Fidelio: Beethoven’s only opera is a hymn to the human capacity for heroism and a call for political liberty
A combination of realistic and symbolic drama, Beethoven’s only opera is a formulaic thriller, a hymn to the human capacity for heroism and a call for political liberty. What it lacks in psychological subtlety and theatrical finesse, it triumphantly makes up in spiritual uplift.
Plot
In mid 18th-century Spain, Leonore disguises herself as a teenage boy called Fidelio in order to rescue her husband Florestan from unjust imprisonment ordered (for unspecified reasons) by the dastardly Don Pizarro. She takes a job as assistant to his jailer Rocco, and is embarrassed when his daughter Marzelline loses interest in her suitor Jaquino and takes a romantic fancy to “him” instead.
Fidelio is given permission to accompany Rocco on a visit to a cell where a nameless prisoner is being secretly kept – she suspects, rightly, that this is her husband. Her resolve is steeled when she overhears Pizarro instructing the craven Rocco to prepare Florestan’s grave, so that Pizarro can kill him before the minister Don Fernando comes to inspect the prison. The other prisoners are briefly allowed into the courtyard to glimpse the light.
Florestan struggles to keep hope alive. Rocco and Fidelio enter the cell and begin digging his grave. But when Pizarro enters with the intention of killing Florestan, Fidelio brandishes a pistol at him and reveals her true female identity, to general consternation. A trumpet call announces Don Fernando’s timely arrival. Pizarro is arrested, the prisoners are released into the parade ground and as Leonore and Florestan are publicly reunited, there is universal rejoicing at Leonore’s courage.
Background
Beethoven struggled for more than a decade with this opera. Drawing on a French libretto that had already been used by three other composers, he began work in 1804 on a three-act version, with a new text by Joseph von Sonnleithner. Hampered by problems of censorship – Vienna being under Napoleonic occupation – this was briefly performed in 1805. The next year Beethoven revised the score for a further Viennese production.
In 1814, Beethoven returned to the opera, providing new finales and substantially altering both Leonore and Florestan’s arias. This is the version most commonly heard today, though in recent years several revivals of the first two recensions have revealed passages of fine music that were later eliminated. The protracted spoken dialogue is now almost always abbreviated.
Further confusion surrounds the existence of four overtures. Leonore No 2 was written for the 1805 production, Leonore No 3 for the 1806 one, and Leonore No 1 for an 1807 production in Prague that never took place; the overture known as Fidelio was written for the 1814 production. Until recently, it was the practice to play the Fidelio overture before the opera, with Leonore No 3 as an interlude to cover the scene change between Florestan’s dungeon and the parade ground. The latter is now considered dramatically inappropriate, leaving Leonore No 3 as something generally heard as a separate concert item.
What makes it so great?
Fidelio presents a multitude of stumbling blocks to singers and directors, and perhaps, rather like King Lear, it is a work of such high ambition that it often falls short in performance. There is a marked change of stylistic tone between the broadly realistic first act, and the increasingly symbolic character of the second act. The libretto (rewritten several times) is very unsatisfactory in terms of motivation, leaving many questions about secondary characters unanswered. Broad-chested sopranos often stretch plausibility in conveying Leonore’s disguise as a teenage boy, and the exposure of her female identity can seem merely ridiculous.
The first act is an awkward mix of domestic intrigue requiring a Mozartian lightness of touch that Beethoven lacked and heavy-handed cloak-and-dagger melodrama – the exquisite canon quartet Mir ist so wunderbar, in which the characters reflect on their feelings, seems to belong to neither sphere. Leonore’s aria of hope and defiance Abscheulicher is notoriously difficult to sing – Beethoven did not write well for the voice, and even the most powerful of singers find the climax, with its lengthy ascent to a top B, almost unsingable.
But once the story reaches Florestan’s bleak dungeon, Beethoven’s imagination and inspiration are fired up, and the drama moves in one enthralling taut trajectory, from Florestan’s anguished cry “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier” (“God! What darkness is here”), the tense trio as the grave is dug, the thrilling climactic quartet Er sterbe (“He dies”) interrupted by the redemptive offstage trumpet call and the ecstatic duet between the reunited Leonore and Florsetan. The final scene constitutes one of Beethoven’s great essays in choral writing, a precursor for ideas later developed in the Ninth Symphony and the Missa solemnis.
Contemporary productions like to make visual reference to the iniquities of recent totalitarian regimes, although the opera can also be played out in more universal terms as a struggle between darkness and light.
Recordings
It seems unlikely that any recording will ever surpass the superb version made in 1962 conducted with mature authority by Otto Klemperer. Christa Ludwig can be heard in her matchless prime as Leonore, Jon Vickers makes a heart-rending Florestan and Gottlob Frick is a sterling Rocco (EMI Classics).
On DVD, a safe recommendation is the traditional production from the Deutsche Oper Berlin dating from 1970 with Gwyneth Jones as a fiercely intense Leonore, conducted by Karl B?hm (Deutsche Grammophon).