The pandemic disrupted many things, such as the premiere of the opera Prisoner of State, which David Lang composed based on Beethoven’s Fidelio, the only opera by the German musician, and “which speaks to us of love, loyalty and fidelity, but it is not the work that generates the most admiration among followers of the Bonn genius”.
These are statements by the director of L’Auditori, Robert Brufau, one of the entities that commissioned the Californian composer to compose this opera, along with the New York Philharmonic, De Doelen Concert Hall in Rotterdam, The Barbican in London, Bochum Symphony Orchestra Concertgebouw in Bruges and the Malmö Opera.
The commission was intended to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, born in 1770, and although Lang premiered it at Lincoln Center in New York in 2019, the rest of the tour had to be canceled due to the pandemic. Now, after having toured half of Europe, Prisoner of State closes its tour in Barcelona, ??with the state premiere at the Grec amphitheatre, this Saturday, July 22.
For the occasion, a production headed by the OBC and the men’s choir of the Cor Jove de l’Orfeó Català and the Cor de Cambra del Palau (male voices) will be presented. The four soloists are Claron McFadden, Jarrett Ott, Davone Tines and Alan Oke. Ludovic Morlot, director of the OBC for ten months, jokes about the postponement suffered by the production: “I must be the only one who is happy, because in this way I have been able to be part of this project.”
Lang explains how the creation process was: “I saw a production of Fidelio when I was 21 years old. Every time you see a work about war or climate change, it turns out that we already find that in Beethoven, who changed the whole concept of classical music. Now, at that time I was on the extreme left, very revolutionary, and I came away very disappointed, I was disappointed that Beethoven could not speak openly about politics.
In his rereading, Lang has stripped Beethoven’s libretto bare: “At first, when Fidelio disguises himself as a man and looks for work in prison, it’s a comedy. Then I already began to think that perhaps it would be possible to rewrite this work freeing ourselves from all the things that corseted it. I took the Beethoven libretti, three, and I took out all the comic part, the romantic love and the happiness of the wedding, and I left only the skeleton of the work”.
In Fidelio, the protagonist disguises herself as a man to go to work in jail and free her imprisoned husband. Lang has maintained this story, but trying to understand it from the present, and for this reason it has been profusely documented: “Fidelio premiered in 1805, when Napoleonic troops were in Vienna and Beethoven could not make a plea against the empire, because it would not have been accepted. I don’t know how your country is, but my country is fatal. We have many prisoners, and many are for political reasons, because a prisoner cannot vote and thus you prevent him from voting according to whom. There is a time of uncertainty in politics, but I don’t remember a time on Earth when everyone was happy and everything worked fine.”
Lang, who became a musician and went to study in the USSR after attending a Shostakovich concert at the age of 9, issues a warning: “We can never relax because if we do, they will take away our rights.”
