Patrick Bade
Beethoven’s Fidelio: An Opera with a Political Message
Patrick Bade Beethoven’s Fidelio: An Opera With a Political Message
- So we have the ultimate political opera today, “Fidelio.” It’s an opera with a timeless political message. Sadly, it seems to me more relevant than ever with what is going on in Russia, Ukraine, and in other places around the world. It’s an opera that celebrates the struggle against tyranny and injustice. At the end of the Second World War, the great German writer Thomas Mann, who’d been in exile in America through the Nazi period, he expressed his disgust and shock that “Fidelio” had continued to be performed in Germany under the Third Reich. He said it was a scandal that it was not forbidden, that refined performances were given, that singers were prepared to sing it, that musicians were prepared to play it, and that audiences were prepared to listen. And it certainly gained a very strong political relevance in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nearly all the great German opera houses, this is Vienna, were destroyed in the blanket bombings of the Second World War. And one by one in the late ‘40s and into the 1950s, these opera houses were reconstructed and they were reopened and in almost every case, they were reopened with performances of “Fidelio.” This is the 1955 performance of “Fidelio” that reopened the rebuilt Vienna State Opera. Now Beethoven is a child of revolution. He was 19 when the Bastille was stormed and the French Revolution began and he lived out his life very much in the shadow of this great world changing cataclysmic event. And he was profoundly influenced by the ideas that created the French Revolution.
Here we have a comparison between Joseph Hayden on the left and Beethoven on the right. Joseph Hayden was also, he was of an earlier generation. He too was a child of his time. He’s a child of the ancien regime, the world as it was before the French Revolution. So he spent his life as a loyal, obedient servant of the princely Esterhazy family. Beethoven, he certainly worked for plenty of princes and aristocrats, but on very different terms. Beethoven was not a man to mess with. Actually, what really says it all about these two composers is their hair. You can see that Hayden has got a neatly powdered wig. It’s the uniform of the ancien regime. Whereas Beethoven-
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Well, that’s very important, 'cause I really want you to see. Well, let’s see. Well, you don’t need to see the earlier images, but I want you to see Hayden’s wig, and I want you to see Beethoven’s hair. 'Cause Beethoven has decidedly revolutionary hair. If I had more of it, mine would be revolutionary too. It’s very tousled, disorderly. So I’ve shown you this image before. It’s the title page of the Eroica Symphony. And Beethoven, as I said, he was in sympathy with the ideas of the French Revolution. And he hoped that Napoleon was going to take these ideas around Europe and it would lead to freedom from tyranny in other European countries. Of course, Napoleon turned out to be a much bigger tyrant than Louis the 16th. And when he declared himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven angrily crossed out his dedication to Napoleon from the title page of the symphony, as you can see here. Now, “Fidelio” is, I think, nobody would dispute the fact that it’s one of the greatest operas ever written. But it’s not perfect. It seems to me it’s an opera that’s made up of sublime, heart-stopping moments, interspersed with some real missteps. Both dramatically and musically there are some extraordinarily banal passages in amongst the great inspirations. It wasn’t an opera that came easy to him. Well, actually almost nothing came easy to Beethoven. Unlike Hayden and Bach and Mozart, where the music just seemed to pour out of them with great ease, Beethoven always had to struggle with his composition. This is a page from the score of the overture. His manuscripts are notoriously messy with lots and lots of crossings out. And so I think probably “Fidelio” gave him more trouble than almost anything else. There are four different versions of the overture. There are no less than 18 versions of the big tenor aria.
There are different versions of the soprano aria. And many, many other changes in the different versions that he created over the years. This is the Vienna where “Fidelio” was created. It was still inside the great mediaeval walls that had saved Vienna from the Turks on two occasions, paid for, as I always like to tell people, by the British taxpayer, because of the ransom that was paid for Richard the Lionheart. So you can see in the middle, of course, the great Gothic and the narrow streets of mediaeval houses and Baroque palaces within these great walls. This time, though, of course, the walls didn’t save Vienna when Napoleon turned up, as we shall see in a minute. This is the , historic theatre in Vienna that was built by Schikaneder with the profits from “The Magic Flute.” He was, of course, the librettist of “The Magic Flute.” He commissioned it from Mozart and he played the role of Papageno and he made an enormous amount of money from it. Mozart, sadly, of course, didn’t live long enough to profit from it. And he built this theatre and he was the one who gave the original commission to Beethoven for this opera. And Beethoven was actually living on the premises for a good part of the time when he was composing the opera. Here it is today with the statue of Schikaneder on the front as Papageno. So it had its premiere in that theatre on November the 20th, 1805, under very inauspicious circumstances. Because just the previous week, the French Army had entered and occupied the city. So the first performance was a bit of a flop.
