Program Notes for Beethoven’s Leonore (1805) By Nizam Peter Kettaneh The German libretto of the Leonore of Beethoven is the work of Joseph Ferdinand Sonnleithner, who translated the French libretto of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s Léonore ou L’Amour conjugal, set to music by Pierre Gaveaux and created with great success at the Theatre Feydeau in Paris on January 19, 1798. (The work was performed by Opera Lafayette in 2017 and recorded on a DVD on the Naxos label.) The subject – the release to freedom of an unjustly imprisoned man by his devoted wife – shares in the genre of “rescue operas” which were very popular at the end of the eighteenth century. As defined by the musicologist Edward J. Dent, the rescue opera has: “a type of libretto in which the hero or heroine is shut up in prison by a villainous tyrant; the wife or the husband attempts to set the prisoner free, but generally makes the situation far worse, and the invariable happy end is brought about by the sudden entry of a chorus of soldiers who arrest the tyrant.” Indeed, the prototype of rescue operas is Le Déserteur of Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, set to a libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine and created at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris on March 6, 1769. (The work was also performed by Opera Lafayette in 2009 and recorded on a CD on the Naxos label.) Such was the success of Le Deserteur that it was performed all over Europe, in particular in Bonn in 1787, where Beethoven’s father sang the role of Jean-Louis, the father who is responsible for Alexis being imprisoned and sentenced to death as a deserter. Beethoven must have been familiar with Le Deserteur, in the overture of which a trumpet call announces the arrival of the King who pardons Alexis just as he is about to face the firing squad. This is an idea he will use in the “Leonore” overtures and in the opera.
Left: Léonore (Kimy McLaren) protects her husband Florestan (Jean-Michel Richer) in Opera Lafayette’s production of Gaveaux/Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal. (Louis Forget). Top: Ludwig van Beethoven. Bottom: Opera Lafayette’s performance of Monsigny’s Le Déserteur (Louis Forget @2009).
The success of Le Deserteur spun out a series of rescue operas of which the most noteworthy are Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784), Le Comte Albert (1786), and Raoul Barbe-Bleue (1789), Lesueur’s La Caverne (1793), Cherubini’s Lodoïska (1791) and Les Deux Journées ou le Porteur d’eau (1800), and Boieldieu’s Beniowski ou les Exilés du Kamschatka (1800). 9
