Fidelio

Composed and recomposed for over a decade, Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio (1805), was a hard-won achievement. “It is the work that caused me the worst birth pangs, the one that brought me the most sorrow, and for that reason it is the one most dear to me,” Beethoven wrote. Composed during the Napoleonic Wars and premiered in 1805, just days after the French occupation of Vienna, it’s both a gripping rescue drama and a powerful musical manifesto for democracy. Leonore’s husband, Florestan, has been wrongfully imprisoned by his political rival Don Pizarro. Determined to rescue him, Leonore disguises herself as a boy—Fidelio—and takes a job in the prison where he is being held. But her plans are complicated when the jailer’s daughter falls in love with “Fidelio” and Pizarro decides to silence his prisoner once and for all. After an unsuccessful premiere, Beethoven reworked Fidelio in 1806 and again in 1814 (it’s the latter version we know best today), and four different overtures also survive. The opera is the work of a master symphonist—unified by an overarching harmonic plan—but is far from a dramatic failure. Just listen to the friction between outward control and inward conflict in the Act I quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” (A Wondrous Feeling Fills Me), the stirring heroism of Leonore’s “Abscheulicher!” (Abominable One), and of course the fragile beauty and hope of the “Prisoners’ Chorus” (“O welche lust”—“O what joy”).