It seems that actually many of the people in the audience were French soldiers who really didn’t have much understanding, weren’t impressed by an opera where they had you had a rather plump German house Frau dressed as a man was not really something, I think, to appeal to the average Frenchman. And just immediately after the premier, two weeks later, there was outside of Vienna, the Great Battle of Austerlitz, which was a decisive defeat for the Hapsburgs and a triumph for Napoleon. So I said that there are four different overtures that Beethoven composed for “Fidelio”. The last of these is always referred to as “Leonore 3.” And it’s one of the greatest masterpieces of the concert repertoires, it’s an incredibly monumental and powerful piece. Now, the only trouble with that was it’s so powerful that it really dwarfed the rest of the opera. Sort of after that almost everything has to be an anti-climax.
So Mozart wrote the current overture, also a very powerful piece, but not quite so monumental. And here we hear it in a very famous performance conducted by Otto Klemperer. Now after that very exciting overture, it seems to me that the temperature drops very considerably in the first couple of scenes, which are comic scenes. This is not something, I think, that was natural for Beethoven. Mozart did it so much better. These scenes sound to me a little bit like Mozart in heavy boots. And we’re introduced to, it’s set in a prison. And it’s the jailer’s daughter Marzelline, who we meet first of all with his assistant Jaquino, who is in love with her. And they have a playful duet of the kind, of course, that Mozart would’ve done brilliantly. But it’s, as I said, it’s a bit clunky. And the slight problem really, I think, today also that the way that Jaquino comes on to Marzelline in this duet, I think would definitely be classified today as sexual harassment.
- It’s a very difficult opera to stage. And I think one of the challenges is the fact that it’s not strictly speaking an opera, it’s what the Germans will call a . So the musical numbers are linked by spoken dialogue. I mean, for that reason, actually, in France, where they had very strict categorization of different types of opera, right up into the 20th century, “Fidelio” was classified as an opera comique and done at , not done at the main opera house in Paris, where operas with spoken dialogue were banned. And the the other, so you’ve got this stop start, stop, start. And of course, for a non-German speaking audience, it’s a problem which these days solved to a certain extent by having surtitles. But these surtitles are also a problem, because they reinforce the fact that the spoken dialogue is such rubbish. It’s really, really embarrassingly clunky and bad. In fact, the last, no, two of the last three performances I’ve seen of “Fidelio” they’ve actually really taken drastic action and completely cut the spoken dialogue. But that’s not very satisfactory either. It causes all sorts of problems, really, with the staging. Now we come to the first of the heart-stopping sublime moments in which this opera is so rich. This is the act one quartet. And, in fact, strangely in these photographs, I could only find three figures. But the older man in the middle, that’s Rocco, he’s in charge of the jail. The girl is Marzelline. The boy at the back on the left-hand side, of course, is Jaquino.
And the other character is Leonore, who is the wife of Florestan, who she suspects is being held in a dungeon in this prison. And she is dressed as a boy, she’s dressed as a man, in order to find employment in the prison to see if she can rescue her husband. Course, that’s another big problem, isn’t it, really? The one that, I dunno who it is in the left hand side, she actually looks relatively passable as a young man. But usually, you know, there’s the kind of soprano that can sing Leonore is going to be a big girl and is not going to be very convincing in shape, at least, as a young man. Anyway, in this quartet, it’s one of those sublime moments, I was talking about how Verdi is so good at this as well. Where you have an ensemble, you have four people. The action is paused, it’s suspended, time is suspended. And each of these four characters expresses their inner thoughts and emotions. Marzelline in love with Leonore, or Fidelio as he calls himself. She is aware of this and she’s somewhat disturbed by it. The father looks benignly on the potential relationship of his daughter and Fidelio. The only person who’s really not happy about the situation is Jaquino. Now I’m going to play you this, this is for me the most beautiful and moving recording of this piece that I know, and for all sorts of reasons. First of all, it’s very, very beautiful, with four excellent singers. And secondly, the circumstances. It was recorded late in 1932, so months before the Nazis took part. And that Leonore Nora was a singer called Henriette Gottlieb, who you see on the right hand side. She made some really wonderful records. She was a dramatic soprano with a powerful voice.
