When apparently pragmatic details of a recording's editing and layout articulate and underline the essential character of a performance, then they are worth taking note of: the appearance of Bernstein's Fidelio on CD emphasizes its distinct and often unique qualities.
The dialogue, severely and fruitfully pruned, now enables the opera to fit comfortably on two CDs, one act on each (Masur's Eurodisc sprawls over three; Solti's Decca, also on three, divides too early, before ''O welche Lust!''): these are important considerations for armchair listening. Where Masur appends Leonore No. 3 as a postscript and Solti omits it altogether, Bernstein's is the performance which has the idea of letting Leonore's and Florestan's duet fade into the Overture, and the finale's C major catharsis burst out of it. It is a brilliant coup, typical of Bernstein as a man of the theatre, and it epitomizes his instinct for tempo relationships and for the harmonic breathing of the entire score.
It is, inevitably, a sense of theatre which occasionally protests too much. The Overture indicates a general tendency to rit. within an Adagio, to accelerate at the first sign on an ff. Masur's Leipzig band offer wonderfully lucid, contained playing, full of implication where Bernstein tends to heavier stage-management (compare, for instance, Masur's incomparable woodwind throughout, or his long, creeping crescendo into the finale with Bernstein turns the Dungeon's brass chords into fluorescent light; and neither Masur, who leaves too well alone, nor Solti, who over-points, draws such strength from the chorus. And only Bernstein has scooped Fischer-Dieskau for a Don Fernando to bring true light out of darkness.
After Masur (whose brisk ''Mir ist so wunderbar'' works wonders by that quality alone) and, to a lesser extent, Solti, Bernstein's tempos can seem indulgently slow. But for the proof of the pudding, one has only to turn to an ''O war ich schon'' which actually gives Marzelline real space to breathe a ''warmen Herzenskuss''. With Dallapozza and Popp, Jacquino and Marzelline do spring to larger life than either Solti's or Masur's soloists, and Manfred Jungwirth's fatherly, Austrian Rocco epitomizes this recording's imaginative casting.
The principals, too, win hands down. Hans Sotin's Pizarro unleashes a real reign of terror at ''Ha! welch' ein Augenblick'', while lacking quite the twist of evil which Nimsgern provides for Masur. Gundula Janowitz's Leonore (helped, again, by the impetus of Bernstein's tempo in ''Komm, Hoffnung'') has all the power and pain of Solti's Behrens without her tendency to squally passages. Where Siegfried Jerusalem (for Masur) is a disturbingly detached Florestan, and Peter Hofmann (for Solti) displays a bad case of hypertension above the stave, Rene Kollo builds and sustains an extraordinary crescendo of agony out of a ''Gott!'' which starts as a long, distant howl of sub-human torment. That, perhaps, says it all.'