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Beethoven wrote only one opera – Fidelio.

The Lyric Opera’s production of this singular work highlights the season’s debut of the famous Lyric chorus under the inspired direction of Michael Black, the thrilling playing of the Lyric orchestra led by the always meticulous Enrique Maszzola, and the uniformly dynamic singing of the principal vocalists.

Beethoven was hired to write an opera for Emmanuel Schickaneder (who had commissioned Mozart’s Magic Flute) and his Theater an der Wien.  However, Beethoven was not satisfied with the libretto provided to him.  Instead, near the end of 1803, Beethoven decided upon the French playwright Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s story(“Leonore, ou L’amour conjugal” (Leonore, or Married Love). Pierre Gaveax (1761 -1825) and Simon Mayr (1863- 1845) had each created successful operas from the story. Beethoven’s collaborator, Joseph Sonnleithner, prepared a German-language libretto.

The play is about a political prisoner and freedom fighter named Florestan (Russell Thomas), and his wife Leonore (Elza van den Heever). When Florestan is imprisoned, Leonore disguises herself as a boy, Fidelio, and gets a job in the prison where her husband is imprisoned, in order to free him. Mr. Thomas and Ms. van den Heever seem born to sing these roles, so surefooted are their approaches to the music. Supporting them are the more-than-able Brian Mulligan as Don Pizzaro, the  opera’s villain who receives Pinkerton-like boos at the curtain call, a testament to his successful portrayal. Dimitry Ivashhchenko creates a powerful Rocco, the jailer. The hero is Don Fernando the magistrate,  played authoritatively by Alfred Walker, while Sydney Mancasola debuts as the love-struck Marzelline.

Most accounts of the origins of Bouilly’s drama simply state that it is “based on a true story.”

The fact is, the tale of  Florestan uncannily parallels the true account of an episode in the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution, and his wife Adrienne. [1]

In 1792, three years into the French Revolution, Lafayette, a living symbol of freedom from monarchical tyrrany,  was the leader of the Northern French Army, assigned to defend France against an expected invasion by Austria and Prussia. When he came into opposition with the blood-thirsty Jacobin leadership of France and their guillotine, he sought asylum at the U.S. Embassy in the Hague (He later wrote from prison to a friend, that “I supported the progress of the French Revolution down to the time when I thought it inconsistent with the rights of the people at large, the sentiments of the majority of their representatives, and the true notions of liberty, to unite with partial acts of violence, and I was of course obliged momentarily to seek for a neutral ground.”)

He was intercepted and placed under arrest by the Coalition of Britain, Austria and Prussia. Since they were going to war with Revolutionary France, one  might conclude that they ought to have welcomed Lafayette as an ally, since he was breaking with the Jacobin leadership. Instead, they held Lafayette prisoner, outside of any rules that applied to war, simply because he represented the American solution for Europe and was a threat to the established rule. He was imprisoned in Prussia for two years, then transferred to Austria, for a total of about five years.[2]

The similarity of Bouilly’s play to the case of Lafayette is strengthened by the fact that in both cases, a loving wife intervenes to save her husband through “L’amour conjugal”, or married love. It is the story of the imprisonment of the Marquis de Lafayette, the world-famous hero of the American Revolution, and the courageous fight of his wife,  Adrienne, to free him, which Beethoven adopted for Fidelio, his one and only opera. At the time Fidelio was composed the heroic tale of the Lafayettes was already one of the most popular and admired love stories of the eighteenth century.

Marchioness Adrienne Lafayette herself was imprisoned in France, in late 1792– shortly after her husband was imprisoned by the anti-France Coalition. She was there in the summer of 1794, when her sister, her mother and her grandmother were taken from her and guillotined. She only escaped the same fate due to pressures exerted by America – from George Washington himself through his representatives in Paris, Governor Morris and James Monroe.

For five years, from 1792 to 1797, Lafayette was held in virtual solitary confinement for daring to fight Biitish colonial policy. After his key role in organizing European support for the American Revolution, Lafayette returned to France, where, together with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, he set out to reorganize the French monarchy along republican principles. But the British-run mobs of the “French Revolution” intervened to wreck Franklin and Lafayette’s design, and forced Lafayette to flee France. Shortly thereafter he was captured and thrown into and Austrian prison by England’s ally, Austria. Life in France was too perilous.

