Leave your guess in the comments, and be entered to win a pair of tickets to Beethoven’s Fifth! Contest will close Thursday at 3 PM.

For more information and to apply, visit our website!

“The concert, which also included music by Richard Wagner and American composer Christopher Rouse, showed new levels of stylistic definition and ensemble unity, especially during Beethoven’s programmatically descriptive symphony.”
- The Salt Lake Tribune

“Thierry Fischer continues to knock it out of the park with his Beethoven symphony cycle. The Utah Symphony, under Fischer’s guiding hand, painted a vivid musical picture and offered a clear window into the emotions of the three composers on the program Friday night.”
- Reichel Recommends

“holy geez, it was amazing; the entire orchestra did a phenomenal job, but the main percussionist—absolutely stupendous and literally had me holding my breath at the end.”
- LifeIsBYUtiful

Were you at the concert this weekend? Let us know what you thought! Please leave your review in the comments.

National Opera week is Oct 28 – Nov 6! Watch our blog, Facebook, and Twitter for all sorts of fun things as we celebrate opera.

Other upcoming education events:

Tuesday, October 25 | 7 PM | Our annual favorite: Spooky Symphonies! | Come join Utah’s favorite Halloween tradition! Grab your costume and compete in one of the state’s largest costume contests with categories for groups, adults, children & orchestra members. Plus, hear the Utah Symphony perform your favorite spooky symphonies.

Friday, November 4 | 2 PM | Utah Opera Production Studios | Opera masterclass observation opportunity with Stanford Olsen. Our Resident Artists will be singing.

Saturday, November 5 | 1 PM | Abravanel Hall Stage | Open masterclass observation opportunity featuring young violinists. This event is sponsored by the Utah Symphony Youth Guild

Monday, November 21 | 7 PM | Abravanel Hall | The Late Piano Sonatas | A Lecture/Demonstration of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas with Principal Keyboardist Jason Hardink. Sit on the Abravanel Hall Stage and learn about Beethoven’s solo keyboard compositions. Part of our Beethoven Festival, tickets are limited.

That’s right, Beethoven only wrote one opera, Fidelio. It’s an incredibly moving mythic statement about the power of love and proves that freedom always conquers over tyranny. We hope you’ll join us at Capitol Theatre Oct 6 – 8.

Since it’s another Beethoven week, it’s time for another installment in our “Where’s Beethoven?” competition. Post a comment below telling us where Beethoven is hanging out. One of you will be randomly selected to receive two free tickets to Beethoven’s Fidelio.

by Luke Howard

Many consider the ensemble pieces the most successful examples of vocal writing in Fidelio. The Act 1 quartet (discussed in Lesson 2), the “Prisoners’ Chorus,” the final trio, the concluding rejoicing—these are precisely the places where Beethoven can treat the voices symphonically, and that is his métier.

Caption: Image of the Prisoner’s Chorus from Utah Opera’s 1999 production of Fidelio

Next, the famous “Prisoners’ Chorus:”

(Music starts at 0:57)

There is no question this is gorgeous music—a terrific 7-minute chorus in the style of a German Männerchor. But how does it propel the drama? It doesn’t. Absolutely nothing happens on stage during the chorus, and the theme of its text is only incidental to the opera. For all the lofty philosophizing about freedom and liberty in this chorus, the opera itself is about the love of a woman for her husband, and her bravery. A brave wife’s love is what the final chorus celebrates, and what the original subtitle of the opera underscored. This is another example where Beethoven’s remarkable music is far more important than the dramatic pacing or the story at this point.

Finally, the “stand-off” in Act II, “Er sterbe”:

The music in this scene is amazingly vivid—impassioned, emotional, moving—and yet Pizzaro, Leonore, Florestan, and Rocco stand there virtually stock-still for a full five minutes, with daggers and pistols drawn, making sure to reveal their true identities to all before the drama can continue. Then everyone freezes when the trumpet signals the arrival of the Minister, and they sing at length again about Leonore’s love and courage. The most exciting scene of the story, and the most musically animated, is actually one of the most visually static parts of the opera.

