Fidelio: Following the Voice Within
By Thomas May

"The moral law in us and the starry sky above us - Kant!!!" So wrote Beethoven in one of his conversation books, in the last decade of his life. Despite his well known lack of formal education, Beethoven's enthusiasm for one of the core ideas of Immanuel Kant's philosophy is almost visceral: head and heart are bound together with a blindingly bright intuition. Here the composer echoes his profound admiration for the other beacon guiding his lifelong adherence to Enlightenment humanism: the utopian hope of the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller.

Beethoven merged their ideals of the interconnectedness of humans - with the moral imperative this implies - into a kind of credo for the all-encompassing significance of art. Already as a young man, Beethoven had survived a suicidal crisis, precipitated by the need to come to terms with the inevitable course of his increasing deafness, only by allowing faith in his calling as an artist to hold him back. As he movingly declared in the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802: "It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

He perceived his musical mission as something beyond the creation of perfectly self-contained or probingly confessional works (the classicist and romanticist views, respectively, that continue to distort our perceptions of the composer). Rather, for Beethoven, aesthetic meaning also became intimately linked with a vision of moral and even political purpose.

This Schillerian ideal of the artistic consciousness as paving the way toward social enlightenment and true freedom permeates not only the finale of the Ninth Symphony but the opera that gave its composer so many birth pangs that it became his only completed work in the genre, Fidelio. For all its melodramatic trappings, the toppling of a regime based on cruelty and injustice through the power of courageous love is an archetype that has only gained in urgency as societies have careened from crisis to crisis since Beethoven introduced the opera he called his "child of sorrow."

Indeed, Fidelio's various premieres were themselves bookmarked by conditions of acute political crisis. The first version (titled after the heroine, Leonore) opened in 1805 while Vienna was under siege by Napoleon's forces. After several revisions (including some cuts for a tightening of the dramatic structure), Fidelio, as it was renamed, came to the stage in its definitive form in 1814, just months away from the start of the Congress of Vienna, which would inaugurate a new era of reactionary suppression of civil rights.

There we have a hint of one of the great Beethovenian paradoxes. A work which itself has been inevitably influenced by its particular historical context (the intellectual and political milieu of the Enlightenment and French Revolution) still stands as an emblem for universal ideals, ideals which seem uncannily relevant to any number of subsequent, politically circumscribed situations. Audiences have drawn on Fidelio's moral and emotional capital for sustenance in troubled times.

Long before the era of "director's opera" arose, merely producing the opera could signal an implicit critique of social or political conditions. The slightest of allegorical touches from a producer's palette can make Fidelio convincingly seem to be "about" Nazi oppression, the Soviet gulags, or more contemporary permutations of the distressingly obstinate impulse toward fascism (and of course the countervailing instinct for freedom). The prison's walled grimness in Fidelio functions as both metaphor and literal setting, in ways that continue to shock us, for the condition in which humanity finds itself.

Beethoven was of course not immune to the economic pressures of life as a freelance artist, and one of the reasons behind his choice of source material likely had to do with the commercial popularity of a genre known as the "rescue opera" that had developed in France in the 1790s in response to the turmoil unleashed by the French Revolution. (It wasn't, however, until its 1814 version that Fidelio actually achieved lasting success on the stage.)

The source from which Fidelio was eventually drawn and reworked by a series of librettists was Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, writing within the context of this "rescue" genre. Bouilly was alleged to have based his libretto on a true story of oppression he had witnessed during the Reign of Terror, but he changed the setting to a less controversial location in Spain. Yet the original idealism of the French Revolution - before its corruption into the Terror - resonates through Beethoven's score with triumphant force.

The trademarks of the "rescue opera" pervade not just Fidelio's plot line but its musical texture. Influences from French composers of the Revolutionary era - above all Luigi Cherubini, singled out by Beethoven as an admired contemporary - should not be underestimated as a crucial element in the mix that became the signature, most familiar sound of Beethoven's middle period. (One among many powerful instances in the score is the prelude to Act Two, setting the scene of Florestan languishing in his dungeon.) This "amalgamation of Viennese and French influences," as biographer Maynard Solomon points out, is "characteristic of Beethoven's heroic style."

