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Via Daniel May's Instagram Story (August 5th, 2025)
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Via Daniel May's Instagram Story (August 5th, 2025)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces the New MetLiveArts Season of Performances
Live performance returns to The Met's galleries and theater with a fall 2021 lineup that features an evening of music by Gavin Creel and more.
by Alexa Criscitiello Aug. 27, 2021
The Met today announced a new season of live performances with in-person audiences beginning fall 2021 and a new Artist in Residence, the acclaimed dancer and choreographer Bijayini Satpathy. Beginning in October, performances will once again take place in galleries throughout the Museum, as well as in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, and will feature MetLiveArts commissions and leading international musicians and composers.
"MetLiveArts has always been an innovator in the field, producing compelling works that illuminate The Met's collection and galleries in new and often surprising ways," said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. "This season brings a range of powerful programs, and we are thrilled to again invite audiences back to the Museum to engage with the exhilarating performances we have ahead."
Limor Tomer, Lulu C. and Anthony W. Wang General Manager of Live Arts, commented: "After nearly a year and a half, we are so excited to welcome back our audiences to experience the visceral force and power of live performance and what it means to once again share energy and space with dynamic artists and fellow enthusiasts. We have always asked our performers to create works that challenge them, and this past year has put that invitation to the test for so many. This new season will include some of the most personal, unexpected, and inventive works of any MetLiveArts season."
Artists this season include Tony and Olivier Award-winner Gavin Creel (Hello, Dolly!; West End production of The Book of Mormon); a world-premiere work by Arvo Pärt at the Temple of Dendur; four-time Grammy Award-winner Angélique Kidjo in an intimate performance; the Dessoff Choirs and Orchestra with soprano Laquita Mitchell; and Heartbeat Opera's acclaimed original production of Beethoven's Fidelio.
During the past 17 months, MetLiveArts has presented virtual performances, including Sonic Cloisters, the popular ongoing series of electronic music concerts filmed in the galleries and courtyards of The Met Cloisters. While the Museum was closed to the public, there were new concerts filmed in the galleries amid the iconic art, as well as digital premieres of past performances-both of which have encouraged audiences from around the world to engage with brilliant musicians and The Met collection and spaces. The Museum's resident quartet, ETHEL & Friends, will continue their weekly virtual series, Balcony Bar from Home.
Performances will be ticketed and open rehearsals will be free with Museum admission.
Artist in Residence: Bijayini Satpathy
Hailed by The New Yorker as "a performer of exquisite grace and technique," the revered Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy will be the 2021-22 MetLiveArts Artist in Residence. She will premiere new site-specific works and collaborate with musicians, visual artists, and dancers. Satpathy launched her solo career in 2019, after 25 years as a principal dancer with the lionized Nrityagram Dance Ensemble based in Bangalore, India. As a soloist, Satpathy creates new works that reflect her interest in challenging the tradition and vision of Odissi, and for The Met she will explore that interest through performances in unexpected areas of the Museum's collection, with a special focus on works in modern and contemporary art. During her Museum residency, she will further expand her choreographic language beyond the Indian dance form and collaborate with a range of artists and Met curators.
Satpathy's residency will include in-gallery performances, extensive workshops with New York City-based students and professional dancers, and auditorium performances.
Open rehearsals will begin in January 2022 and take place in five gallery spaces throughout The Met, including the Astor Court; Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia; and the Fuentidueña Chapel at The Met Cloisters. All open rehearsals will take place during Museum hours and will be open to the public. Details about performances in spring and fall 2022 will be announced.
Fall 2021 and Early Winter 2022 Performances:
Gavin Creel: Walk on Through
Monday, October 25, 2021, at 6 and 8:30 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Tony and Olivier Award-winner Gavin Creel was a museum novice for most of his 20 years living in New York City. Invited to create a program for MetLiveArts, he spent countless hours over the past year exploring the Museum's galleries, finding inspiration, and falling in love with The Met. Experience Creel's newfound passion and sense of wonder for The Met in his newly composed songs that make the art sing.