There is no issue at all with Beethoven’s musical instincts. He develops themes, varies the melodies, sustains the musical interest with masterly perfection. That is Fidelio’s greatest strength, and undoubtedly the reason for its continued success. But dramatically, in terms of the action on stage, these scenes are weak. (I personally find them almost farcical, for opposite reasons. The Act I quartet is a comic scene, but is treated as a very serious theme and variations. “Er sterbe,” on the other hand is a serious scene, the most intense of the opera, but the dramatic pacing so attenuated as to make it almost ludicrous on stage.)

Caption: Fidelio, Act II, Scene 3 (”Er sterbe”), an engraving from 1815

What carries the day is Beethoven’s music. It is proof, if it were needed, that opera is essentially a musical genre, not a dramatic genre. Otherwise (as a critic once claimed) Meryl Streep would be hired to sing every mad scene, and Sigourney Weaver would do everything else. We forgive opera for not being totally realistic because there is compensation in the music itself. And with Beethoven’s Fidelio, there is more than enough compensation for the weaknesses in dramatic pacing and libretto. Wilhelm Fürtwangler, the great German conductor, once observed, “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.” So the struggle Beethoven experienced in producing Fidelio wasn’t so much a struggle to write a good opera. It was the struggle to write an opera on his own terms, a symphonic opera that breaks all the “rules” of staged drama and allows the music itself to be the lead character. It is what he excelled at in his symphonies, and in that struggle to symphonize the opera genre with Fidelio, he succeeded beautifully.

Director Eric Einhorn gives instructions to Brenda Harris (Leonore/Fidelio) and Corey Bix (Florestan)

When I first began studying Fidelio, I couldn’t help but have the feeling that it was not like other operas. The plot — though just as implausible as most opera plots — seemed rougher. The characters seemed less defined and three-dimensional, when compared with characters from Mozart’s operas. I struggled with how to bring this story to life in a way that would speak to audiences and support Beethoven’s grand score.

After going through the score several times, I realized that the elements of the opera which had been giving me trouble were pointing me away from my usual aesthetic of hyper-realism toward the grander world of myth. Using Joseph Campbell’s landmark book The Hero With A Thousand Faces as a guide [the same book used by George Lucas to craft Star Wars], Fidelio became a perfect example of the hero’s journey found in universal mythology. Campbell’s step-by-step breakdown of the hero’s journey lined up almost number-by-number with Beethoven’s score. The characters and events in the opera create a story that is meant to be seen on an archetypal level, rather than a hyper-real level.

Myths require a delicate balance between detail and generality in order to fully deliver its message. It is that balance that drove the visual world of this production. The set, from Virginia Opera, is extremely industrial and cold, consisting of walls, a steel bridge, and a pile of rubble. It suggests the world of a prison in its coldness and distress, without the need of barred cells.

Fidelio set (from Virginia Opera)

Florestan languishes in his cell.

The costumes, designed specifically for this production by Susan Allred, further the mythic idea by creating an archetypal costume language: the good guys are clearly good and the bad guys are clearly bad. The costumes are rooted in the mid-20th century, but the silhouettes have been changed slightly to obscure an exact period in order to highlight the universality of opera’s message.

Pants for the male prisoners' chorus. Each pair has been individually hand-painted. The amount of distressing and number of bricks is intended to reflect how long each prisoner has been held captive by Don Pizarro.

Don Fernando's coat

Soilder coat

By exploring the epic qualities of the opera, it is my aim to work hand in hand with the score to deliver Beethoven’s grand message of love and redemption in the face of tyranny to the audience.

Mark Schnaible (Don Pizarro) lears over his prisoners.

Leonore-as-Fidelio stops Don Pizarro from murdering her husband Florestan.

Leonore and Florestan profess their love for each other.

Lesson 1: Composition and Disastrous Premiere(s)
Lesson 2: Beethoven’s Struggle with Fidelio

So why precisely did Beethoven, the great musical genius, struggle so much with Fidelio? First, Beethoven was not a natural dramatist—certainly not in the way that, for example, Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi were. He did not possess an innate understanding of the stage, and his sense of dramatic pacing in a theatrical context (as opposed to a purely musical context) was clearly lacking. Second, his choice of genre created its own problems. Though the story itself is decidedly serious, Beethoven wrote it as a singspiel—a lighter form of musical drama with spoken dialog and an expectation of some comic content. Beethoven did include comedy, particularly in the first act, but the effect was to dilute the seriousness rather than highlight it. Mozart understood how comedy can enhance drama, and demonstrated that marvelously in a work such as Don Giovanni. But trying to tell a serious story through a genre designed for light entertainment creates a tension between content and form that Beethoven never really grasped and never fully solved.

