opulent sobriety

Schmitt's Cherry. Bridgemead, Swindon, 28th March 2020

I intended failing to mention Covid-19 on this blog, à la Louis XVI, whose diary entry on the day they stormed the Bastille was "Rien". I wanted to maintain a virus-free zone -- whether physical, technical, mental, tribal or mass-medial. But there we go, I've said it now.

Will this brusque reminder of the foundations of life finally persuade us to care for our planet's health? Or will the world's battered economies supply a pretext for burning oil as never before? Or if it's both, depending on where you stand, will our present sense of a society pulling together be followed by yet more furious polarization?

So being at home on a Saturday evening (this never happens) I decided to switch on the radio and listen to Opera on 3. It was Beethoven's Fidelio, the Tobias Kratzer production at the Royal Opera House (Antonio Pappano, Lise Davidsen, Jonas Kaufmann) ... an opera I'd never seen or listened to, so I sat there following the libretto on my smartphone, and it was a thrilling experience: both less and more than an opera perhaps, yet an opera all the same,  a unique one.

The skeletal but resonant narrative concerns Leonore (disguised as Fidelio) rescuing her husband, who is a political prisoner; the opera is a paean to liberty, constancy and resolution; a woman who defies all the odds.

No declaration, no proof of mad passion could have had stronger contagion than these flower symphonies, in which my deluded desire led me to exert the efforts that Beethoven conveyed in his notes ; profound inward searchings, tremendous soarings towards the sky.  (Honoré de Balzac, The Lily of the Valley (1835), pp. 144-45)

Berlioz wrote:

What stands in the way of the music of "Fidelio" as regards the Parisian public is the chasteness of its melody ; the great disdain of the composer for sonorous effects which are not justified ; and his contempt for conventional terminations and periods which are too obvious. There is also additional cause in the opulent sobriety of his instrumentation ; the boldness of his harmony ; and, above all I venture to say, the profundity of his feeling for expression. Everything must be listened to in this complex music, everything must be heard, in order to enable us to understand it. The orchestral parts, which are sometimes principal and sometimes obscure, are liable to contain the very accent of expression, the cry of passion, in fact, the very idea ; which the author may not have been able to give to the vocal part.

About Fidelio:
https://www.opera-online.com/en/articles/fidelio-a-unique-opera

http://www.classicalnotes.net/classics2/fidelio.html

Edward Said on Fidelio (1997):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n21/edward-said/on-fidelio

Single-flowered deep pink cherry. Bridgemead, Swindon, 28th March 2020.

[Normally I'd be thinking Sargent Cherry, but this feels very different from all the other specimens I know; the blossoms more clustered and deeper pink, the new leaves more fiery...]