Tickets start at $25.
Celebrating Arvo Pärt at The Met
Sunday, October 31, 2021, at 3 p.m., and Monday, November 1, 2021, at 7 p.m.
The Temple of Dendur
The Temple of Dendur is the setting for a world-premiere a cappella choral work from the beloved Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, composed to celebrate the reopening of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed on September 11, 2001. The Schola Cantorum choir are joined by Grammy Award-winning Experiential Orchestra in an evening of masterpieces composed over Pärt's career, which has spanned seven decades.
Tickets start at $65.
The Orchestra Now, Conducted by Leon Botstein:
Beethoven and Cristofori, The Piano's First Century
Sunday, December 5, 2021, at 2 p.m.
Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 illuminates the transformation of piano music, which began with Bartolomeo Cristofori's breakthrough invention of the fortepiano. The Grand Piano (1720) by Bartolomeo Cristofori (Italian) is on view in Gallery 684 at The Met Fifth Avenue and is part of the Museum's Musical Instruments collection.
Stravinsky, Picasso, and Cubism
Sunday, February 20, 2022, at 2 p.m.
Featuring Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments and Pablo Picasso's Man with a Guitar.
Igor Stravinsky's deconstructed and reassembled music from the 1920s was heavily influenced by the work of his friend Pablo Picasso. One of his masterpieces from this period is this concerto, which Stravinsky loved to perform himself.
Dvořák, Macdowell, and Delacroix: The New World
Sunday, April 10, 2022, at 2 p.m.
Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, From the New World (Mvt. 2); Edward MacDowell's Suite No. 2, Indian; and Eugène Delacroix's The Natchez
From their earliest encounters in the New World, Europeans were mesmerized by the Indigenous peoples of North America. French artist Eugène Delacroix painted a Natchez family as they fled the massacre of their tribe up the Mississippi River. Edward MacDowell's Indian Suite incorporated Indigenous melodies and rhythms, and the second movement of Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony was inspired by Longfellow's poem on Hiawatha.
All performances take place in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.
Tickets start at $30; $75 for the series.
Christmas with the Dessoff Choirs
Sunday, December 19, 2021, at 3 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Led by director Malcolm J. Merriweather, the Dessoff Choirs and Orchestra welcome the holiday season with two works by highly influential yet underrepresented composers: Margaret Bonds and Mary Lou Williams. The concert features The Ballad of the Brown King, a Christmas cantata by Margaret Bonds, and the great Jazz composer Mary Lou Williams's Black Christ of the Andes, along with some of Williams's other rarely heard choral works. The performance features internationally recognized soloists, soprano Laquita Mitchell, mezzo-soprano Lucia Bradford, and tenor Noah Stewart.
Tickets start at $25.
Angélique Kidjo at The Met
Monday, December 27, and Tuesday, December 28, 2021, at 6 and 8:30 p.m.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing
Four-time Grammy Award-winner and "Africa's premier diva" (Time) Angélique Kidjo performs an intimate site-specific program devoted to the Museum's collection of African art. Set in the galleries of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which are currently closed in preparation for renovation and reenvisioning, Kidjo's performance anticipates the vision and reinstallation of the galleries, underscoring the aesthetic qualities, authorship, provenance, and cultural context of the art to be displayed.
Tickets start at $65.
Beethoven's Fidelio
Heartbeat Opera
Thursday, February 10; Saturday, February 12; and Monday, February 14, 2022, at 7 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Adapted and directed by Ethan Heard
Music arranged and directed by Daniel Schlosberg
New English dialogue by Marcus Scott and Ethan Heard
When a Black activist is wrongfully incarcerated, his wife disguises herself to infiltrate the system and free him, but injustice reigns. In this daring adaptation created by Heartbeat Opera, Beethoven's classic is reimagined in the time and context of the Black Lives Matter movement. The opera will feature the voices of more than 100 incarcerated singers and volunteers from prison choirs.