Margaret Jane Wray as Leonore in Utah Opera's 1999 Production

George Gray as Florestan in Utah Opera's 1999 Production

What saves this opera from potential mediocrity is the music. But this isn’t simply a case of great music compensating for a composer’s lack of stage know-how. It is a different kind of opera from those being produced in the early 19th century, an opera in which music dominates completely and dramatic integrity is secondary. When Gluck attempted to reform opera from the excesses of baroque artificiality in the mid-18th century, he had suggested that dramatic integrity should be returned to opera—that music should serve the drama. And except for Mozart (who would never let music be subservient to anything!), that notion was beginning to catch on in Romantic-era operas with passionate stories and vivid musical settings. But—and again, Mozart is the exception here—opera composers tend not be great symphonists (think Wagner, Verdi, Puccini), and great symphonists (Haydn, Brahms) tend not to write great operas. For Beethoven to write a successful opera, I believe, he had to approach it as if it were a symphony. And there is no major opera quite that is quite so symphonic as Fidelio.

Some examples might be useful to illustrate this. First, the quartet from Act I, “Mir ist so wunderbar”:

(2000 Met production with Utah’s own Jennifer Welch-Babidge as Marzelline!)

The story has been all light-hearted to this point. And the plot devices of love triangles and mistaken gender are straight out of opera buffa. But this ensemble set piece is written as a theme and variations, shifting the main theme from voice to voice while adding counter-melodies that weave through it, and later putting the accompaniment in triplets. It is exactly the same musical process, though with different emotions entirely, that Beethoven had used in the finale to the “Eroica” Symphony, and again later, in the second movement from his Symphony No. 7.

(especially from 0:19 to 1:58)

(0:00 to 2:42)

Beethoven seems to be thinking instrumentally in the Fidelio quartet rather than vocally (which should come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to sing Beethoven).

This quartet is immediately followed by a buffa aria from Rocco, which makes it something of an odd little insertion of quasi-symphonic seriousness into an essentially comic series of scenes in the first act. Of course, the act takes another oddly serious turn when Pizarro appears. And then there is no (intentional) comedy in the second half of the opera at all. Dramatically it’s a bit of a mess, but musically it’s stunning.

by Luke Howard

It might seem strange that one of the most innovative and talented composers in the history of Western music, the man who single-handedly revolutionized the symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata in the early 19th century, should write only one opera. Music seemed to flow naturally from Beethoven. It’s true that, unlike Mozart, his music did not emerge with seemingly effortless facility; we know from his sketchbooks and letters something of the struggles he endured to compose. But it was almost always produced with supreme artistry and, yes, genius. Nobody questions Beethoven’s gift.

So why only one opera? And why should he feel the need to revise it so frequently? Why are there four different overtures for the opera? Clearly, the gestation of Fidelio was a challenge that created more than the usual amount of trouble for the composer.

Joseph Sonnleithner and Jean-Nicolas Bouilly

Beethoven started work on Fidelio in early 1804, but it was not premiered until 1805. It was revised the following year (and performed with almost exactly the same cast), and revised again in 1814. All three versions were published together as his Op. 72. The libretto Beethoven used in the 1805 version was by Joseph Sonnleithner, based on a French libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal composed by Pierre Gaveaux. (According to some sources, the original plot is based on a true story.) Bouilly’s libretto also served as the basis for the 1804 opera Leonora by Ferdinando Paer. At some point Beethoven procured a copy of Paer’s score for his own library, but no one is certain whether he had heard Paer’s opera yet or had access to the score while working on his own version. Certainly, he had begun thinking about his own opera before Paer’s was produced in Dresden in October 1804.

