FIDELIO Beethoven Vienna State Opera

Suspecting her missing husband is being held as a political prisoner, a noblewoman disguises herself as a male prison guard. She discovers him weakened in the darkest dungeon, but will she be able to rescue him before it is too late?

The themes of oppression and isolation, but also of hope and the power of love, make Fidelio the perfect opera for our times and all times. In the new production from Vienna State Opera, director Nikolaus Habjan has staged Beethoven's only opera as a timeless piece standing above a specific era. In this production, Leonore and Florestan are each doubled by a puppet, split, as it were, into an inner life, an expression of the soul and an outer figure. Leonore's agonizing state of tension between intense emotionality and the pressure to conceal her true identity is thus made clear. ‘If you think about what Beethoven wanted with his works’, says Habjan ‘you always come across a great idealisation. And such an idealisation stands above a specific epoch. That's why I want to create something that is ultimately independent of time. The less I try to set the plot in a narrow, temporally or politically precise situation, the more timeless the work becomes. It's about the big themes that Beethoven deals with, and you can understand them quite clearly without using a historical frame of reference.’