Tickets start at $25.
For tickets, visit metmuseum.org/performances, call 212-570-3949, or stop by any desk in the Great Hall at The Met Fifth Avenue.
Your ticket includes Museum admission on the day of the event.
MetLiveArts performances require all guests age 12 and older to show proof of full vaccination (at least 14 days after the second dose of a two-dose series vaccine, or at least 14 days after a single-dose vaccine). Children under 12 must be accompanied by a fully vaccinated adult. The Met may require additional safety measures for these performances and will communicate such measures to confirmed guests in advance. More information on The Met's comprehensive safety procedures can be found on metmuseum.org.
A few video clips from the Heartbeat Opera / Opera Lafayette co-production of Alessandro Stradella’s La Susanna that I saw at the Kennedy Center this past spring.
The intriguing “mezzo-contralto” voice that you hear in the first third of the video is that of Sara Couden, one of my personal faves, in the narratorial role of Testo (reimagined as a scholar of women’s studies).
The middle third features an aria sung by Lucía Martín Cartón in the title role; I felt like I was suddenly seeing her name everywhere last year, and I think her performance in La Susanna demonstrated good reason for her success. She’s an alumna of Les Arts Florissants’ Jardin des Voix training program and displays the refined technical control and sensitive text-reading typical of its graduates.
A 200-Year-Old German Opera Speaks to 21st Century America
Heartbeat Opera stages Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at the Met Museum with a social message of the moment
ELI JACOBSON| 29 JAN 2022 | 10:05
Heartbeat Opera put itself on the map in Spring 2018 with a radical reworking of Beethoven’s 1805 opera “Fidelio.” The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New Yorker raved about the production, which returns in February for three performances.
The only opera Beethoven wrote (in several versions), “Fidelio” is a story about Leonore, a heroic Spanish noblewoman, who dons male clothing to infiltrate the prison where her husband Florestan, a political prisoner, is brutally incarcerated by the tyrannical governor Pizarro. “Fidelio” gained resonance in the 20th century in the wake of the Nazi era anti-Semitism and World War II.
Director/Co-Librettist and Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera Ethan Heard reconceived the piece for modern day America layering in issues of racism, Black Lives Matter, police brutality and sexual identity into a 200 year-old story. Cut down to 90 minutes and updated to the present, Stan (Florestan) is now a radical black activist and refugee who is arrested and disappears into the prison system. His wife Leah (Leonore) infiltrates the prison to search for her missing husband. The governor Pizarro becomes a white supremacist warden.
Also participating are 100 incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison choirs across the Midwest who perform the moving “Prisoner’s Chorus” via multimedia video.
Straus News spoke to Ethan Heard and bass/activist Derrell Acon (who sang “Roc” or Rocco, the prison warden in 2018 and repeats the role in 2022) about “Fidelio,” Black Lives Matter, music and the responsibility of artists to the community.
You last performed this show in spring 2018 and are bringing it back four years later. Why did you feel the need to revive it so soon?
Heard: “Fidelio” is one of Heartbeat’s most celebrated productions. Our original production sold out its six-performance run. The Met Museum reached out to ask if they could present it, and our managers at Opus 3 Artists thought it would be a great production to tour. We were planning on remounting the show in 2020, the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, but the pandemic forced us to postpone. Now, in the midst of our country’s ongoing racial reckoning, this story feels even more urgent.
You have made changes to the libretto you created in 2018 in collaboration with Marcus Scott to better reflect current America. What changes did you feel the need to make?
Heard: We are sharpening language that different characters use to describe protest and violence against Black bodies. We want Marcy [Marzelline] to be less naive and experience more of an awakening. We gave Pizarro white supremacist language that resonates with the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“Fidelio” is a singspiel or opera with spoken dialogue. The sung sections are performed in the original German while the dialogue is heavily rewritten and revised in contemporary English. Was there ever a question of whether to translate the sung portions of Beethoven’s score into English as well to bring it closer to the audience?
