Why Fidelio was the libretto for Beethoven

 Everyone knows Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio. Considering it started life as 'Leonore' which itself underwent a revision, one might almost say he wrote three operas, all on the same subject. It has been said that Bruckner wrote 23 symphonies - a fanciful pronouncement including as it does revisions made by others. My point about Leonore/Fidelio is that it obviously meant a very great deal indeed to Beethoven. He stated that the revision which took the final Leonore and created the Fidelio we know today was the most difficult thing he had ever done. This from the arch-revisor, revision being an integral part of his compositional process. In Wikipedia, we read

No other work of Beethoven caused him so much frustration and disappointment. He found the difficulties posed by writing and producing an opera so disagreeable, he never attempted to compose another. In a letter to Treitschke he said, "I assure you, dear Treitschke, that this opera will win me a martyr's crown. You have by your co-operation saved what is best from the shipwreck. For all this I shall be eternally grateful to you."^[4]

Amazingly there are still critics of this Fidelio. I have even heard it said that it is not a good opera. True that in a bad performance you won't get the full impression of it being the greatest opera of all but just listen to the recording of Klemperer conducting it at Covent Garden in 1960 (with Jurinac, Vickers, Hotter, Frick, Morrison, Dobson and Robinson) and you will be hard pressed to deny its greatness. 

For those of us lucky enough to have been there there is no doubt. Klemperer also produced the opera and chose the designer so even if the production was simple and the sets on the drab side the whole thing was singleminded and powerful, unlike other productions whose 'tricksiness' and lack of integrity diminish the work entirely.

Beethoven seems to have considered himself no less an opera composer that a composer of any other medium. As a youngster he played viola in the court orchestra of Hanover for a couple of seasons. So he knew the repertoire. Works included operas by Mozart and Gluck. When he went to Vienna he took lessons on word-setting from Salieri. 

From time to time, operatic subjects came into view. The best known of these was 'Vestas Feuer.' This was a hodge-podge scenario by Schikaneder with a ludicrous plot and equally poor words concerning a love triangle in ancient Rome where the heroine escapes the villans by becoming a vestal virgin. The villains duly destroy the temple and extinguish the sacred flame etc. Beethoven composed a few numbers; about ten minutes of music before giving up. More than one of these numbers even found its way into Fidelio.

He frequently sought other libretti and was convinced he could turn his hand to many subjects. In 1807 he wrote to the directors of the Vienna court theatres offering to write at least one great opera and an operetta (Singspiel) or minor compositions for specific occasions each year! He had found himself in need of money after the failure of Leonore in 1806 and indicated that unless he recived such an appointment he may have to leave Vienna for a city where he was more appreciated.

In the end, as is well known a group of sponsors was formed by Prince Lichnowski who paid Beethoven a regular stipend.

Here is a list of the other operatic subjects that were offered to Beethoven or which he toyed with during his career in Vienna;

1. 'Alexander'                            Schikaneder            eventually composed by Franz Teuber

2, 'Vestas Feuer'                        Schikaneder+                                                  Joseph Weigl

3. (Ur) 'Leonore'                       'Old French Libretto' Sonnleithner                   Beethoven

4. Macbeth                               Collin                                                                 Beethoven*

5. Faust l                                  Goethe                                                                -

6. Attila                                    -                                                                          -

7. Brutus                                  -                                                                          -

8. Ulysses                                -                                                                          -

9. Les Ruines de Babylone     Treitschke                                                           -

10. Romulus                            -                                                                          -

11. Bacchus (Pan?)                 -                                                                           -

12. Drahomira                        Grillparzer#                                                          -

13. Die Schoene Melusine     Grillparzer                                                            -

+ Beethoven rejected Schikaneder's libretto on account of the language (that of Viennese apple women according to B) and the fact Schikaneder  was too self-conceited to change anything. Also, the inclsion of 'magic' - a device by then (1805) out of fashion.

* Beethoven sketched 2 pages of the witches' incantation and possibly some of the overture. Collin's brother reported after Beethoven's death that Macbeth was to interrupt the witches' chanting and also that the subject was abandoned as 'too gloomy.'

# Grillparzer's uncle was none other than Joseph von Sonnleithner, translator of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's 'Leonore ou l'amour conjugal' and hence librettist of 'Leonore.' Beethoven himself together with his friend Stefan von Breuning revised this libretto for the second 'Leonore' and Georg Friedrich Treitschke the revision that became 'Fidelio.'

However none of these plans would ever come to fruition and with the benefit of hindsight I would like to suggest the reason why.

