Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 2 - Fidelio

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 “Welch’ein Augenblick” (“What a moment”), and he repeats the word later, in the dungeon, when he is about to murder Florestan. When Leonore, asked to unchain Florestan, repeats the phrase, saying “O welch’ein Augenblick,” what are we to make of this repetition? Beethoven, like his audience, knew all too well that in real life politics is dizzyingly unstable. A promising beginning can all too quickly turn oppressive—as the early days of the French Revolution, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, was followed by the arbitrary cruelty of the Terror, and as the early days of Napoleon the liberal lawgiver, once the hero of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, were followed by Napoleon the Emperor, at which point Beethoven is said to have withdrawn his dedication and titled the symphony simply “Eroica” with no real-life dedicatee. The play on the word Augenblick is surely a sign that we are meant to see the victory of the good as insecure and temporary, as in life it always must be. (At the end of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera , the hero is rescued by the King’s order, delivered by a messenger on horseback—a satirical reference to Fidelio , I am certain—at which point Mrs. Peachum says, “Life would be so easy and peaceful, if King’s messengers always came riding in.”) A famous semi-staged version of Fidelio conducted by Daniel Barenboim in Chicago in 1998 contained added narration written by Edward Said—spoken by Waltraut Meier, who played Leonore, as if Leonore is looking back from many years later, meditating on the fact that things did not work out as she wished. This might initially seem like intrusive Regietheater, but in fact Said has written an excellent article on the opera arguing for just this sense of vulnerability and impermanence as built into its music, and I believe he is right, though perhaps too pessimistic in the conclusion he draws. Yes, power is unreliable, regimes are unreliable. We can’t count on messengers who turn up at just the right moment. What we can nonetheless love and regard with awe is the struggle of courageous human beings who refuse the easy option of despair, who strive for the right against great odds, a struggle that is beautiful in itself, whether it ultimately prevails or not. Beethoven’s music for Leonore and Florestan brilliantly depicts this difficult upward struggle. What propels that struggle is hope, and Fidelio is opera’s greatest musical depiction of that emotion. Hope is slippery. It does not track the probabilities: if your loved one is very ill, you can hope even when the situation is grave; you can also abandon hope when things are going somewhat better. Hope is a way of seeing a situation, as, so to speak, half-full rather than half-empty, and it is of crucial importance for action. People of hope will strive and struggle; without hope people will put up with the worst and do nothing. Immanuel Kant, a leading thinker of the Enlightenment and a philosopher whom Beethoven greatly admired, said that all human beings had an obligation to cultivate hope in themselves, because we all ought to struggle for the good, and only hope can propel that struggle. That idea lies at the core of Fidelio . The key arias of both Leonore and Florestan are musical embodiments of hope. They are different. Hers moves from denunciation of Pizzaro into a gentle meditative invocation of hope, the legato phrase arcing upward. Then, when hope arrives in response to her call, she is propelled into action, and the music becomes rapid, decisive, and heroic, attempting the most difficult runs with seeming ease. In Florestan’s case, his aria’s meditative part is about his past, and he seems to have no path forward to action—and yet, suddenly, hope arrives in a fevered dream of Leonore, the vocal line leaping upward with unsteady and anxious thrusts. His hope, for the present, leads nowhere: he needs her actions to move forward. The finale depicts justice arriving in response to the committed and courageous actions of good ordinary people. And it does not simply represent hope; it inspires it in its audiences, as unfailingly as its companion piece, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Asked by the King’s messenger to free her husband from his chains, Leonore does so, exclaiming “O welch’ein Augenblick”—quoting verbatim from Pizzaro but in the opposite moral sense. At this point there is a naked oboe solo that arcs gently upward (another “exalted subdominant”) and then descends as if to touch the formerly imprisoned man. Gentle and serene, the melody was borrowed by Beethoven from an earlier never-performed cantata, written in 1790 to honor the death of the enlightened Emperor Joseph II, in which it is sung to the words, “Now mankind reaches toward the light.” It has come to be called Beethoven’s Humanitätsmelodie, “melody of Humanity.” Beethoven’s ending is perilous and temporary— and, I believe, intended to be heard as such. And yet it tells us that the struggle for justice is not futile, that there are “moments”—openings for decent people to struggle for change, and sometimes for a while to succeed, propelled by hope and love. There may be no solid reasons for hope, but hope is all we have to inspire us to fight for justice. And we must continue to fight because we can. We might call Fidelio Beethoven’s— and our own— Humanitätsoper , the opera of humanity, striving for the light. Martha C. Nussbaum is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Chicago. Her most recent books are Justice for Animals (2023) and The Tenderness of Silent Minds: Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem (2024).