Heard: Yes, we have considered performing the whole opera in English, but we love the German, and we think it’s powerful to hear the German up next to the English. Personally, I like the juxtaposition. I like that the audience experiences these intimate, contemporary American dialogues and then hears these grand German arias. That said, our English supertitles have been updated and adapted to match our production and interpretation.
Obviously racially-oriented police brutality and violence towards African-Americans has existed for decades – or centuries – in this country. What is new are cellphone cameras that record the brutal acts which can be shown to the public and in the courtroom and on social media which amplifies Black Lives Matter to the American people. Your “Fidelio” production uses multimedia. How does the multimedia work in the production and how does it link with BLM and cellphones and social media?
Acon: Absolutely. The murder of George Floyd is a chilling example of how cellphones and social media have become crucial in contemporary activism. Exacerbated by the lockdown of the pandemic, this was an instance when we had no choice but to sit, watch, and absorb this small glimpse into the terror of institutional brutality on Black and Brown communities around the country.
Heard: *Spoiler alert!* Instead of pulling out a pistol as in the original opera, Leah uses her cellphone as her weapon against Pizarro. That is her way of throwing him off guard and documenting his corruption.
In this production, “Roc” (Rocco) is a black man who is working for whites in a prison which incarcerates a majority of black men. This production adds the race issue to Beethoven and Sonnleithner’s original story about political oppression, injustice and cruelty. What do you think about the issue of African-Americans working within a biased and racist society and the ways they survive and navigate the system?
Acon: I think it’s awful and deeply nuanced. Roc, like so many Black people in America, does not have the social agency/access to have a real impact on systemic racism and oppression. We did not create these institutions and cannot be expected to dismantle them. He tries to live by his own set of values, which he then passes along to his daughter. He turns a blind eye to the more atrocious aspects of his “duties” in order to survive and retain what little power he has. The victory of our story is the opportunity that this particular set of events affords him to do more.
Heard: Roc reminds me that we are all complicit with our carceral justice system unless we are actively resisting it.
Anything you want to say about your role as activist and artist?
Acon: My role as an activist sits at the center of everything I do - including my career as an artist. I firmly hold that artists must always work to be even more courageous, even more honest. The world depends on it.
Heard: This project challenges me not only to be a better stage director, but also to be a better producer, community-builder, communicator, and human being. It also reminds me every day what great art can do: speak truth to power, illuminate injustice, inspire empathy, and radiate love.
Heartbeat Opera will perform “Fidelio” at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at The Met Fifth Avenue on February 10, February 12, and February 13, 2022.
More information and tickets are available here: https://engage.metmuseum.org/events/metlivearts/fy21-22/beethoven-s-fidelio/
and here: https://www.heartbeatopera.org/comingup
Heartbeat Opera Announces 2021-22 Season
By Francisco Salazar
AUG 12, 2021
New York’s Heartbeat Opera has announced its 2021-22 season
The season opens with “BREATHING FREE, a visual album,” a free outdoor screening at dusk with live performances focusing on Black empowerment in the arts. The work will feature excerpts from Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” Negro Spirituals, and songs by Harry T. Burleigh, Florence Price, Langston Hughes, Anthony Davis, Thulani Davis. The work is directed by Ethan Heard and filmmaker Anaiis Cisco.
Performance Date: Sept. 18 at Pier 63, Hudson River Park Trust
Ethan Heard directs “Messy Messiah” with music directed by Jacob Ashworth and arranged by Daniel Schlosberg. The performance will see the return of Heartbeat’s beloved annual drag opera extravaganza with familiar tunes by Handel, Tchaikovsky, Berlin, and many more.