Pierre Gaveaux and Ferdinando Paer

These various versions of the opera tell a roughly similar story. Leonore, disguised as a young (male) prison guard named Fidelio, manages to find her husband, Florestan, who has been kept as a political prisoner under the orders of a malevolent governor. She rescues him just as he is about to be murdered by the governor, and the couple are happily reunited. These kinds of “rescue” operas, very popular in post-revolutionary France, were enjoying a renewed vogue as Napoleon’s army swept across Europe in the first decade of the 19th century. Although the plot is primarily about Leonore’s courage and her love for Florestan, the political undercurrents—highlighted in Beethoven’s version, especially—added some historical depth to the story.

Fidelio was premiered at the Theater an der Wien in November 1805, only days after Napoleon and his army had occupied Vienna. With a popular storyline, contemporary political relevance, and nearly two years of effort by Europe’s leading composer of the day, Fidelio seemed to have all the ingredients for a success. But the performances were a disaster, attended by almost no one except for some of the composer’s friends and a handful of stray French soldiers. (Ironically, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” which expressed both admiration for and disappointment with Napoleon, had been premiered in the same theater several months earlier in 1805.) Problems with the libretto, and Beethoven’s inherent difficulty with producing convincing music for the stage, were the main issues. When he revised the opera the following year, it was performed by almost the same cast, and was slightly more successful. Beethoven had composed a new overture for the 1806 revision (now known as the “Leonore Overture No. 3”—the original 1805 overture is usually designated “Leonore Overture No. 2”), and tightened up the libretto, especially in the first half of the opera. It would have had a longer run had not Beethoven run into difficulties with the theater management.

For a planned 1808 revival in Prague, Beethoven wrote a third overture (“Leonore Overture No. 1”), but the production was cancelled. Then, with the help of Georg Freidrich Treitschke, Beethoven revised the opera yet again in 1814, including another new overture (the “Fidelio Overture”). This final version was, at last, a great success, even though (as Beethoven remarked to Treitschke) it had emerged with difficulty over a long period of time. The composer wrote: “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.”

Lesson 2 of 3 will be posted on Friday, September 23rd. Stay tuned!

From the beginning of his life, Ludwig van Beethoven was destined for one full of fame, fortune and friction.  Named after his grandfather, a musician of the Roman Catholic Flemish Court, and one of three survivors of the seven children his parents bore, Ludwig van Beethoven was destined to carry the musical weight passed through generations of his family. In addition to his grandfather’s legacy, his own father was a tenor in the Electoral court and his first music teacher.

Beethoven studied as a young man with famous pianists such as Haydn, gaining a quick reputation as a virtuoso pianist in his early teens.  Studying abroad, Beethoven quickly returned home as his mother passed on and he raised his siblings while his father battled being an alcoholic.

Even as his name began to grow among Europeans and his talents were esteemed, his health began fading. Beethoven’s hearing gradually began deteriorating from a ringing in his ears to almost complete deafness as he continued to compose masterpieces, conduct, and perform. His encroaching deafness led him to contemplate suicide, and it is now rumored that he also battled bipolar disease. There is also speculation that he suffered from irritability brought on by chronic abdominal pain beginning in his 20’s attributed to lead poisoning that later resulted in his death.

Beethoven never married, but he was engaged to Giulietta Guiccardi, whose father was made thwarter of the lovers, and she joined in marriage to a noble man. Nevertheless, he had a close and devoted circle of friends all his life, thought to have been attracted by his reputed strength of personality. Towards the end of his life, Beethoven’s friends competed in their efforts to help him cope with his incapacities.

Completed in 1824, the Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 “Choral” was the last complete symphony composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.  It incorporated part of An die Freude (”Ode to Joy”), a poem by Friedrich Schiller written in 1785.

In the first performance of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Beethoven pounded out the beats he couldn’t hear (his hearing now completely gone). According to one witness, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them.” Beethoven was given five standing ovations – people waved handkerchiefs in the air and raised their hands and hats so Beethoven, who was now deaf, could see the response. Never before had the theater seen such an enthusiastic response from the audience. In the end, he truly conducted an “Ode to Joy,” which may be a tribute to his life. Though it was hard, frustrating, and sometimes overwhelming, his was a fulfilled life that would be celebrated, at least nightly, somewhere around the world to this day.