12. august – 18. september 2010

libretto within the context of this “rescue” genre. Bouilly was alleged to have
based his libretto on a true story of oppression he had witnessed during the
Reign of Terror, but he changed the setting to the less-incendiary one of Seville.
Yet the original idealism of the French Revolution—before its corruption
into the Terror—resonates through Beethoven’s score with triumphant
force. The trademarks of the “rescue opera” pervade not just Fidelio’s plot
line but its musical texture.
Yet Beethoven’s painstaking quest for the right subject for an opera entailed
far more than a consideration of commercial aspects. For all its stilted qualities,
Bouilly’s original libretto was able to fire up the composer’s imagination
with a sense of musical possibilities. Fidelio enabled him to explore how
such abstract, utopian ideals of the Enlightenment as freedom, brotherhood,
and justice could become catalyzed by a specific, dramatic instance of
self-sacrificing spousal love. The intensity with which such love is represented
underscores the lonely reality that it was all too absent from Beethoven’s
own life.
This interplay of abstract concepts and concrete, dramatic reality—the heart
of the opera’s robust appeal—is what moves us to the depths. Fidelio stands
apart as a special case in Beethoven’s career, yet it also represents a compendium
of his most intimately cherished passions. Here, Beethoven’s belief
in music with a moral purpose influences the musical narrative itself. On one
level, Fidelio is part of a continuum drawing on the composer’s mastery of
instrumental music, as the symphonically complex scoring through which he
delineates the drama makes abundantly clear.
We might even hear Fidelio as the overtly operatic counterpart to the dramatic
narrative implicit in Beethoven’s heroic style. The characters and situations
on stage echo a musical rhetoric we know from its abstract manifestations
as Beethoven them developed in sonata form—above all in his
middle-period symphonic works. In their final, triumphantly loving reunion,
Florestan and Leonore express a “nameless” joy characterized by a uniquely
Beethovenian ecstasy of rough-hewn lyricism and rhythmic excitement.
Following the voice Within
After the rousing heroics of the overture (the most compact of the four, which
trace a parallel history of the opera’s convoluted genesis), the operetta-like
character of the opening scene seems to confuse the sense of genre; here,
the atmosphere suggests Singspiel, as in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Isn’t this round
robin of misaligned affections and mistaken identity out of place in the context
of Fidelio’s elevated moral tone—a bizarre melding of the comic and serious?
Suddenly, with the opera’s first quartet (“Mir ist so wunderbar”), an
unexpectedly elevated tone enters in. (Mahler, one of the great Fidelio interpreters,
would draw on precisely this radiance for the “Adagio” of his Fourth
Symphony.) What is behind all these head-spinning shifts in emotional direction?
Typically, Beethoven seems to be up to several things at once here. The jailor
Rocco’s bourgeois pursuit of security, on behalf of his daughter Marzelline, is
the domestic counterpart to the utopian liberation and reunion of spouses
that occurs in the opera’s climax. But it also grounds Fidelio’s central issues in
a way that proves disturbing. These are decent people pursuing their fair
share of happiness, but in the shadow of an abusive prison system. Evil, we
are reminded, is not so easily singled out as an extreme case that can be eliminated;
it infiltrates into ordinary life in insidious ways. Rocco may be satirized,
yet he has principles and limits. At the same time, he lacks the strength
to resist compromising with the power structure in which he operates.
30 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Messer Marsilio and His Wife
31