Beethoven believed in the fall of royal tyrannies. He looked hopefully towards France, where in his youth a great revolution broke out, heralding the end of political subjugation. He also admired the heroic leader Napoleon until he was crowned emperor of the French. The composer hated authority and censorship, he was a flesh-and-blood democrat, the first free artist in the history of music, whose life motto was to get as much money as possible from aristocratic admirers, but never to flinch before them.
As he prepared to write the opera, he looked through dozens of libretto materials, but he liked only one play: Leonora, the marriage love of Jean-Nicholas Bouilly, in which justice triumphs over despotism, and fidelity overcomes adversities. In this work Beethoven not so much illustrates as recreates the act of revolution on stage like a holy mass , wrote the music theorist Theodor W. Adorno.
Ironically, the creator of Fidelio never experienced the marital love he celebrated, and the premiere of his opera for freedom (1805) took place in Vienna, which was conquered by Napoleon, who then only sought to expand his empire. The hope of a force majeure intervention is fulfilled in Fidelio . After the French Revolution, a peculiar opera genre was created, named after the German Schrecken und Rettungsoper , which can be translated as "an opera of horror and unexpected salvation". And that's what Fidelio is . Providence existsHis wife Leonora, still in masculine disguise, still unrecognized by him, exclaims to Florestan. In the opera's finale, the "inspector" appears, he takes away the power he abused by Pizarr, filling the state prisons beyond measure. "Unexpected Salvation" has come. One may ask: what is the highest instance for us today? In the 21st century, we cannot share Beethoven's belief in punishing bad guys and throwing down all tyrants once and for all. We know that those who have power will not hesitate to abuse it and will certainly not want to give it up.
