\n<\/p>\n
The other tenor role is more herculean: Florestan, sung at the Met by David Butt Philip with ardent tirelessness matched only by his dramatic bravery. He enters with a high G, exposed once the orchestra drops out after a beat. There isn\u2019t a fermata in the score, but Philip held the note, less to show off than to trace an arc of pathetic anguish to full-voiced despair.<\/p>\n
Ren\u00e9 Pape was back as the warden Rocco, which he sang when Flimm\u2019s staging was new. After a quarter century, Pape\u2019s sound may be a bit smaller, but it was still warm, as well as appropriate for a loyal worker willing, against his better judgment, to follow the sadistic orders of Pizarro. In that role, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny had a loud, reverberating speaking voice, similarly penetrating when he sang, that slowly revealed itself as posturing bluster; he remains one of the great acting talents at the Met.<\/p>\n
In Flimm\u2019s production, Pizarro is a vaguely defined tyrant who answers to and fears a higher, distant authority. It\u2019s deliberately unspecific, with details plucked from oppressive regimes of recent history: cold Soviet architecture; discarded shoes piled as if in a concentration camp; khaki uniforms of a banana republic; a monument, eerily of our moment<\/a>, that may or may not be giving a Nazi salute.<\/p>\n Beethoven\u2019s opera is beautiful if flawed as theater, with political idealism that is more admirable than resonant. But Flimm, who died in 2023<\/a>, found a way to make it work and, most impressively, speak to the audiences of each revival in different ways.<\/p>\n During the Iraq War, the toppling of a dictator\u2019s monument in the finale felt ripped from the headlines. With a rightward swing around the world today, there seems to be a warning in its \u201cZone of Interest\u201d-like juxtaposition of the mundane and the monstrous; flowers are trimmed and dinner is served as prisoners look on, in a portrait of complicity and opportunism.<\/p>\n Most chillingly, Flimm turns Beethoven\u2019s celebratory finale into a warning. The officers who have just obeyed Pizarro now cheer his execution, while members of the public menacingly wave knives in the air. Flimm, a German born during World War II, knew that tyrants are dangerous, but so are people who are all too happy to do as they\u2019re told.<\/p>\n Fidelio<\/strong><\/p>\n Through March 15 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n