But she was also very lyrical. She was really an excellent singer. She actually sings Brunhilde in the very first attempt to record the extensive parts of “The Ring Cycle.” She had two problems. One was that she was tiny, as you can see on the right hand side where she appeared and you can see the other Wagnerian singers absolutely towering over her. So there were obviously certain roles where she wasn’t going to look very convincing on the stage. Brunhilde being one of them. And the other problem was that she was Jewish. By the time you get to 1932 and 1933. So she was still at the peak of her powers, as you’ll hear in this wonderful record. But she was in her 50s. She’d had a very successful career in Germany. You know, she had a comfortable house. After '33, of course, overnight, she had to stop singing in Germany, but she probably felt that she was too old to go abroad and start a new career somewhere else, so she stayed And she was later rounded up and murdered in the Holocaust. And the singer on the left hand side is Erna Berger. And she sings Marzelline on this recording. And as you can see, I met her, actually, in 1989. And we spent two days together.. One day we spent seven hours talking. And it was a very wonderful experience to talk with her. She talked about Lotze and she talked about Flutbinger and Beecham and Lotte Lehmann and all sorts of people, of course, that she had performed with. And she was a very delightful, very sweet woman. She wrote her memoirs and she talks about Henriette Gottlieb, 'cause they were colleagues.
And it’s quite interesting what she says in her autobiography. She says, “You know, one day she was there and then the next she wasn’t.” And she said, you know, she said, “I wonder why I didn’t think about it.” And she’s more candid, I would say, than most musicians and singers who lived through the Nazi period. She’s a little more honest than most. She says, “I ask myself now what I knew and what I could have known and what I chose not to know.” Anyway, she’s for me, beside all that, she’s simply vocally the perfect Marzelline. So here is this very beautiful quartet, which starts off with Erna Berger singing Marzelline. And then the next voice to come in, of course, is that of Henriette Gottlieb as Leonore.
Sorry, terrible to cut that off. But we’ve got a lot to get through. This is Rocco, who’s the jailer. And he seems to me to represent, in a way, the average German who lived through the Nazi period. So he’s like the average person in any country at any time. He’s not a bad man, but you could say he’s a bystander rather than a perpetrator. Actually in the end, he does actually do the right thing, but up until the last part of the opera, he’s prepared to go along with evil because it’s profitable and it suits him and it’s convenient. And this is the philosophy that he expresses in this rather jolly little aria.
Next we meet Don Pizarro. He is the guy who, he’s the enemy of Florestan and he’s the one who’s had him kidnapped and imprisoned in the dungeon and who intends to kill him. Now, if Rocco is not evil, Pizarro certainly is. He is a perpetrator. He is a Nazi. And he has a terrific, exciting aria in which he expresses his hate and his lust for vengeance.
This is Leonore, the heroine of “Fidelio.” And this is one of the great roles for a soprano, but what kind of soprano? It can be sung by what the Germans would call , the Italian equivalent will be . That is, a singer who still sounds youthful and must be lyrical, but has got sufficient power for the big moments. It can also be sung by a full-blown dramatic soprano. So we have a very famous , Lotte Lehmann, on the left hand side and a famous dramatic soprano, Kirsten Flagstad, on the right hand side. I’m going to play you both these sopranos. For her big aria she overhears part of what Pizarro has said and she realises what a monster he is. And so this, you could see it says, “Recitative and Aria.” It’s actually an aria in a very conventional Italian form. If anybody was listening to me last night, I talked about Ava Guliya’s aria, which has a very similar structure. So you have a defamatory recitative, a central lyrical aria, and then a showy cabaletta. So the recitative, the dramatic recitative, this certainly does benefit from having a full-blooded dramatic soprano with an enormous voice and great dramatic projection. So I’m going to play you the opening recitative of the aria with the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad. This is from a live performance at the Met during the Second World War. And I’ll be coming back to that performance later.
