Fidelio: Focus & Fade

A man sits in solitary confinement in a dark cellar. He is helplessly at the mercy of his mortal enemy, and while his perception blurs, he hallucinates of a saving angel. A woman has been searching for two years under a false identity for her husband, who was arrested for political reasons. Between them stand an unscrupulous prison warden and a family in which everyone has narrowed their focus to their own little happiness.
Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera shows different forms of love and solidarity and at the same time characters with individual interests and values. Musically, they speak different languages. In order to be able to act, each character hides a part of reality. Fidelio focuses on a single fate and ends the story with a celebration of liberation, while other characters fade away.
The opera was premiered in Vienna in 1805 under the title Leonore, followed by several reworkings. It established itself as Fidelio, but its unwieldy form repeatedly provoked changes: People experimented with the plot sequence, which Beethoven revised several times, shortened or replaced the dialog and added additional music.
Director Eva-Maria Höckmayr uses the open form of the work created by the history of its reception as a starting point for her own view of the opera. In Fidelio: Focus & Fade, the Singspiel dialogues meet nearby and distant sounds, the arias, choirs and ensembles meet other music by Beethoven and others. Höckmayr sharpens our focus on questions such as: What do we hear and see in extreme circumstances? How much suffering of others do we have to ignore in order to survive, and when does ignoring become inhumane?