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Fidelio and the French Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Paul Robinson
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Extract

Fidelio has always posed difficulties for operatic interpreters. On the literal level it is straight-forward enough, much more so, certainly, than its great Mozartian predecessor, The Magic Flute. All three of its versions tell the unproblematical story of a wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as a boy in order to rescue her unjustly imprisoned husband. In the prison she obtains a job with the jailor, Rocco, whose daughter proceeds to fall in love with her (in spite of being promised to the prison gatekeeper). The central action is triggered when the governor of the prison, Don Pizarro, learns that the Minister (representing the central monarchy) has set out to visit the prison, suspecting that it harbours several ‘victims of arbitrary force’. Pizarro is terrified that the Minister will discover one particular inmate, Florestan, who had threatened to expose his crimes and whom the Minister believes to be dead (we, of course, have no difficulty recognising him as Leonore's husband). Pizarro thus resolves to murder Florestan. In the second act Rocco and Leonore precede Pizarro into the dungeon to dig the victim's grave, and there Leonore ascertains that the condemned prisoner is indeed her husband. When Pizarro descends for the kill, he is confronted by Leonore, who tells him he will have to kill Florestan's wife first, and pulls a gun on him. At exactly this moment, a trumpet call announces the Minister, whose arrival dissolves the dramatic situation with breathtaking suddenness: Florestan is rescued, husband and wife are reunited, and Pizarro's tyranny is broken. In the final scene all the prisoners are liberated, Pizarro is banished (presumably to face imprisonment himself), and the Minister, learning that his friend Florestan has been saved by his wife's courage, invites her to unlock his chains. The opera ends with a choral tribute to wifely devotion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 23 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Solomon, Maynard, Beethoven (New York, 1977), 199Google Scholar; Sterba, Editha and Sterba, Richard, Beethoven and his Nephew: A Psychoanalytical Study of their Relationship (New York, 1971), 111.Google Scholar

2 Tyson, Alan, ‘Beethoven's Heroic Phase’, Musical Times, 110 (1969), 141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 See for example Noli, Bishop Fan S., Beethoven and the French Revolution (New York, 1947)Google Scholar and Knight, Frida, Beethoven and the Age of Revolution (London, 1973).Google Scholar

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17 The two major arias Beethoven composes for his heroine and hero – Leonore's ‘Komm, Hoffnung’; and Florestan's ‘In des Lebens Frühlingstagen’ – exhibit this dichotomous pattern in microcosm. Following their introductory recitatives, both are constructed of two large contrasting musical sections, the first slow and ruminative, the second fast and ecstatic. The pattern, of course, is already standard in Mozart. But in Mozart the contrast between the sections is often not sharply drawn: one barely notices, for example, that an aria like ‘Dove sono’ in Figaro is in fact divided between an Andante first section and an Allegro second section, so modest is the musical distance between them. Just the opposite is the case with the two grand arias in Fidelio. Judged in terms of tempo, mood, vocal manner and orchestration, Beethoven's practice here is actually closer to the radical juxtaposition of cantabile and cabaletta in Verdi. The effect of this juxtaposition is exactly analogous to the antithesis that governs the opera's structure as a whole: it suggests the sudden and decisive shift from one dispensation to another, from melancholy recollection to hallucinatory expectation in the case of Florestan, from anxious hopefulness to gripping resolve in the case of Leonore. The two arias articulate, one might say, the characteristic pattern of a revolutionary career. They are the biographical counterpart of the opera's larger historical conceit.

18 Pierre Rétat has drawn particular attention to the role of anxiety in the Revolutionaries' experiences of their radical break with the past. See his ‘Forme et discours d'un journal révolutionnaire: Les Révolutions de Paris en 1789’, in Labrosse, Claude, Rétat, Pierre and Duranton, Henri, L'instrument périodique: La fonction de la presse au XVIIIe siècle (Lyon, 1986), 160–1.Google Scholar