And move on to the central part of the aria with the great Lotte Lehmann, in my opinion, the greatest German soprano of the 20th century. And I did talk to, I talked to Erna Berger about her because they appear together in the opera at Covent Garden in the 1930s conducted by Thomas Beecham. She was very interesting about both of them, actually. So I said, “What was Beecham like?” And she said, “Oh, he was a very good conductor. But of course, you know, he had no sense of humour.” Which I think, 'cause English people think Germans don’t have a sense of humour, I think the German-English sense of humour is often like ships passing in the night. And I said, “Well, what was Lotte Lehmann like?” And she said, “Oh, she was totally fascinating.” She said it’s the only time where she actually stood in the wings throughout the opera to observe the whole thing and she said it was because of Lotte Lehmann. And she said it wasn’t really her singing, it was her spoken voice, which was so beautiful. Her enunciation of German is so expressive. That was what really fascinated her. So I’m going to play you just the central part of the aria with Lotte Lehmann. And she has of, of course, the most sensuous, gorgeous, meltingly beautiful voice. It really is a voice of honey. That’s how Puccini described it. But it’s also her way with words and her phrasing, her use of portamento. Portamento is an expressive device where you slur one note into another. And I’d like, the first line, . And on the word , this beautiful expressive downward portamento.
Next we come to yet another of those sublime heart stopping moments, maybe the greatest in this opera. And this is the prisoner’s chorus. Fidelio persuades Rocco to allow her to open up the dungeons so that the prisoners can come out into the sunlight. And this is so moving and so beautiful. I just had a conversation this afternoon with my friend Fiona, and she was telling me how hearing this in a live performance conducted by Klemperer was one of the most powerful and moving experiences she ever had in the opera house.
Act two, it takes place in the deepest dungeon of the prison. And you should have a sense of vast dark space. And the music conjures up, it’s so effectively, it’s full of doom and gloom. And here this is from a live performance conducted by Furtwangler. And now we meet the tenor hero Florestan for the first time, who’s in despair in this deep, dark dungeon. And he has his great aria that caused Beethoven so much trouble with 18 different versions. It starts with the word God, , on a prolonged note with a crescendo. I’m going to continue here with the Furtwanger performance with the great Julius Patzak, who was one of the most admired Florestans. But he doesn’t prolong the crescendo all that much. There’s a new fashion I’ve noticed in recent performances. I think he’s actually set by Jonas Kaufmann, who does have extraordinary breath control. He hangs onto this note forever and the conductor just has to stand there with his arms crossed. And I saw him do this in Salzburg and I talked the conductor afterwards. It was Franz Welser-Most. And I said, “Well, why did you let him do that? You know, it’s not in the score.” And Franz said to me, “Well, you know, if you’ve got it, you can do it, do it.” But this, I think, is probably more how it should really be.
Moving on now to the last part of the aria, Florestan is inspired by a vision of his beloved wife, Leonore. And he works himself up into a state of great exaltation. Here we’re going to hear another very great exponent of the role. This is the Canadian Jon Vickers.
As you can see, you actually really need a real Heldentenor with a lot of metal in the voice for the end of that aria. He sinks back into sleep. And Leonore, Rocco has been told that Florestan has to be murdered. In fact, he’s asked to murder him by Pizarro and he declines to do this. But he does agree to dig the grave so that Pizarro himself can come and murder Florestan. And he takes Fidelio down to help him into the dungeon. This is a tremendous scene. It seems to me the core of the opera, really, from the first moments of the dungeon scene that I played you, you know, evocation of darkness and despair right through to the rescue. This is unalloyed inspiration. This is Beethoven at his greatest. And one of the greatest scenes, I think, in any opera ever written. But this is now from another, this is a live performance. This is the performance I played you before with Flagstad. This is from the Metropolitan Opera House in 1941. And it has an incredible emotional charge, this performance. And I think it’s to do with the experiences of all the participants. They’re all of them refugees from Nazi tyranny. Bruno Walter, course he’d been driven out of Berlin, then driven out of Vienna, then driven out of Paris and had landed up in America. There was Alexander Kipnis.
