Imagining Florestan: An attempt to recover the lost aria of 1805 By Will Crutchfield Beethoven’s involvement with his only opera produced three distinct scores on three occasions in Vienna: • The 1805 premiere as Fidelio, the work revived in the present production • The 1806 revival as Leonore, with revisions and abbreviations • The 1814 revival as Fidelio, extensively re-composed, that has remained in repertory. As though this were not enough, the composer left us four distinct overtures; the “extra” one, published as Op. 138 and now confusingly known as “Leonore No. 1,” was most likely written for a projected but unrealized Prague production in 1807 or 1808. It is a lot of music, yet every bit is of interest. One important bit unfortunately went missing: the principal tenor aria of Beethoven’s 1805 opera was literally destroyed when the scores of it were cut up so that some pages could be recycled in the version of 1806. The pages lost on the cutting-room floor included a significant passage – a solo in F Major with obbligato flute as the imprisoned Florestan recalls happier days with Leonore at his side – of which no trace remained in the other versions. Also lost was the first version of the aria’s slow movement, “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen,” which was different, likely quite different, from the ones we know. The paper trail of the dismembered scores tells us beyond doubt that these movements were present in the 1805 Fidelio, but the only evidence we have for their musical content comes from the composer’s sketchbooks, where he recorded multiple drafts of their melodic lines. For the current Beethoven anniversary year, Opera Lafayette invited me to edit these drafts and try my hand at devising an orchestral score to accompany them. The idea is to let audiences hear for the first time Beethoven’s original conception of the aria, even if we cannot hear the way he himself orchestrated it. Doing this meant also picking up the thread of a long-running musical detective story that scholars have been investigating for more than a century: just what happened, and when and why, to this problem aria? What follows is an account of that mystery and the process of developing the score heard at these performances. I - The shape of the scene Florestan’s soliloquy in the dungeon is laid out on a plan that remained intact in all three versions of the opera, though the content was significantly different in each. Its components: an instrumental prelude, an expansive recitative, and a grand aria in two parts – a slow “cantabile” movement followed by a faster one. Left: The Prisoner by Joseph Wright.
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