In recent years the Deutsche Oper has stumbled upon a surefire recipe for success. Step One: find a moderately obscure opera from the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. Step Two: get Christof Loy to direct it. While the opera in this case – Giordano’s Fedora - can’t quite claim to be great opera, the combination of first-class performances in the principal roles and charismatic musical direction from John Fiore resulted in an undeniably a great evening.
Umberto Giordano composed some ten operas in the course of a career lasting over forty years, and while many were moderately successful at the time, only Andrea Chénier has secured a firm place in the international repertoire. Indeed it was success of Chénier that allowed Giordano to secure the rights to adapt Victorien Sardou’s play Fédora, which had first appeared on the Parisian stage in 1882. Giordano’s version opened in 1898 – only two years after Chénier
With over a hundred years of hindsight, it is easier to be objective about Fedora’s qualities and limitations. In the minus column, it suffers from a plot so skilfully contrived that one appreciates it more for the efficiency of its mechanics than the immediacy of its emotional engagement (even the disposable sub-plot is a textbook example of dramatic contrast); Giordano’s music, although not without its flashes of individuality, contains many of the verismo trappings – both the bombast and occasional triteness – that virtually guaranteed success in the final decade of the nineteenth century. If Fedora is considerably more refined than many of its peers, there is still an undercurrent of sensationalism in its explosive outpourings of love and death.
Giordano: Fedora. John Fiore, conductor. Christof Loy, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, November 2025. © 2025 by Bettina Stoess / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
The work’s shortcomings, however, seemed insignificant in the face of such dedicated performances and such a well-conceived staging. Christof Loy is a master of creating oppressive spaces that heighten the psychological intensity of the drama, and his approach to Fedora was no different. Although the three acts of the libretto take place in three different locales (St Petersburg, Paris, and a village in Switzerland) the action of Mr Loy’s staging unfolded in a single room, in which even the conventional markers of opulence – the ornate wallpaper and the gilded mouldings – took on a sinister edge. The location of each act was announced by title cards, and the layout and contents of the room were modified slightly from scene to scene – even opening up into a slightly more inviting space for the first half of the third act – but for the most part the staging revelled in its own claustrophobia.
The staging also made use of some live video, focussed primarily on the title character and her reactions to the events of the first two acts (although, in an intriguing piece of fourth-wall-breaking, the camera followed Vida Miknevičiūtė, already firmly in character as Fedora, from her dressing room through the backstage area of the opera house, leading up to her appearance on stage). However the subtle intrusion of technology was largely incidental. The strengths of the staging lay primarily in Mr Loy’s ability to sketch plausible characters and to create confined spaces in which the passions of those characters were strained to the breaking point. If Sardou’s scenario is impressive primarily for the extreme refinement of its dramatic formula, Mr Loy was able to transform the chilly inevitability of the story into an oddly invigorating cauldron of repressed emotion.
Giordano: Fedora. John Fiore, conductor. Christof Loy, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, November 2025. © 2025 by Bettina Stoess / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
On its own, the staging would have yielded a concise and involving work of theatre, but the vocal and orchestral performances transformed the evening into something far greater. At the centre of it all was Vida Miknevičiūtė, whose thoroughly compelling embodiment of the eponymous princess was matched by a vocal majesty that set exactly the right tone for every scene. Whether swearing vengeance on her crucifix necklace in Act One, coolly plotting the seduction and capture of her enemy in Act Two, or pleading for forgiveness in the opera’s final scene, Ms Miknevičiūtė maintained an absolute command of the stage, not merely through the projective assertion of her phrasing – although she had no trouble rising to the heights of Giordano’s most rapturous passages –but also through a complete immersion in the turmoil of the character. Throughout the performance Ms Miknevičiūtė revealed herself to be something close to a force of nature – albeit one with enough restraint to prevent the performance from going over the top – and if the rest of the cast had been merely average, the evening would have been memorable on the strength of her appearances alone.
Giordano: Fedora. John Fiore, conductor. Christof Loy, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, November 2025. © 2025 by Bettina Stoess / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
However the evening was fortunate enough to have the powerful tenor of Jonathan Tetelman in the role of Loris, Fedora’s sworn-enemy turned love-interest. Mr Tetelman made a big impression in the brief but potent ‘Amor ti vieta’ mid-way through the second act, but even that was only a warm-up for the confession that brought the second act to its climax: opening with a wistful evocation of his family home and first love, he turned up the dark intensity of his delivery as romance turned to tragedy. And while Mr Tetelman established himself as an expert purveyor of grand emotion, his appearances were just as notable for the richness of tone he imparted to the character’s most impassioned moments. While the remainder of the large cast were relegated to comparatively minor roles, there were nonetheless a number of fine supporting performances: Julia Muzychenko gave a boisterous reading of the frivolous Countess Olga, Tobias Kehrer was quietly superb as the police inspector charged with bringing Vladimir’s murderer to justice, and Artur Garbas had a notable (if brief) scene as Cirillo the coachman.
Apart from the two principals, however, the evening’s finest performance came from John Fiore, whose unfussy musical direction wove the score’s frequent and sudden changes of mood into a unified drama. Although he had no problem summoning the violent passions that propel the characters to their eventual doom, his reading seemed less concerned with isolated emotional outbursts than with placing the work’s volatile peaks within the context of a consistent dramatic structure. If the score has its moments of obviousness – not merely the love scene at the end of the second act, but the unconvincingly effervescent banter between Olga and de Siriex – Mr Fiore seemed determined to demonstrate that Giordano equally adept at subtle ambiguity. It was difficult not to be impressed by some of the composer’s quietly unusual string writing, most notably in the instrumental interlude between the two parts of the second act.
In the end, Fedora may not be entirely convincing as a work of drama: the libretto is a victory of plot over character and its emotional cues often seem carefully calculated rather than honestly earned. With a good staging, however, it can succeed as a work of finely crafted entertainment, and with the right level of musical commitment it can be something considerably greater. Between the direction of Mr Loy, the vocal splendour of Ms Miknevičiūtė and Mr Tetelman, and the unassuming grace of Mr Fiore’s conducting, the evening offered a remarkably strong argument for Fedora’s qualities.
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