Still in France, Lafayette’s wife was also imprisoned in the same year, 1792. Barely escaping the guillotine she won her freedom with the help of the American government and in disguise, traveled to Austria, where for two more years she submitted to imprisonment beside her husband. It was only after a worldwide press and organizing campaign by republican networks, which exposed the details of the joint imprisonment of the famous couple, that they were finally freed in 1797. Five months later, in February 1798, a Frenchman, Jean N. Bouilly, published his libretto Leonora, ou l’amour conjugal (“or wedded love”), which Beethoven was to use for his Fidelio.

For Beethoven, Madam Lafayette—represented by Leonora, the central figure in Fidelio—was the model for the promethean woman he himself never found. It was Adrienne who never capitulated in her struggle to free her husband, nor abandoned the principles he stood for. This, despite the fact that the Lafayettes were on the “enemies list” of every major European government, without exception.

Two weeks after her husband was captured, Adrienne and her family were themselves imprisoned, for failing to denounce Lafayette as a traitor to the Revolution as hundreds of aristocratic families who remained in France were doing in order to save their lives.

France at this moment was under the control of a Girondin ministry headed by Brissot de Warville, an old friend of Lafayette’s. Risking her life, Madam Lafayette wrote to Brissot, defiantly challenging him to defend his republicanism against the demands of British agents Marat and Danton to keep her jailed. Admiring her bravery, Brissot granted a parole and released her. It was only to be for a few months however; soon the Jacobins took power, and once again she and her family were imprisoned.  Only after the United States’ Minister to France, Gouveneur Morris, intervened by threatening American reprisals was she spared the same fate. Six months later the Terror was over and she was freed. Immediately she set out to find her husband.

For three years before Adrienne’s release, friends of Lafayette—including Washington, Morris and James Monroe—had been writing the heads of European governments requesting the whereabouts of the American Revolutionary hero, Lafayette, but with no success. In a secret arrangement between England, Austria, and Prussia, Lafayette was transferred from a Prussian prison, where he was first held, to an Austrian prison at Olmuetz. The orders for the transfer as Adrienne was later to learn, came directly from British Prime Minister William Pitt (i.e., Pizarro in Fidelio).

The Austrians had orders to treat their prisoner harshly. Lafayette’s cell was located directly above an open cesspool. His food was poor; which, together with lack of exercise, rapidly sapped his strength.

When finally released, a few months after the fall of Robespierre and the Terror, she proceeded to organize a confrontation with the Austrian Emperor, Francis II —demanding that he release her husband, or that he imprison her in the same dungeon. James Monroe and other Americans aided her with a passport as an American citizen. When a friend warned her that it was too dangerous, she assured him: “In this my decision is firm, and nothing in the world can bring me from it.” She did meet with the Emperor, who protested meekly to Adrienne that “his hands were tied” as “it was a complicated matter.” She was imprisoned at Olmue with her husband, but was taken away for medical treatment, and only later told that she could not return. She wrote: “They will not tear me away from here except with M. Lafayette; unless, perhaps, they drag me away dead. ”husband and wife two was a cause celebre at the time.  Since the U.S. could not enter the fray openly, Alexander Hamilton led the unofficial effort to free Lafayette, including his friends in London, and attempted prison escapes. The playwright, Gotthold Lessing,  smuggled his letters from prison and published them. By 1797, the international pressure to free Lafayette had reached a high point, and he was finally released.

In the months after Lafayette was finally freed, Beethoven was a frequent visitor of the French Ambassador to Vienna, Jean Bernadotte, a friend of Lafayette. It has long been thought that it was Bernadotte who suggested that Beethoven create a “Bonaparte” Symphony (The Eroica). It has been suggested that Lafayette helped keep Bonaparte in the republican circles and away from oligarchical influence, from 1798 until 1804. Thus the symphony might not just have been praise of Napoleon, but an intervention, to keep him on the republican pathway.

Much later, at a time that it would have been very dangerous to say otherwise, Bouilly denied any connection of his play to the story of the Lafayettes at a time.[i]  When Beethoven crossed Napoleon’s name off of his Eroica Symphony. He did not have far to look for a new Romantic hero of freedom- the Marquis de Lafayette.

