A Note from James Conlon, Music Director

Ludwig van Beethoven, the colossus who bestrode classical music, whose magnificent shadow stretched across the entire 19th century, and whose music has been treasured, loved and admired through the 20th into our own time, wrote one opera: Fidelio. This master of symphony, piano sonata, trio and string quartet abandoned his predilection for so-called “absolute music” and entered the profane theater.

He disdained the Italian Mozart/DaPonte operas (which he did not like) but turned rather to the Singspiel (a popular form of musical theater in the vernacular with alternating music and dialogues). Mozart had transformed this popular genre from the purely comic to the sublime when he produced The Abduction from the Seraglio (whose two great humanistic themes are fidelity in love and the power of magnanimous forgiveness) and The Magic Flute (whose Enlightenment and Masonic themes cross over into contemporary political ideas of human dignity and of society’s responsibility to protect it through reason, wisdom and truth).

Beethoven took these themes and developed them combining his own political convictions (inspired by the French Revolution) and his idealization of marriage and feminine virtue. He was often disillusioned with the political events of his time, and was never to realize any lasting personal relationship at all. But he poured this striving for a perfect world and a perfect union into the form of the now more enlightened Singspiel, and produced a unique masterpiece in the form of Fidelio. The developing form demands enhanced content, which in turn will exert even more influence on that form.

Great moral themes require great moral characters. None is greater than that of the heroine, Leonore. She goes one step beyond Mozart’s heroine of The Seraglio, Konstanze (representing Constancy). Steadfast in her love, she resists and renounces until her beloved rescues her. Leonore, disguised as a young man, Fidelio (Faithful), does more. It is she who rescues her husband. Beethoven created a new and unique heroine. This “drama set to music” is borrowed from the fashionable French “rescue opera” of the time. Beethoven turned this form into high art in the same manner in which Mozart had shown the way with the Singspiel.

But there is no precedent to this “modern” woman who rescues her noble and honest husband, unjustly imprisoned for speaking out against injustice. She exemplifies ingenuity, courage, moral determination, invention, boundless personal devotion and commitment to justice. Unlike the vast number of operas based on romantic love, where reason and passion are antagonists, Fidelio’s protagonist shows us that the demand of heart and brain can be integrated and placed in the service of the “Other” and the “Greater Good.”

The first act descends from light to dark, and the second in contrary motion. Leonore, like Orpheus, metaphorically goes into the underworld to rescue her beloved, offers him bread in a Eucharistic act of compassion, and literally frees him from the shackles of tyranny.

Heroism, the Ideals of the French Revolution, Humanism, Triumph over Political Tyranny and Evil, the Rights of Man, Idealized Conjugal Love: all of these are Beethoven’s great themes. Like Napoleon, Beethoven invaded the operatic terrain from a foreign land, so-called absolute music. The protean power of the symphonies is distilled into theatrical and lyrical form: the celebration of the great statesman of the Eroica, the triumph over conflict of the Fifth, the eulogizing of the fallen soldiers of the Seventh. The Ode to Joy of the Ninth parallels the choral finale of Fidelio which celebrates its heroine and the idealized humanistic world that Beethoven sought, and succeeded in capturing, in the perfection of his music.

Concerning the Third Leonore Overture
Beethoven, in his constant revision and reworking of Fidelio, wrote four different overtures. As the opera was originally called Leonore, the overtures acquired numbers and were called Leonore I, II and III . They were superseded by the present Fidelio overture. In a tradition sealed by Gustav Mahler’s performances in 1904 (although already practiced in the 19th century), the Leonore III overture was inserted between the two scenes of Act Two.

In January of this year, when discussing plans for these performances of Fidelio with the late Edgar Baitzel, the Company’s chief operating officer, he expressed to me his wish that the Leonore III overture be included. As a tribute to him, together with the orchestra of LA Opera, we dedicate this performance to honor his memory.

James Conlon

© 2007 by James Conlon. All rights reserved.