Beethoven's Fidelio is a hymn to liberty, but it was adopted enthusiastically by Marxists and Nazis alike
From the Bastille in 1789 to Wham!'s 1980s pop anthem, mankind's cries for freedom occur with perhaps more regularity and intensity than for any other object of human aspiration. In its name, we engage in everything from buying cars to fighting wars, just and unjust. But what does freedom actually mean? This is the question raised by Beethoven's only complete opera, Fidelio, now playing in a much-hyped New York Met production at Covent Garden.
Fidelio is ostensibly a story about a wife's cross-dressing efforts to free her husband from prison, but it has come to represent the yearning for freedom in a more abstract sense. The prisoners' chorus in the first act is among the most common choices on Desert Island Discs, not least for politicians (Menzies Campbell, to name the most recent). With its theme of liberation from tyranny, the opera's place in the leftist canon was always guaranteed: the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch declared that "every future storming of the Bastille" is enacted in Fidelio. It was, however, also performed for Hermann Goering to celebrate Vienna's "liberation" by the Anschluss.
The nature of the freedom espoused in Fidelio is, therefore, highly ambiguous. The libretto, which is based on one written in France shortly after the revolution, has usually been read as an allegory of the triumph at the Bastille. Ordinary prisoners are freed, the old guard is banished and a new order of universal brotherhood and political freedom is established. But there are also reactionary values embedded in the story: the tyrannical prison governor was intended as a depiction of one of Robespierre's provincial flunkeys. While the incarcerated hero Florestan (played on 14, 16 and 24 June by the excellent Simon O'Neill) and his liberator, Don Fernando, are understood to be of noble birth and to have natural authority, the prison governor and his lackey gaoler are shown as unsettled, paranoid agents in the new, upwardly mobile society.
This political ambiguity is well served by Jürgen Flimm's staging, first seen at the Met in 2000. Flimm transfers the action to a South American dictatorship some time around the middle of the 20th century, but the production gives no clues as to whether the dictatorship is communist or fascist. Instead, the emphasis is on the simple paraphernalia of tyranny: money, yards of prison bars, and hundreds of heavy, single-bolt rifles bolster the fragile division between oppressors and oppressed. The rituals of the false romance between Leonore (played alternately by Yvonne Howard and the legendary Finnish soprano Karita Mattila), dressed as Fidelio, and the gaoler's daughter are carried out under glaring lights more fit for an interrogation. The reuniting of the two lovers, by contrast, is clothed in thick and stifling darkness.
Beethoven's own politics have always been something of a mystery. He was disgusted when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, famously renaming the symphony he had originally dedicated to Bonaparte. Yet his anger was not necessarily because he felt Napoleon had betrayed the principles of the revolution; rather, Beethoven admired Napoleon for being a self-made man, but abhorred his dishonesty in buying in to an aristocratic ideal.
The composer was, all the same, a keen supporter of the "enlightened despotism" of the Habsburgs both before and after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet he also saw himself as their equal, or even superior: he once tried to persuade Goethe, his senior in both years and fame, that, on meeting the empress and Austrian dukes while out walking, the imperial party should stand aside and make way for the artists, not the other way around. "They could make a privy councillor or a minister, but they couldn't make a Goethe or a Beethoven," he told the poet, who beat a fast, bowing retreat. "They must be taught to respect that which they cannot make and which they're far from being themselves." The Habsburg grandees duly made way.
This extraordinary act - which would be highly unusual even today, let alone 200 years ago, when most of the nobility still counted musicians as servants - reflects not so much an extreme egalitarianism as a new faith in the power and importance of artists and their work. Germany's long-nurtured dream of a united homeland, given piquancy by the ignominy of French rule, found its natural home in the idealism of philosophy, art and particularly music. Music was held to capture, in sensuous, emotional and intellectually engaging form, the idea at the heart of human freedom: man's ability to shape the world through his thought and actions. Listening to Beethoven's symphonies, following the integration of widely varying sonorous and thematic matter, became more than just a symbol of togetherness and union. In the new concert culture, listening became the very enactment of a free and enlightened code of honour.
The prisoners in Fidelio sing of their dream of freedom - "Hope whispers gently to me:/We shall be free, we shall find rest" - and the opera follows them, bursting through the confines of the semi-comic rescue plot. By the time Leonore finally penetrates the depths of the prison, she is no longer even sure who it is she is supposed to set free. "Whoever you may be . . ./I will loose your chains,/poor man, and set you free," she promises to an unknown figure crouching in the gloom. That, indeed, it turns out to be her husband is almost forgotten in the closing scene. It is mankind in general that Leonore speaks of freeing. And, through Beethoven's music, this is precisely what she does.
"Fidelio" is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2, until 24 June. http://www.royalopera.org
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