For me he’s the greatest Wagnerian and heavy German base of the 20th century, Ukrainian singer who’d had a big career in Germany. He’d also landed up as a refugee in America. The tenor, we’re not going to hear him here, Rene Maison, very fine Belgian tenor, also a refugee. And Kirsten Flagstad. Of course her country had just been overrun by the Nazis. And she made the very controversial Leonore like decision to actually, just after this performance, I mean, she must have been thinking about it at this time, she decided to go back to Norway to be with her husband under German occupation through the war. And she actually completely gave up her stage career and stopped singing. That got her into a lot of trouble later on, I think unfairly. So there’s a terrific, incredible dramatic tension in this performance. And starting, this, as you can see, it’s melodrama and duet. Melodrama is where you have spoken dialogue over orchestral accompaniments. I want to play you the melodrama part and just start the duet, 'cause I want you to hear these two voices. Flagstad and Kipnis, they’re two of the most astonishing voices of the 20th century. That’s applause for the end of the aria, the tenor aria.
I’m going to move forward and actually I’m going to, the last thing I’m going to play you is the climax of this scene, which is really the climax of the opera. It’s the moment of rescue. Pizarro arrives and he’s determined to murder Florestan. And he pulls out a knife, a dagger, to do it. And Leonore leaps forward and she shouts, , get back. And she shields the body of her husband. And then he says, well, Pizarro is determined to carry out the murder. And then she cries out , kill his wife first. And this is the moment where she has to, it’s a tricky one. She has to reveal of course, that she’s a woman. And in most productions she will have her hair under a cap and she’ll lift off the cap and the hair falls down or she’s wearing a jacket and she can rip open the jacket to expose the fact that she has breasts. And then there’s a kind of standoff between the four characters, Rocco, no, there are, yes, four characters. And suddenly, you know, very exciting music. Then a dramatic pause and silence. And then we hear offstage in a different key the sound of the bugle, which is the signal that the minister has arrived, the minister in charge who’s going to sort everything out. So it’s, you know, you could say it’s the arrival of the US cavalry. Tremendously heart stopping. Exciting moment.
I’m going to stop there, that very exciting moment. Actually, I have to tell you the truth, I’m not sorry that I’ve run out of time because after this tremendous scene, it does seem to me that the rest of the opera is something of an anti-climax and that Beethoven’s inspiration in the final scene is somewhat patchy. So I’m going to open up and see what comments and questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Thank you, Jennifer.
This is Martin who saw “Fidelio” in 1989 in Pretoria just after Mandela’s release. Oh gosh, that must have been really something. I imagine it it was a very emotional occasion. Yes, as you say, memorable.
Q: Why do young directors today think “Fidelio” is fair game for…
A: You know, I think it’s because it’s, oh God, yes, I know, I’ve seen some real horrors. But I think it’s one of those operas like “Don Giovanni,” it’s done so often in so many productions and every director thinks somehow they have to put their stamp on it.
Q: How did anyone make sense of Beethoven scores?
A: What a mess. Yes. I don’t know really the answer to that. It’s not seldom performed, David. It’s really commonly performed. Every opera house does it. I’ve seen it several times in the last couple of years. Cutting the dialogue doesn’t quite work.
You said recently I saw “La Boheme” done backward. Mimi dies in act one. I dunno, I’d have to see it before I could comment on that. I can sort of see why, I can sort of see how it could be done in terms of nostalgia and looking back.
Q: Why was Thomas Mann opposed to it being performed?
A: 'Cause the whole, you think how could anybody sit through it and then leave the house and carry on as normal in Nazi Germany? It’s an opera which is so profoundly against everything that the Nazi regime stood for.
Sandy, I’m glad you loved that recording, the recording of the quartet. I too also find it, I know, I’m sorry, terrible to cut, lots of things, these talks are so difficult. It’s brutal to have to cut the excerpts and keep them so short.
The wonderful sketch of the prison, of course, is Piranesi. It’s one of those famous 18th century prints of prisons by Piranesi.
Herbert saying you never realised how, oh, Vicars, he’s fantastic. He’s one of the top, top, he’s a Heldentenor who doesn’t make an ugly noise. Dungeon scene often brings you to tears. I’m not surprised. It’s so exciting. If you are, the set of the dungeon, you’re probably thinking again of the Piranesi print.
Thank you all very much. Have a wonderful Seder, Passover, Easter, whatever you’re going to celebrate. And I’ll see you in a week’s time. Thank you. Bye-bye.