Heartbeat Opera collaborates with six prison choirs on Fidelio

[BeyondGeography]

Heartbeat Opera is known for its bold reimagining of canonical operas, using them as a platform to address relevant social issues. Bizet’s Carmen, for instance, became an exploration of borders and national identities; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly tackled the Western fetishization of Japanese culture. And a new production of Fidelio, part of the company’s 2018 season, centers the action of Beethoven’s only opera around the unjustly-imprisoned black activist Stan (Florestan in the original), whose wife, Leah (Leonore) infiltrates the prison to free him. “I wanted the show to have political urgency, something worth saying here and now,” said Co-Artistic Director Ethan Heard. “The idea of a wrongfully-incarcerated person in a corrupt system, and a woman who has to disguise herself to rescue him, is so contemporary.”

The most significant aspect of this production involves Beethoven’s famous “Prisoners' Chorus,” which is now sung by incarcerated people at six facilities in the Midwest.

...In addition to Voices of Hope, prison choirs from Ohio, Iowa and Kansas are also represented. Schlosberg wrote a new arrangement of the chorus — while Beethoven’s original is only for male voices, Schlosberg’s arrangement makes room for additional female and mixed choirs. Each group was recorded separately, and a sound designer in New York stitched each track together...

https://www.wqxr.org/story/new-production-heartbeat-opera-beethoven-fidelio-features-voices-incarcerated/