The events leading up to the writing and first performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s opera Fidelio demonstrate that for a century and a half Beethoven had relationships to the leading political events of his day. Far from being a solitary, nonpolitical musical genius , Beethoven was a member of an extensive, European-wide humanist network which supported the American Revolution and which was actively using the new American government as a model for establishing new governments in Europe. Edward J. Dent, the dean of opera historians, notes that Beethoven’s “personality was profoundly affected by the social and political upheavals of his time. We are often told that his music was the natural development of the music of Haydn and Mozart, and historians have pointed out the direct resemblances to these two predecessors. But nobody can fail to recognize that even in Beethoven’s first period there is a new musical character which cannot be derived from Haydn and Mozart, and it is no belittling of Beethoven’s genius to admit that this came to him from the music of the French Revolution.”[1]

It was about the same time as Madam Lafayette’s release from the Terror, in 1795, that pro-American networks within Austria began to smuggle out, from Olmuetz, information on Lafayette’s presence. Accounts of his prison conditions soon began to filter into English, German and American newspapers. An actual escape attempt was tried by an American friend of Lafayette, but it failed.

Upon learning that her husband was at Olm Madam Lafayette enlisted the aid of Monroe, the new Minister to France, who obtained false passports for her and her two daughters to go to Austria. Joyous at the thought of seeing her husband at last, she wrote to him in September 1795:

That I am free, my dear heart, is plain since I am already on the road which will bring me to you. So great is my joy that I can describe it only by saying that I feel guilty at still being capable of entertaining so lively a sentiment after all our miseries. They will poison all that remains to me of life, but all I can think of now is the only thing which might extinguish the memory of them: namely, that I am on my way to you. That hope alone gave me a renewed sense of life when I was almost at the foot of the scaffold.

Winton Dean writes:

Humanity was of more importance to Beethoven than the individual. Fidelio was successfully achieved because it satisfied one of the psychological needs of his existence, the search for the ideal woman. He found her in art where he failed in life, and placed her on a pedestal. No wonder he wished to call the opera Lenore” [2]

Beethoven’s Fidelio first appeared in Chicago at McVicker’s Theater on January 11,1865 When Grover’s Grand German Opera Company under the leadership of Leonard Grover( 1833—1926), a personal friend of President Lincoln and the owner of a namesake D.C. Theater brought his company to town Carl Anschutz conducted the production in which Bertha Johannsen sang Fidelio, Theodore Habelman played Floristan, and Pauline  Canissa sang Marceline

 The Tribune reported that Fidelio “reaches the summit of the sublime in music, serene and classic in its character, and yet not cold and purely artistic in its classicism, but full of passion, passion in the best sense of the term, the generous, the noble the exalted.”

The Lyric Opera’s Fidelio is set in the present. Director Matthew Ozawa maintains that this decision allows today’s audience to have the same experience as the original audience. The reasoning is one common among young directors seeking to justify their desire to place the work outside the time and place designated by the librettist and composer, in this case Seville, Spain in the 18th century. Had the librettist and composer wanted the production to always be contemporary they would have written what many writers dictate: “Time: now” They didn’t and their wishes , along with all authors’ wishes, should be honored. (It was and is, after all the author’s reputation and talent which draws the audience. Only rarely does an audience decide to attend because of who has directed. The best stage directing is said to be invisible.)

History reveals quite a difference between the prisons of the eighteenth century and those of today. Think Jean Valjean and the Man in the Iron Mask versus Dead Man Walking. The eighteenth century prison was a hell hole: no light, only an occasional torch, no heat, sewage, refuse, rats, insects, disease, unbearable stench, heavy chains. The modern prison is club – like with very bright electric lighting, CCTVs everywhere, air conditioning, centralized heat, and superior ventilation.

When the eighteenth century Fidelio snuck into a prison she took a great risk; discovery meant almost instant execution on the guillotine. For  a modern Fidelio the risk is minimal; she would probably receive a mild reprimand upon discovery, or, at most, a charge of trespass. By moving the time of the opera’s action Mr. Ozawa has diminished is heroine’s necessary courage and thereby her very admirable status as heroine. He has also hindered the performer’s search for the necessary gravitas for the character.

Nevertheless we had Beethoven’s glorious music.

[1] Research and analysis courtesy of Donald Phau and David Shavin

[2] Louis Gottschalk, Lafayette in the French Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

[3] Edward J. Dent Opera (New York :Penguin Books,1940), p.50.

[4]Winton Dean, Essays on Opera. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1990), p.161.