by Paula Fowler

During a preview lecture for Utah Opera’s 1999 production of Beethoven’s Fidelio,  Ardean Watts made the claim that everything Beethoven wrote was an “ode to joy.” If you attended recent Utah Symphony performances of Symphony No. 9, which contains the now-famous “ode to joy” in its fourth movement, you know that Beethoven’s representation of joy is not an unvarying portrait of unalloyed pleasantness. To arrive at joy, you spend an hour journeying through depths….there is sweetness and light-hearted dancing en route, to be sure, but also terror, despair, and wrenching sorrow. When you emerge from that progress, and the vocalists begin their assertion of brotherhood and sublime happiness, you feel a profundity in that certitude that would not have been possible without the journey. One of the wonders of Beethoven’s music is that the victorious ending feels incredibly large. It feels symbolic… mythical…it claims a victory for all humanity.

Beethoven’s works are full of this kind of drama and passion, and these two qualities, of course, are the stuff of opera. So we might suppose Beethoven would have been drawn to this art form. Yet Beethoven left behind only a single opera, Fidelio.

That is not to say, however, that he never had other opera projects in mind during his career. Opera was extremely popular in Bonn and Vienna, the two cities where he spent most of his career. His father, often drunk and abusive, was an operatic tenor. Moreover, as a young musician, Beethoven played viola in an orchestra in Bonn that accompanied operas, and during the four seasons he held that position, he became acquainted with the operas of Mozart and the Italian composer Cherubini. Tellingly, Beethoven didn’t approve of the stories Mozart chose for his operas: Mozart’s plots were often ambiguous and light-hearted, not sternly focused on uplifting themes, and Beethoven regarded opera as a vehicle for ideas. He proposed himself as an opera composer to opera companies of his day. He did work on a Romeo & Juliet and a Macbeth; and he considered working with his contemporary Goethe on an opera version of Faust. But none of these made it past the idea and sketch phase.

It was, instead, an opera story of ideals and strong message that compelled him to completion. As a young adult in the late 1780s, in Bonn, Beethoven applauded the outbreak of the French Revolution, and he maintained his excitement about it until 1804, when Napoleon disappointed him by crowning himself emperor. But even that outcome of the Revolution did not stain Beethoven’s allegiance to its goals. The vision of commoners rebelling against ancient aristocratic rule in the name of liberty, equality, and brotherhood appealed to his idealistic spirit.

A French style of opera popular during and after the Revolution drew Beethoven’s attention: “rescue operas” featured plots full of heroic endeavor and lofty morals in which characters defy and triumph over power. Beethoven was so attracted to this style that he selected a French rescue drama, Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s Leonore, or Married Love, as the source for his first opera. Beethoven preferred to keep that title, but to distinguish his works from three other contemporary operas written on the same story, was compelled to change his title to Fidelio, with the subtitle The Triumph of Married Love.

Set simply, all in a prison, the play’s equally simple plot centers on brave wife Leonore, who goes undercover as a young man named Fidelio in order to rescue her husband, who is a political prisoner of an unequivocally evil tyrant. Fidelio/ Leonore comes near to achieving her goal, but succeeds only because of a ‘deux ex machina’ intervention: a Minister of State arrives to apprehend the evil governor and finds his old friend, whom he had thought dead, in chains. The Minister allows Fidelio/Leonore to release her Florestan from his chains, and the freed man celebrates his noble wife.

Beethoven liked this unambiguous plot: the good people are clearly good, and the tyrant deserves the punishment he will receive. No confusion is possible.

Interestingly, our stage director has chosen to add ambiguity to the production by avoiding setting the story in any one time or place. The original French play was set in Spain, but was actually based on an event that took place in France during the Reign of Terror. Beethoven set it several centuries in the past, to satisfy censors who decried any semblance to current events. Producers of today often have the liberty of making the opposite selection: they want us to take stories personally, so they contemporize. Our production staff has selected a set that could be a prison in any time, any place. And in order to show that wrongful imprisonment could happen to any of us, the male chorus, who are all prisoners in the story, will appear in costumes suggesting a variety of cultures, religions, and countries, all of them incarcerated together, many of them (the story suggests) wrongfully.

Beethoven labored over this opera. No Mozart he, with works completed inside his head just lacking time to write them down. He wrote sketches and revised musical ideas time and again: there are at least 16 sketches for the beginning of Florestan’s first aria, and 346 pages of sketches for the opera. The lovely melody of the Act 1 quartet (“Mir ist so wunderbar”) took him 13 attempts. He wrote four versions of the overture, and took three stabs at the entire score, with productions in 1805, 1806 and 1814. Despite Beethoven’s careful and painstaking work, however, the opera’s premiere in November 1805 was unsuccessful, partly because of accidents of historical timing, but also because the drama was clumsy, with too much stage-time devoted to the domestic theme of Marzelline, who is smitten with Fidelio, and of her father….and not enough on the heroic theme of Fidelio finding and saving her husband.

Beethoven’s friends tried to advise him, and he made a few changes for the 1806 production. The version we see produced today (and which Utah Opera is using) is regarded as the best of the three, and came to the stage in 1814. When given the opportunity for this final revision, in those years when he realized he was fully deaf, Beethoven said he wanted to rethink the entire work, and he suffered through the process, claiming: “I could compose something new far more quickly than patch up the old…. I have to think out the entire work again….this opera will win for me a martyr’s crown.” Beethoven regarded this revision and this revival of his sole opera his greatest triumph.

Many critics still see weaknesses in this opera: one suggests that Beethoven’s music is “dramatic” but not “theatrical.” Another critic with the same complaint called it an “orchestral opera.” As you listen to it, notice all the usual passion in the music and its development, but recognize that the dramatic music doesn’t easily suggest stage action. The Act I quartet, for example, is one of the musical moments where all four characters on stage are frozen in place, singing their internal thoughts in a harmony that is musically moving. In Beethoven’s defense, though, most arias and many ensembles up until the late 19th century were of this nature: the music expresses emotion and shows the beauty and expressive ability of the singers rather than progressing the drama. Because Beethoven selected a story with a simple plot, there’s not a lot of drama to progress, so the opera can be very much about the emotion of the music as the story communicates its unmissable themes: tyrants shall be defeated, a noble wife is a wonderful thing, humanity will be victorious.

Utah Opera produces Fidelio in October 2011 in commemoration of those who died in the 9/11/01 bombings committed by those who, like Fidelio’s tyrant Don Pizarro, would rule through terror. Beethoven’s opera, emerging from his life of personal disappointment and illness and disability, delivers to us against that terrorizing a message of noble human triumph, and not just joy, but hope and encouragement. It is a powerful and appropriate response to any who would attempt to contain or inhibit humankind: Beethoven’s music compels us with its claim that the human spirit is greater than any tyrant can imagine, and will triumph in the end.