Christian Schmidt, Fidelio

In this staging of Fidelio, the curtain opens during the overture revealing an overscaled monumental bourgeois salon, with wooden paneling painted white and an elegant inlayed parquet floor. Space is dominated by a giant, featureless black rectangle. As revealed by both Guth and Schmidt in an interview with German drama critic Norbert Abels, they view the work as a psychological drama, comprising “a mosaic of the solitudes in which everyone is a prisoner of their very own reaction structure.” The freedom being sought is a liberation from self-inflicted prisons of the mind. interiority is reflected in the set which was motivated in part by Freud’s idea of the «Salon des Unbewussten», the salon of the unconscious, presumably meaning the imagined space in which we picture intra-psychic conflict being played out, in which the rectangular black monolith, an «Etwas», slowly revolves.