12. august – 18. september 2010

Beethoven’s enlightening Love
For all its melodramatic trappings, Fidelio’s story of the power of courageous
love to topple a regime based on cruelty and injustice is an archetype that
has only gained in urgency since Beethoven introduced the opera he called
his “child of sorrow.” The walled grimness of its prison setting has remained
distressingly relevant, in ways that continue to shock us: both as metaphor
and literal setting for the condition in which humanity finds itself. Audiences
have long drawn on Fidelio’s moral and emotional capital for sustenance in
troubled times.
Indeed, Fidelio’s various premieres were themselves bookmarked by conditions
of acute political crisis. The first version (titled after the heroine, Leonore)
opened in 1805 while Vienna was under siege by Napoleon’s forces.
After some cuts and a tightening of the dramatic structure, Fidelio (as it was
renamed) came to the stage in its definitive form in 1814—just months away
from the start of the Congress of Vienna, which would inaugurate a new era
of reactionary suppression of civil rights.
Beethoven was, of course, not immune to the economic pressures of life as a
freelance artist, and one of the reasons behind his choice of source material
likely had to do with the commercial popularity of a genre known as the “rescue
opera” that had developed in France in the 1790s in response to the turmoil
unleashed by the French Revolution. Both the moralizing plot line of a
victim being liberated from oppression and certain musical “special effects”
(for example, in the prelude to Florestan’s monolog in Act Two) are rooted in
this genre, which had spread eastward and, as the Revolution died out,
found an audience in Beethoven’s Vienna. (It wasn’t, however, until the 1814
version that Fidelio actually achieved lasting success on the stage.)
The source from which Fidelio was eventually drawn and reworked by
Beethoven’s librettists was Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, who wrote his earlier French
Francisco de Goya, Woman Holding Up Her Dying Lover 29