the same plot by Italian composer Ferdinando Paër called Leonora (Chicago Opera Theater stages the North American premiere on Oct. 1, 4 and 6 at the Studebaker Theater).
Beethoven’s much-revised Fidelio also has a long history of being staged as a means of artistic protest against oppressive regimes. This tradition dates all the way back to Beethoven’s original 1805 version of Fidelio that premiered in Vienna when French troops were occupying the city under the command of Napoleon.
In the 20th century, the anti-fascist Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini notably made it a point to program and conduct Fidelio each season at the Salzburg Festival in Austria from 1935 to 1937. It was his artistic way to warn about the Nazi menace in neighboring Germany, and Toscanini famously refused to return following Austria’s annexation in 1938.
Ozawa initially came up with a historically traditional approach for San Francisco Opera’s new production of Fidelio, which was originally scheduled for fall 2020 in part to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. But the company’s artistic leaders rejected Ozawa’s first concept.
“They said, ‘Go back to the table, we want you to see this through your personal unique lens,’” Ozawa said.
Ozawa thought about his own family’s history, and how his Japanese-American father was born in an U.S.-run internment camp during World War II (even though his father’s parents were both American citizens). Ozawa was also aware of some of the Trump administration’s more controversial policies in the U.S.
“At the time we were creating this, we were looking at a lot of images of the migrant detention centers at the border and families who were being separated and people who were in these cells,” Ozawa said. “And right before the pandemic, some of the migrants were even placed in what were previously Japanese-American detention centers.”
So, Ozawa re-conceived his approach to Fidelio to explore the opera in relation to contemporary prisons, though generalized not to be located in a specific country. Set and projection designer Alexander V. Nichols created a huge rotating scenic “cube” with loads of security cameras and monitors to depict what Ozawa calls “all facets of the bureaucracy that keeps the prison running.”
Ultimately, the global COVID-19 pandemic shutdown delayed San Francisco Opera’s Fidelio until the fall of 2021. It ended up being the first indoor performance back for San Francisco Opera.
“It was an interesting, yet tumultuous time as we rehearsed the piece,” Ozawa said. “It ended up being this huge success for the company.”
A few performers starring in Fidelio at the Lyric are returning veterans of Ozawa’s production. South African soprano Elza van den Heever and American tenor Russell Thomas respectively starred as the central couple of Leonore and Florestan in San Francisco in 2021, while the Russian bass Dimitry Ivanshchenko played the chief jailer Rocco when Canadian Opera Company in Toronto staged Ozawa’s Fidelio in 2023.
“It’s interesting coming to the piece with a new lens with (Thomas and van den Heever) several years later,” said Ozawa, remembering the stressful rehearsal conditions coming back from the pandemic.
Ozawa is also curious to see how his contemporary Fidelio will play at the Lyric in the midst of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. There has been the unsettling sight of mass-produced signs promoting “Mass Deportations Now!” at the Republican Party’s Milwaukee convention.
“When I look back at different forms of unjust imprisonment, but in particular, groups and communities of a specific ethic group being taken from their homes and put into facilities, I very much recall my own family’s generational history,” Ozawa said.
Ozawa also hopes that audiences can see themselves in the heroic and daring actions of Leonore in Fidelio.
“She very much felt revolutionary and a vision for our modern age,” said Ozawa, hoping that audiences can find inspiration so “they, too, have power as individuals and as a collective to create and ignite change in their own lives and communities.”
Fidelio plays five performances from Sept. 26 to Oct. 10 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive. Tickets are $42-$355. Sung in German with projected English translations. For information, visit LyricOpera.org or phone 312-827-5600.
Chicago Opera Theater’s North American premiere of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora plays 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Friday, Oct. 1 and 4, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6, at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave. Tickets are $59.50-$159.50. Sung in Italian with projected English translations. For information, visit COT.org/leonora or phone 312-704-8414.