It is well known from Beethoven's childhood that his father made him practice in the hope that he would become a new prodigy and be a source of income as Mozart had been. Johann Beethoven is also known to have been a drunkard and one story relates how he returned home one night with friends after a night in the tavern and dragged the sleeping Ludwig from his bed to show him off and make him play the piano. the child Ludwig refused. This was a dangerous thing to have done because it was also known that the father would lock his son in the basement if he refused to practice.

Beethoven's relationship with his father was so bad that in the Heilgenstadt Testament - a letter addressed to his two brothers Kaspar Karl and Johann, he was unable even to write the name Johann and left a blank each time he tried to name him.

He adored his mother though and it should be remembered that when he went to Vienna for the first time in order to meet and hopefully study with Mozart, it was word of his mother's (final) illness that made him abruptly cut short his stay and return home to Bonn. It is not known for sure if he even met Mozart although there is a famous but possibly apocryphal story that a meeting did take place.

Consider this: a heroine - a wife, saves a victim (her husband) of an unspecified crime from a dungeon (cf. basement) where he has been flung by a 'Boesewicht,' (Pizarro) whose music has obsessed Beethoven even before the composition of Leonore/Fidelio. the opera has the subtitle 'Oder die eheliche Liebe.' What was Beethoven's lifelong desire? Die eheliche Liebe - marital love.

It is not a stretch of imagination to assume Beethoven's mother would have 'saved' her son from these incarcerations in the cellar by the father when the son didn't want to play or practice.

What other subject could have had such personal significance for Beethoven?

A word about Beethoven's operatic experience before writing the Ur 'Leonore'. Other stage works.

Between 18 and 22, Beethoven played viola in the Court Orchestra at Bonn. In these 4 seasons plus one interim season, he took part in 62 operas some of which were revived from season to season. The number o performances was even greater. For example 'le nozze di Figaro' was given 4 performances in one season but is counted as one title.

As well as familiar works by Mozart (Don Giovanni, La finta Giardiniera, Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail and Le nozze di Figaro), Gluck (Die Pilger von Mecca), Pergolesi (La serva padrona) and perhaps Paisiello ('Il barbiere di Siviglia), there were also forgotten operas by known composers such as Benda, Cimarosa, Dalayrac, Dittersdorf, Gretry, Martin y Soler and Salieri and operas by forgotten composers such as Anfossi,  de la Borde, The Electoral captain d'Antoin, Desaides, Guglielmi, Martini, Monsigny, Sacchini, Sarti, Schubauer, Schuster, Umlauf and of course, Anon.

As already mentioned, Beethoven studied word-setting with Salieri and no doubt attended opera perfomances in Vienna before becoming deaf. Even that didn't prevent him from going to the publisher Schlesinger's shop the day after the premiere of Weber's 'Euryanthe' to ask how the performance had gone and whether Henrietta Sonntag had had a success (he was very taken with the young soprano and used her in the premiere of his Ninth Symphony).

Such experience of the workings of opera is almost unprecedented. No doubt Beethoven could have penned other operas or Singspiels as a composer in need of funds but they may not have attained any further significance than his incidental music to Egmont, Koenig Stefan, Die Ruinen von Athen, Die Weihe des Hauses, Tarpeja, Die gute Nachricht, Leonora Prohaska, Die Ehrenpforten and Wilhelm Tell. Admittedly some of these contain very few or even just one number. His ballets, the 'Ritterballett' and 'Die Geschoepfe von Prometheus' have hardly fared any better.

Furtwaengler sums it up

The conjugal love of Leonore appears, to the modern individual armed with realism and psychology, irremediably abstract and theoretical.... Now that political events in Germany have restored to the concepts of human dignity and liberty their original significance, this is the opera which, thanks to the music of Beethoven, gives us comfort and courage.... Certainly, Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theater, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary. That which disturbs us is not a material effect, nor the fact of the 'imprisonment'; any film could create the same effect. No, it is the music, it is Beethoven himself. It is this 'nostalgia of liberty' he feels, or better, makes us feel; this is what moves us to tears. His Fidelio has more of the Mass than of the Opera to it; the sentiments it expresses come from the sphere of the sacred, and preach a 'religion of humanity' which we never found so beautiful or necessary as we do today, after all we have lived through. Herein lies the singular power of this unique opera.... Independent of any historical consideration ... the flaming message of Fidelio touches deeply.

We realize that for us Europeans, as for all men, this music will always represent an appeal to our conscience. 

Salzburg, 1948