Performance Dates: Dec. 16 & 17 at Roulette in Brooklyn
Beethoven’s “Fidelio” will be adopted and directed by Ethan heard and arranged & Music Directed by Daniel Schlosberg. The New English Dialogue will be Co-Written by Marcus Scott and Ethan Heard and will star Derrell Acon (Roc), Curtis Bannister (Stan), Kelly Griffin (Leah), Victoria Lawal (Marcy), Tim Mix (Pizarro), and more than 100 incarcerated singers in six prison choirs.
Performance Dates: Feb. 10-27, 2022 in NY, California, and Arizona
The production of the season will be “QUANDO, ossia Project ‘0‘” which will include in-person screenings with live performances in New York and Long Beach. The pilot of NO EVIL Projects will feature music from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” and Verdi’s “La Traviata” and “Don Carlo.” The music will be directed and arranged by Daniel Schlosberg.
Performance Dates: April 2022
Heartbeat’s first commission “The Extinctionist,” will be performed in 2023 and will be a one-act opera. The opera was written by composer Daniel Schlosberg with a libretto by Amanda Quaid, based on her play. It will be directed, conceived, and developed by Louisa Proske and music directed by Jacob Ashworth.
VIDEO: Preview Heartbeat Opera's Radically Staged Versions Of Two Classics - DON GIOVANNI And FIDELIO
After last season's much-buzzed-about Butterfly and Carmen, HEARTBEAT OPERA-the daring young company whose unconventional orchestrations and stagings of classic operas have been called "a radical endeavor" by Alex Ross in The New Yorker-returns to Baruch Performing Arts Center with its fourth annual Spring Festival May 2-13, 2018. Heartbeat premieres adaptations of two operatic masterpieces, both radically staged, trimmed down and re-orchestrated: Mozart's DON GIOVANNI and Beethoven's FIDELIO. Once again at the helm is Heartbeat Co-Artistic Directors Louisa Proske and Ethan Heard and Co-Music Directors Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg. These four graduates of the Yale School of Drama and Yale School of Music founded Heartbeat Opera in 2014 and have since brought a number of great works of the operatic canon into the 21st century through visionary adaptations, offbeat chamber music arrangements, and visceral productions that put the singers and instrumentalists at the center of the work. Cantata Profana, Heartbeat's "crack chamber ensemble" (The New Yorker), performs Daniel Schlosberg's new instrumental arrangements, which have been called "ingenious" by The Wall Street Journal. Schlosberg works in tight communication with Ms. Proske and Mr. Heard to create original arrangements that are closely tied to the directors' visions of these iconic operas. DON GIOVANNI'S WOMEN The three women of DON GIOVANNI will be brought into new light by director Louisa Proske as powerful, diverse, and complex people. Donna Elvira is portrayed by the young emerging singer Felicia Moore; Donna Anna is Berlin-based Met cover Leela Subramaniam; and Zerlina is Puerto Rico's Samarie Alicea, who played the lead of Figaro 90210! off-Broadway.
MOZART'S CLARINET The novel element in Mozart's original orchestration of DON GIOVANNI is the prominence of the clarinets, which at that very moment were coming into their modern form as the primary voice of the winds. After a life-long fascination with the clarinet, Mozart finally had access to good players with remodeled instruments, giving him new coloristic expression for a group of late works that peaked with his iconic chamber music masterpiece, the Clarinet Quintet. Daniel Schlosberg's new orchestration of DON GIOVANNI-for clarinet, string quartet, bass, and harpsichord-takes Mozart's lead in his own Quintet to cast the clarinet, like Giovanni himself, as the outsider. The clarinet has a unique capacity to be both the loudest sound, impossible to ignore, and to blend in almost to the point of being imperceptible. Like Giovanni, the clarinet is a shapeshifter.
