by Nizam Peter KettanehLeonoreProgram Notes for Beethoven’s

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).

Beethoven held Cherubini in high esteem and thought the libretto of Les Deux Journées ou le Porteur d’eau, as well as that of Spontini’s La Vestale, the two best libretti ever written. The fact that the former libretto was also written by JeanNicolas Bouilly may have caused him to pay special attention to Bouilly’s Léonore ou l’Amour conjugal.

On the other hand, his appreciation of La Vestale may be the reason why in 1803, Beethoven agreed to collaborate with Schikaneder, the author of the libretto to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and to compose music for Schikaneder’s Vesta’s Feuer (The Fire of Vesta). However, after composing four musical numbers for the first scenes of the opera, Beethoven abandoned the project in December 1803, finding Schikaneder difficult to work with, while the language and verses were “such as could come out of the mouths of our Viennese apple-vendors,” as he confided in a letter to Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. However, all was not lost: the music of the trio of Vesta’s Feuer is the first version of the Leonore duet “O namenlose Freude,” when Leonore is finally reunited with her husband, Florestan.

While Vienna had a tradition of performances of French opera-comique dating back to Empress Maria-Theresa and her composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, there is no indication that Gaveaux’s Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal was ever performed in Vienna. On the basis of numerous similarities of musical treatment of the same situation between Gaveaux’s and Beethoven’s Leonore, some musicologists have speculated that Beethoven must have known the Gaveaux score, even though his library did not house a copy of it.

Beethoven started composing his Leonore in January 1804, while Ferdinando Paër was composing for Dresden an Italian opera on the same subject, Leonore ossia l’amore conjugale, which was created on October 3, 1804. The Paër opera would not be performed in Vienna until 1809, but Beethoven did possess a copy of its score, though it is not known when he acquired it. Sonnenleithner was slow in providing Beethoven with the translated text, so most of its composition took place in the summer of 1805. It was while working on his Leonore that Beethoven met Cherubini in July at Sonnleithner’s home. It is likely that the great number of surviving sketches that Beethoven wrote while composing Leonore is due to his ambition to rival Cherubini: his untiring industry making up for his lack of practice and experience in theatrical composition.

But while Beethoven was composing, political events were bringing disaster to Austria. On August 9, 1805, Austria joined Britain, Russia, Sweden, and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the Third Coalition against Napoleonic France and Spain, only to be beaten at the battle of Ulm on October 19. The nobility, the great bankers and merchants left Vienna and the Empress herself departed on November 9. The French army arrived in the villages West of Vienna on the 10th and the vanguard of 15,000 soldiers, led by the generals Murat and Lannes, entered the city at 11 o’clock on the 13th in order of battle, flags flying high and to the sound of military music. Napoleon entered on the 14th, a week before the premiere of Beethoven’s Leonore, and made a proclamation the next day from the palace of Schönbrunn, which he used as his headquarters.

On December 2, he defeated the Russian and Austrian armies at the battle of Austerlitz. No wonder that the Theateran-der-Wien had been playing to half empty houses, despite the splendid decorations and costumes that were used for the creation of Schikaneder’s Swetards Zaubergürtel (music by Anton Fischer) on July 3, 1805 and Vestas Feuer (music by Joseph Weigl) on August 10, 1805. The patrons and fans of Beethoven had all fled or were in no mood to go to the theater, so it was to a sparsely populated parterre of French officers that

Leonore was performed on November 20, 21, and 22. Though Beethoven wanted the title to be Leonore, the directors of the theater overruled him and billed the work as Fidelio. The three acts of Beethoven’s first full opera proved too long for a public, the majority of which was unfamiliar with the German language and with Beethoven’s music.

There were also difficulties with the casting. The first Leonore/Fidelio, Anna Milder, (1785-1838) had a wonderful voice, but was just starting her career and had not acquired much stage experience. She would later create the title roles of Cherubini’s German opera, Faniska, (1806) and Joseph Weigl’s operas, Das Waisenhoaus (1808) and Die Schweizer Familie (1809). In 1812 she scored a huge success in Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride and in the Vienna performance of Cherubini’s Médée. After creating the role of Leonore/Fidelio in Beethoven’s Fidelio of 1814, she left Vienna for Berlin where she created the operas of Spontini Olimpie (1821), Nurmahal (1822), and Agnes von Hohenstaufen (1827) and sang the soprano part in Mendelssohn’s revival of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (1829). It is for her that Schubert composed Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shephard on the Rocks). Louise Miller (1784-after 1837), the Marzelline, was a good singer and actress, particularly in the comic roles. However, the first Florestan, the tenor Joseph Friedrich Christian Demmer (ca. 1788–1811) was weak; so was the Pizarro of Sebastian Meier [Mayer] (1773-1835), who had become in 1797 the second husband of Josepha Hofer (née Weber), the younger sister of Constance Mozart and the creator of the role of the Queen of the Night. Joseph Caché (1770-1841), who sang Jaquino, learned his role by having it played for him on the violin and Joseph Rothe (1759-1808), the creator of Rocco, was so insignificant that there is hardly any mention of him at all.

Thus, Beethoven’s first completed attempt at writing an opera resulted in a dismal failure with the public. He revised the score, shortened it to two acts instead of the original three before it was performed at the Theater-an-der-Wien on March 29, 1806 and repeated on April 10. It was rather well received and would have had a longer run if, in a fit of anger, Beethoven had not withdrawn it. Beethoven revised the score again in 1807 in the hopes of a performance in Prague, which did not materialize. It is only in 1814 that his final revision produced the opera Fidelio, which premiered with great success on May 23, 1814 at the Kärnthnerthor-Theater of Vienna.