Yet Beethoven's painstaking quest for the right subject for an opera entailed far more than a consideration of practical, commercial aspects. Bouilly's original libretto was able to fire up Beethoven's imagination with a sense of musical possibilities, keeping in mind the composer's orientation toward music that could also have a morally compelling aspect. Fidelio enabled him to explore how such abstract, utopian ideals as freedom, brotherhood and justice could become catalyzed by a specific, dramatic instance of self-sacrificing spousal love (in Beethoven's own life an ideal also all too abstract).

This interplay of abstract concepts and concretely dramatic reality is what makes Fidelio so special, what moves us to the depths: it's also part of the opera's robust appeal. Fidelio stands apart as a special case in Beethoven's career (and in operatic history), but it also represents a compendium of his most intimately cherished passions. How can the notion of music with a moral purpose influence musical narrative itself? On one level Fidelio forms a continuum with the composer's mastery of instrumental music, as any acquaintance with the symphonically complex scoring Beethoven applies to the drama makes abundantly clear. In contrast to the polarity between "absolute" and "programmatic" music that became established later in the 19th century (each side claiming Beethoven as guru), Beethoven pursues an arc of musical dramaturgy in Fidelio that is shared with his instrumental music.

One might even see Fidelio as the operatic counterpart to the dramatic narrative implicit in the heroic style that Beethoven developed in abstract sonata form (above all in his middle-period symphonic works and piano sonatas). The characters and situations on stage echo a musical rhetoric we know from the instrumental music. And in their final, triumphant reunion, Florestan and Leonore express a "nameless" joy characterized by a uniquely Beethovenian ecstasy of rough-hewn lyricism and rhythmic excitement.

In terms of the relation between Beethoven's instrumental and operatic guises, there's something extraordinarily apt about the story of the Leonore Overture No. 3. With this, the lengthiest of the four overtures Beethoven eventually wrote for his opera, the composer realized he had outdone himself (replacing it with the more proportionate "Fidelio" Overture). Its sheer epic expansion encompassed too much of the opera, essentially retelling the story via sonata form, with a climax on the moment of liberation symbolized by the trumpet calls. In other words, it overwhelmed rather than prepared for what would happen after the curtain opened.

Much has been made of the operetta-like character of the opening scene and the confusing sense of genre it introduces. Here the atmosphere is Singspiel, as in Mozart's Magic Flute. Isn't this round robin of misaligned affections and mistaken identity out of place in the context of Fidelio's elevated moral tone, a bizarre melding of the comic and serious? Suddenly, with the opera's first quartet ("Mir ist so wunderbar"), we find ourselves transported to an unexpected radiance. (Composer Gustav Mahler, also one of the great Fidelio interpreters as a conductor, would draw on precisely this radiance for the Adagio of his Fourth Symphony.) What is behind all these head-spinning shifts in emotional direction?

Typically, Beethoven seems to be up to several things at once here. The jailor Rocco's bourgeois pursuit of security, on behalf of his daughter Marzelline, is the domestic counterpart to the utopian liberation and reunion of spouses that occurs in the opera's climax. But it also grounds Fidelio's central issues in a way that proves disturbing. These are decent people pursuing their fair share of happiness, but in the shadow of an abusive prison system. Evil, we are reminded, is not so easily singled out as an extremity that can be eliminated; it infiltrates into ordinary life in insidious ways. Rocco may be satirized, yet he has principles and limits. At the same time, he lacks the strength to resist compromising with the power structure in which he operates.