A FIDELIO FOR 2018 In Heartbeat's version of FIDELIO, Leonore is now "Leah," a young black woman, and her husband Florestan is "Stan," a Black Lives Matter activist who has been wrongfully incarcerated. Leah dreams that she becomes "Leo," a butch female prison guard who attempts to rescue Stan from death in prison. Together with playwright Marcus Scott, Ethan Heard has made the dialogue fresh and American, eliminated two major roles, and altered the ending. Among the four black leads is Angolan immigrant Nelson Ebo, who plays the imprisoned Stan. Born in 1984 during the civil war, Ebo watched nine of his siblings and both parents die due to illness and war. A U.N. representative heard a teen-aged Ebo sing and helped him emigrate to receive formal opera training. Singing literally became his way out of Angola, which had become a virtual prison. FIDELIO is known for its stirring "Prisoners' Chorus," an ode to freedom, hope, and the human spirit. Heartbeat invited six prison choirs to learn and record a new version of this hymn. All six recordings will be layered and combined so that the audience hears the voices of people in prison in Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas, singing together in harmony. Schlosberg's new orchestration of FIDELIO-for two French horns, two cellos, two pianos, and percussion-will channel the emotional core of the opera. The instruments reflect Leah's hope and struggle, from the deep expressivity of the cellos to the bold resolve of the horns. Bolstered by a battery of pianos and drums, the instrumentation pulls listeners through a vast yet intimate journey into Leah's psyche. Heartbeat Opera's
For tickets and more visit www.heartbeatopera.org
Beethoven Opera is upgraded to the current prison system
‘Fidelio' wins new set-up with support from Black Lives Matter movement
Ruan Ebright, The New York Times12 May 2018 | 4:00 p.m.
Few opera choirs are as poignant as the group of inmates who sings in the First Act of Beethoven's Fidelio opera . Temporarily released from the cells, the prisoners almost whisper an ode, like a hymn, to freedom: "Oh, what joy to breathe and again and freely in the open air."
The transformation of oppression into freedom lies in the essence of Fidelio , which the small and intrepid Heartbeat Opera Company is performing until May 13 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in Manhattan. There the recorded voices of the choir of the Midwestern prison join in the Beethoven Opera Prisoners' Choir.
To revive the work in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, Heartbeat's artistic director, Ethan Heard, and artistic director Daniel Schlosberg, set the stage for production within the American criminal justice system, which has sent a disproportionately large number of people to prison. color.
With the opera Fidelio and its competitor Don Giovanni in the #MeToo era, the Heartbeat company continues to follow the same steps as last year's Madame Butterfly , which addresses Asian issues, Orientalism, and culture clichés. geishas Puccini's opera, Heard said in an interview, "is timely and embedded in the current discussions, and I want to find another opera that can do something like this."
He was raptured with Fidelio , whom Beethoven composed after the French Revolution.The opera recounts the efforts of a wife to save her imprisoned husband by mistake, disguising himself as a man and infiltrating the prison. "I thought it was a proper story for 2018," he said.
In the adaptation of the company Heartbeat, the heroine is Leah (Leonore in the original opera), whose husband Stan (Florestan) a naturalized citizen and activist of the Black Lives Matter movement, is arrested during a protest and taken unjustly to prison. Some of the minor opera roles were eliminated, and Schlosberg arranged for Beethoven's score for two pianos, two cellos, two horns and percussion - a camera set that would musically emphasize the story of heroism amidst the tenebrous opera.
It is a version that fits with the increasing efforts in the field of the opera to put experiences and perspectives of the blacks in the center of the stage, as it is the case of Charlie Parker's Yardbird, of Daniel Schnyder; The Summer King , by Daniel Sonenberg, about black basketball player Josh Gibson; Champion , by Terence Blanchard, about a gay boxer, Emile Griffith; and work still under development by Tania Leon, Little Rock Nine.
Musicologist Naomi André, in her upcoming book Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement, describes how operas in the US and South Africa - countries with problematic racism stories - have been used to "offer an alternative narrative of racial experience as opposed to the dominant culture." The power of operas, she writes, "rests on what they offered to their original audience as well as on what they can still offer us in the present day."
