Princess Fedora Romazow is going through a lot and is mostly in control of herself.

Her first husband died, the second is shot dead in Saint Petersburg the evening before the wedding.

She herself works in exile in Paris as a spy for the Russian secret police in order to convict the murderer of her fiancé.

But when the killer, Count Loris Ipanow, tells her that her fiancé cheated on her with his wife on the night of the murder, she falls in love with the killer, whom she had previously denounced to the police.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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How do you sing such a woman?

With warmth, pathos and devotion?

Or with calculation, brilliance and composure?

Nadja Stefanoff at the Frankfurt Opera takes a very deliberate approach to this role – it is her role and house debut.

Her slender voice, with a light timbre at the same time, never relies solely on rich sensuality.

She can sing not only loudly, but also softly, without losing assertiveness, which must also be credited to the sensitive direction of the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra by the wide-awake Lorenzo Passerini.

Stefanoff's voice has brilliance and nimbleness, an aristocratic sense of status that doesn't need to prove its rank.

The certain coolness in the charisma of this princess - through a voice that seems to think about itself while singing - corresponds to Christof Loy's production.

In film images of his soloist, she tells the story that “Fédora” has always been a vehicle for stars that serve as a projection surface for the audience, both as a drama by Victorien Sardou for Sarah Bernhardt and then as an opera by Umberto Giordano.

Likewise, the character captures herself—as a noblewoman and agent—in the images she delivers to society.

In some places, the film images with their live illusion do not show the same as what is actually happening on stage.

We ourselves begin to doubt what we are actually seeing.

And it is precisely this doubt that runs through the play: Are the motives behind the murder exclusively private, or are Russian nihilists behind it, who also killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881?

Is it love or conspiracy that brings Fedora and Loris together?

The tenor Jonathan Tetelman, whose first solo album will soon be released by Deutsche Grammophon, sings the Loris completely unbroken as sincerity incarnate.

His voice has an intense, inescapable euphony, warm foundation, full body, admirably elegant and supple.

The short aria in the Paris picture, "Amor ti vieta", which catapulted Enrico Caruso to world fame when it was premiered in 1898, he sings with restrained ardor and tasteful courtesy of heart.

He does not allow himself to slip and sob, but calculation, ambiguity and doubt are completely foreign to his character.

It's a pity that he then uses the outbursts of his game to show off the power of his organ more than necessary.

Especially at the end.

That is when the director demands that the dying Fedora – she has taken poison out of despair over her inextricable entanglement – ​​refuse the warmth through physical closeness that she begs for.

At this moment, the emphasis of Tetelman's triple fortissimo on the ascent to the high B flat seems disconcerting given the scene's distance.

The score only prescribes “con anima” at this point, i.e. a “souled” performance, no roaring, although this fortissimo by Tetelman still retains something balsamic.

This “Fedora”, which was taken over from Stockholm (FAZ from 14.

The program booklet links Giordano's fascination with the Russian subject surrounding the assassination attempt on the tsar of 1881 all too reflexively to the broadcast of the novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy as well as the music by Peter Tchaikovsky and Modest Mussorgsky.

But the nihilists became famous in Western Europe through the novel "Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Turgenev, which conservative journalists themselves insulted as a "nihilist".

And what we hear of Russian music in Giordano is the romance The Nightingale by Alexander Alyabyev and the folk tune Kamarinskaya, both of which Mikhail Glinka had worked on long before.

Russia, too, is more and different than the images we have of it.