So in the quartet, these characters from the comic Singspiel, with their subplot of mistaken gender identity, bring another level of polyphony to the epic struggle of good and evil that is taking place alongside their quite ordinary concerns and that Leonore brings directly into focus. The quartet introduces a change in the atmosphere just as we first fathom the stakes will become immeasurably higher.

Beethoven hints at an even more significant level. Much of Fidelio can be experienced as Leonore's progress from a self absorbed quest to regain her own privately known love to a consciousness of all humanity and its interconnectedness. The vehicle for this process of enlightenment is compassion. However comic the circumstances of Marzelline's misplaced love, they open up the path for Leonore to pursue her mission. Beethoven's use of canon form, setting commonplace lines of text to ineffably beautiful music, seems to enact just this transition to the higher state of awareness needed for the serious task at hand.

Leonore's progress in compassion will continue in the climax of Act One, during the moving scene of the prisoners' chorus. It reaches its epiphany in the most dejected scene of Act Two when, faced with an example of extreme cruelty, Leonore resolves to save the unfortunate prisoner whose identity she doesn't yet know. In her first-act aria, an ode to the principle of hope and its "last star," Leonore sings, "Unwavering, I will follow the voice within." Is it possible not to hear echoes of the line from Kant quoted above (inscribed by Beethoven in his notebook)? Or of Schiller's vision "beyond the starry firmament," set to Beethoven's music for his "Ode to Joy" in the Ninth's finale?

Leonore is indeed the opera's "guiding angel" of hope, the force of love who brings its most abstract ideals to life through concrete action. Florestan, the actual victim of his own political idealism, is, in a paradoxical way, the symbol of the more private significance Fidelio held for Beethoven. His great scena at the beginning of Act Two mirrors the extended form of Leonore's heroic aria from the previous act. Beethoven seems to suggest that sympathy shapes their musical expression, separated though they are. Yet Florestan suffers deeply, cut off from society through a terrible silence. The painful strains of the first part of his aria have, not surprisingly, evoked for many listeners an image of Beethoven in self-portrait, depicting his own condition as deafness slowly enveloped him. Around the same time, not coincidentally, he was composing the relatively unknown oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, which also focuses on a suffering individual and the agony of isolation.

Florestan also introduces a level of religious meaning to the opera, going beyond the emphatically political context of its setting: this is in the positively ecstatic tone of consolation emerging at the end of his aria. It verges on mania, just as Pizzaro's stereotypical villainy is given fascinating profile by the odd, jarring, violent accents of his music; here is self-hatred just one step away from a descent into madness. But after some of the darkest, most sepulchral passages in Beethoven, it is not only liberation from unjust imprisonment that is achieved: there is also a sense of resurrection from the tomb, Florestan having been revived by his wife's sacramental offerings of bread and wine.

Pizzaro's planned but fatally delayed perfect moment of revenge (the phrase he uses in his aria) is thwarted by another "moment," this one of enlightenment. Leonore, against all odds, emerges in a triumph with implications beyond her own circumstances, in what is perhaps the score's most sublime passage: "O Gott! Welch ein Augenblick!" ("O God! What a moment!") And here the private story of reunion joins together with the community's rejoicing. Enlightenment ideals of reason become joined with powerful emotions, rather than set against them as a polar opposite.

Scott Burnham's book Beethoven Hero offers an intriguing explanation for the enduring appeal of Beethoven's "heroic" style. This style pervades the works that frame Fidelio - the Third and Fifth Symphony, for example - as indeed the opera itself, and has remained the basis for Beethoven's most popular music. It is the perfect vehicle for a particular kind of musical journey, one in which light and triumph are attained only through ordeal. Such an artistic experience may offer one of the last refuges where we are still allowed access to a visceral experience of heroic idealism, an idealism that in other contexts has been punctured and deconstructed to an empty shell. Fidelio's final scene and resolution is a sustained high noon of joy, a flood of light after the darkest moments of which humanity is capable. But Beethoven's music, with all its victory, reminds us this is a journey that will never lose its relevance.

Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater. He is the author of Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.