There is a historical precedent in the case of the changes made by the Heartbeat company in Fidelio , and their exploration of the political relevance of the opera. Beethoven, a resolute defender of the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, was fascinated by the play of Nicolas Bouilly Léonore, or l'Amour Conjugal , from the time of the Revolution.But the composer's librettist, Joseph Sonnleithner, had to bypass the censorship of the Austrian government, setting the opera in 16th-century Spain and emphasizing the "good wife virtue" rather than civil rights.
Unhappy with the unsuccessful play of the play in 1805, which coincided with Napoleon's occupation of Vienna, Beethoven re-wrote Fidelio the following year, condensing the three acts into two. When he and the poet Georg Friedrich Treitschke revised it again in 1814, to coincide with the Vienna Congress, when European leaders devised a new geopolitical map after the Napoleonic era, the composer added a new final chorus that gave more symbolic weight to the prisoners recently released.
"The fact that the opera has undergone many revisions has given us permission to understand that the music was not so unalterable," Scholsberg said.
Although 19th century audiences saw the opera Fidelio as a fundamentally domestic story, the twentieth-century conductors and directors, beginning with Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller in 1904, began to present it as a predominantly political allegory. Mahler cut the music from the first act, which he considered inconsequential, and inserted the dramatic Overture No. 3 , Leonore, in the second act, while the stylized, partially abstracted scenery gave the story a timeless universality.
Many productions after World War II were explicitly political, more punctual than timeless. In a critique of Nazi oppression, Fidelio was the chosen work for the reopening of the opera houses of Germany and Austria. And in a divided Germany during the Cold War, directors on both sides of the Iron Curtain transposed Fidelio into scenarios ranging from the Soviet Gulags to South American military juntas and German concentration camps. And they took some liberties in the case of the libretto.
Rejecting Beethoven's spoken dialogue as well as the recitatives sung that became a standard alternative, Wieland Wagner opted for a narrator in his 1954 production in Stuttgart, Germany. Other directors replaced the dialogue with the political verse of the 20th century.
Heartbeat's production also replaced the spoken text. Heard worked with playwright Marcus Scott to turn German dialogue into a contemporary American discourse. (In a scene, Leah begs the prison administrator to briefly free them: "They are people, people who have made mistakes, some whose only mistake is being poor." (She also insinuates that race is a factor).
A Schosberg student organized a choir in the Minnesota prison and put the collaborators in contact with other choirs in Ohio, Iowa and Kansas. In March the team rehearsed with the Oak Community Choir, the Kuji Men's Chorus, the Ubuntu Men's Chorus and the East Hill Singers.
Behind the concrete walls and metal fences they met enthusiastic artists. A member of the Ubuntu choir proudly showed off his tattoo of Johann Sebastian Bach. Video recordings and audio groupings will be put together to create Beethoven's sublime music.
"These choirs have to do with reaching out to humanity through the community. And the directors of these choirs have found a way to nurture the idea that these inmates are people."
He concluded: "And this is what Fidelio is." / Translation Terezinha Martino
Words from Ethan Heard of Heartbeat Opera:
It’s opening night of Heartbeat Opera’s FIDELIO! 🎼🎭
Today I am full of both pride and humility, excitement and nerves. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the 90 artists, technicians, and managers in NYC who brought this production so beautifully to life — plus the more than 100 incarcerated singers and 70 volunteer singers in the Midwest who raise their voices with us. This story is about hope in the face of injustice, love in the face of hate. We need it right now. Come experience our radical new version of Beethoven’s classic through May 13. The New Yorker thinks you should! 😉 #heartbeatopera #fidelio
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Legendary filmmaker and Oscar-winner James Ivory loved Heartbeat Opera’s FIDELIO. His screenplay for CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is everything! 🍑
FIDELIO performs May 5, 6, 9, 11, and 13. More $25 tickets just went on sale for this Sunday.