Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 2 - Fidelio

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 However Gustav Mahler, who greatly admired Leonore no. 3 , conducted it between the end of the prison scene and the finale, and other conductors have sometimes followed this idea. Today the inclusion of the lengthy overture (about sixteen minutes) is generally considered too great a distraction from the drama’s onward movement; Lyric will not perform it. Beethoven found the whole business of opera difficult, particularly in light of his advancing deafness, which made teamwork a chore. Thus, though he never stopped looking for suitable opera libretti, he never completed another opera. The magnificent one he did complete must suffice. Let us turn, then, to its mysteries and complexities. Fidelio poses three puzzles for its interpreters. The first, and the most hotly debated, is the relationship between its two acts, and whether the discontinuity we experience is a flaw or part of Beethoven’s intention. The opera, it seems, begins as a romantic/domestic comedy and ends as a heroic drama of ideas. There is no doubt that the relationship between the acts gave Beethoven difficulty and was a major source of his revisions of 1814, which cut a lot of dialogue and slimmed down the psychology of the romantic comedy. Occasionally this has been offered as a reason to perform the 1805 or 1806 versions rather than the one we usually hear. The 1805 version is a worthy work in its own right and worth occasional performance. Usually, however, and I think rightly, the 1814 version is preferred on grounds of its moving depiction of the struggle for freedom. This is the core of Beethoven, and he was never comfortable with the genre of domestic comedy, particularly when it involved erotic relationships. (He said that Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was an ignoble work.) The opera, however, is consistent in its discontinuities. What we ought to say, indeed, is that Fidelio is all about discontinuity—how mundane life can offer moments of breakthrough, in which ordinary people ascend to the sublime. Some of these moments are indeed in Act II: Leonore’s realization that she wants to help the prisoner, no matter who he is; the sacramental moment in which Rocco and Leonore offer the prisoner bread and wine; the famous trumpet call; the ecstatic duet; and the entirety of the finale, in which the entire people join in praising justice triumphant. But Act I already shows daily life as, so to speak, porous, offering moments of egress from the mundane world to some type of deeper or higher spirituality. One of these is the four-part canon that begins with Marzelline’s words, “Mir ist so wunderbar” (“I am struck with wonder”), in which the characters step aside from their daily activities into hushed reflections. We feel that something of a different nature is happening here: people are becoming thoughtful, even spiritual. Noting the parallel with the sacramental moment of Act II, some interpreters hold, plausibly, that the canon is also sacramental—its topic being marriage, a sacrament to which Beethoven attached great value. The opera, after all, is about the triumph of marital love. In its moments of profound moral and spiritual commitment, daily life is penetrated by something more than daily. Furthermore, the moral core of the entire work is in Act I: the Prisoners’ Chorus, which has no role in the plot and therefore must be there in order to express an idea of human freedom. We don’t know who these prisoners are—whether they are all political prisoners like Florestan or whether many of them are common criminals. We do know that they are treated badly, ill nourished, not allowed fresh air and outdoor movement. As they feel the unaccustomed air on their faces and turn toward the sun, they sing, “Oh what joy! In the free air to breathe with ease! Only here, only here is life!” On the word “air” they move to their highest note, and the harmony shifts to what critic Paul Robinson rightly calls “an exalted subdominant—a move that becomes practically a harmonic code for the idea of freedom in the opera.” Beethoven impresses this phrase on each listener’s mind. (And we can’t help thinking about the connection between breath and singing: the conditions of opera itself involve a freedom that is all too often denied.) Next a single prisoner steps forward: “With trust we will build on God’s help. Hope whispers gently to me: we shall be free, we shall find rest.” Again the melodic line arcs upward, illustrating the idea of aspiration; and the word “free” occupies the highest note. All too soon, this brief window onto something wonderful begins to close: “Speak softly, restrain yourselves. We are observed by ears and eyes.” The beauty of freedom is shown as much by the pathos of its denial as by the beauty of its momentary sighting. The discontinuity between freedom and the prison, between ordinary life and its hopeful transcendence, between going along as usual and moments of vertiginous ascent, is the real theme of Fidelio : doors opening and closing, surprising bursts of light. Fidelio ’s second puzzle has been its politics: What idea of justice, or the just society, does its text and music embody? It is all so terribly abstract. Much has been written to little purpose about whether Beethoven liked or disliked the French Revolution. This is a pretty useless question, since one might easily love the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen while detesting the Terror, and there were many stopping points along the way from the former to the latter—one of those being the point chosen by the leaders of the American Revolution, which of course was also part of Beethoven’s mental context. What Beethoven puts into his opera is what he wanted us to know: that the arbitrary, lawless tyranny of some human beings over others is always wrong; that those who blow the whistle on crimes, as did Florestan, must be protected from the vengeance of those on whom they inform; that a prison system