Beethoven’s Fidelio at Severance

Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra are wrapping up the 2025-2026 Season this month, and this weekend featured the orchestra’s annual opera production: Beethoven’s only work in the genre, Fidelio.

Let’s put the obvious up front, as an opera, Fidelio has strengths and glaring weaknesses.  It went through two failed productions in 1805 and 1806 before it was heavily revised and successfully mounted in 1814.  Beethoven was never a great writer for the voice, and this opera puts that limitation front and center. The libretto, which was based on two previous operas, centers around a woman who disguises herself as a man to get a job as a prison guard and free her husband from captivity.  Beethoven’s pacing is uneven and things don’t really get moving until the second act.  Yet what matters most is not the details of the plot, but the thematic context: the durability of love and freedom from oppression.

This was my first time seeing Fidelio.  Though it was presented without staging, several things came through that aren’t that apparent on recordings: the humor when Marzelline snarkily resists Jaquino’s advances in the first act; or the absurdity when Rocco notes of Leonore/Fidelio “this woman was about to become my son-in-law!”

As usual, the orchestra played spotlessly and with superb balance, so the singers were never overpowered.  Welser-Möst’s pacing was masterful.  Tony F. Sias presented the narrative sections in English which helped clarify the plot.  The singers were consistently on a high level; but special mention must be made of David Butt Philip’s performance as Florestan, whose opening “GOTT!” was simply astonishing.

In today’s era, particularly in the United States, when LGBTQ people find their rights being threatened, and when trans and non-binary people are subject to increasing hostility, the Cleveland Orchestra’s production of Fidelio can be legitimately seen as having more than musical context.  The past few years have demonstrated that this valued and venerable Cleveland institution is unafraid to make statements that go beyond pure music. 

Prokofiev, Neuwirth, and Wagner with Welser-Möst and Widmann

With the Cleveland Orchestra’s 2025-2026 season approaching its close, music director Franz Welser-Möst returned to the podium to lead a program that seemed tailor made for the ensemble: a popular early-20^th Century Symphony, the US premiere of a new work, capped off by roof-shaking opera excepts from the 19^th Century.

The concert opened in with a perfectly proportioned rendition of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 in C major, the so-called “Classical” symphony.  Welser-Möst adopted a slightly more relaxed tempo than usual for the opening movement, almost an Allegro moderato instead of Allegro. This contrasted nicely with a somewhat brisker than usual second movement, before moving onto a Gavotte which featured some beautifully timed rubati when the winds entered with the main theme.  The Finale, which featured the repeat, was especially buoyant.

Clarinet soloist Jörg Widmann (a composer himself) joined Welser-Möst and the orchestra for Zones of Blue, a new work by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth.  This is one of those works which takes the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to orchestration.  I won’t waste your time or my mental energy going over the details of a work which was a curious mix of half-hearted riffs from Gershwin (including the opening salvo of Rhapsody in Blue) and Miles Davis, mixed with orchestral noise. I have never particularly cared for the sound of the clarinet, and this work only served to aggravate my tinnitus.

The second half of the concert was devoted to a well-selected grouping of from Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy.  Welser-Möst’s approach to Wagner somewhat reminds me of Karl Böhm’s.  He keeps the tempos moving yet flexible, without allowing the orchestra to sound overly bombastic – as doing so in an actual operatic performance would overwhelm the singers.  This made for an effective, cohesive presentation of what are usually derisively referred to as “bleeding chunks” from Wagner’s epic.

A relic from an earlier era at Severance

The previous day, Daniel and I attended a performance The Outsiders musical at Connor Palace theatre in Playhouse Square.  The performers should be lauded, but the musical numbers themselves were weak.  The whole did not pack the emotional punch of the 1983 film.