Fidelio
Fidelio volgens Andriy Zholdak
A Fidelio like you’ve never seen before. In Ukrainian stage director Andriy Zholdak’s version, Beethoven’s opera centres on a battle between good and evil forces, depicted through symbols, video projections, and spoken texts. To help visitors better interpret what they will see on stage, we recommend reading the information page.
Performance information
Voorstellings-informatie
In a nutshell
Fidelio in a nutshell: a look at Beethoven’s only opera and Andriy Zholdak’s interpretation
In a nutshell
Beethoven’s only opera
Despite being the most significant composer of the early Romanticism, Beethoven completed only one opera during his lifetime. That was Fidelio. Beethoven composed the opera during a time of severe mental torment as a result of his increasing deafness and the isolation this caused. The creation of Fidelio spanned ten years, with Beethoven withdrawing the opera twice and rewriting it with the help of various librettists. The result is a work that is unique in Beethoven’s oeuvre and an important milestone in the early Romantic opera repertoire. It is a work that reverberates with the spirit of Beethoven’s times but remains relevant today.
Performances of Fidelio
More than 200 years after its first premiere, the opera is a work that continues to be tinkered with after Beethoven’s own adaptations. It has a rich performance history with amendments to the spoken texts and changes to the music, involving conductors such as Otto Nicolai and Gustav Mahler and stage directors including Gottfried Wagner and Johan Simons. More often the opera was interpreted from a political point of view as a liberation opera, as the original story would trace back to true events during the French Revolution, but certainly not exclusively.
‘Through the Looking glass’ with Andriy Zholdak
The Ukrainian theatre director Andriy Zholdak is making his debut at Dutch National Opera with his production of Fidelio. Rather than focusing on merely illustrating the story, Andriy Zholdak introduces the audience to a surrealist and associative world that is evoked by Beethoven’s music. Zholdak’s reading of this opera foregrounds the love affair and the fight between good and evil, within ourselves and in our universe. Fidelio sends a message of hope for a happy life and a world liberated from evil. Zholdak wrote a new script with a new text for it.
The world behind the mirrors
In Zholdak’s interpretation, Pizarro kidnaps Florestan to his world behind the mirror. Leonore does everything in her power to free her lover from that dark world to restore harmony. Zholdak’s theatrical language is heavily inspired by the world of myths, the great symbols of humanity, art and the films of such major directors as Tarkovsky, Von Trier and Bergman. Film also literally plays a big role in his directing. To bring his wondrous worlds to life, Zholdak operates like a visual artist on a stage, and in addition to directing, he is also co-responsible for set, costume and lighting design.
Fidelio - the story of the performance
Beethoven is dead. The evil genius Pizarro has seized power and plans to disrupt the harmony of the cosmos. He also wants to put an end to the love affair between Leonore and Florestan. So he calls on the help of Rocco, Marzelline and Jaquino. Pizarro kidnaps Florestan and takes him to Pizarro’s world behind the looking glass. Leonore goes in search of her lover and ends up in a dark dreamworld. She must liberate herself and Florestan from Evil and restore order.
Timeline
Beethoven and his opera.
Timeline
1770
On 17 December 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven is born in Bonn. He grows up in a family of musicians. His grandfather, another Ludwig, was a musician from Mechelen (in present-day Belgium) who moved to Bonn and became Kapellmeister at the court of Clemens August of Bavaria. His son Johan was a singer and also taught the violin and piano. Ludwig van Beethoven receives his first music lessons from his father Johan.
1792
At the age of 21, Ludwig van Beethoven moves to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn. While studying composition, Beethoven soon acquires renown in Vienna as a concert pianist, performing the works of others, in particular Mozart, in addition to his own works. Over time, he builds up a reputation as a composer.
1798
The first performance of the opera Léonore, ou L'Amour conjugal takes place in Paris on 19 February. This work, by composer Pierre Gaveaux and librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, is one of a series of liberation operas, which are very popular at that time in Paris. It is a trend that eventually reaches Vienna.
1803
In the spring, Beethoven receives a commission from Emanuel Schikaneder, the impresario of the Theater an der Wien, to compose an opera based on a libretto penned by Schikaneder himself and entitled Vestas Feuer. The remuneration includes putting Beethoven up in an apartment in the theatre. However, Beethoven finds the libretto is unable to hold his attention and he spends most of his time that year on his third symphony (the Eroica) and the Waldstein sonata. By the end of the year, he has only composed ten minutes of the opera.
Winter 1803-1804
Beethoven decides not to continue with the composition for Vestas Feuer; he no longer finds the subject matter interesting. Beethoven sees more potential in the liberation opera stories. The Viennese court secretary, Joseph von Sonnleithner, provides a detailed translation of the libretto of Bouilly’s Leonore, and Beethoven starts composing on the basis of this version.
1804-1805
Beethoven and Sonnleithner are not the only ones looking to create a new version of the opera by Gaveaux and Bouilly. Two Italian versions have their premieres in the twelve months before the first performance of Beethoven’s opera. In October 1804, a version by the Italian composer Ferdinando Paer premieres in Dresden; Beethoven probably knew the musical score of this opera. Another version by Simon Mayr has its premiere in Padua in June 1805.
20 November 1805
The opera Fidelio enjoys its premiere in Theater an der Wien, one week before Napoleon’s French troops invade Vienna. Many of Beethoven’s devotees have already fled the city and the theatre audience consists mainly of French officers, who feel little affinity with German opera. The opera is only performed three times. Although Beethoven preferred the title Leonore, the theatre decides to call the opera Fidelio to avoid confusion with other adaptations of the same story.
29 March 1806
A reworked version of Fidelio is performed, once again in Theater an der Wien. With input from the librettist Stephan von Breuningen, Beethoven changes the sequence of the numbers, drops certain passages and adds new ones. He also writes a new overture. The opera is divided into two acts rather than the original three, to bring it more in line with Bouilly’s original libretto. After two performances, Beethoven withdraws the opera, possibly due to disagreements with the theatre about financial matters.
1807
Beethoven composes a third, new overture for a planned performance in Prague. For a long time, it was erroneously thought this was the original overture from 1805, which is why we now know it as Leonore overture no. 1. Conversely, the original 1805 overture is known as No. 2, and the 1806 version as No. 3. In fact, the envisaged performance in Prague never actually took place.
1810
A piano reduction of the 1806 version is published — the first publication of the opera for general use.
1814
At the request of a number of singers at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, Fidelio is put on the programme. In March and April, Beethoven revises the score yet again for these performances, this time with the help of the poet Georg Friedrich Treitschke. This time, Beethoven is more rigorous. Passages that were deleted in 1806 are reinserted and he makes more amendments and revisions
23 May 1814
This latest version of Fidelio has its premiere in the Kärntnertortheater. However, the new overture composed by Beethoven for this production (the fourth) is not ready in time for the premiere and is only included for the first time in the second performance, three days later. The opera is well received. Among the audience is a 17-year-old Franz Schubert, who sold his schoolbooks so that he could buy a ticket.
21 November 1814
The first performance of Fidelio outside Vienna takes place in Prague.
1822
More performances of Fidelio take place in Vienna. Beethoven, who is unable to conduct the orchestra himself because of his deafness, complains about the singer playing the role of Leonore, the 17-year-old Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. But in fact her performance in the opera marks her professional breakthrough and that of the opera itself. She goes on to sing the role several more times, including in Paris and London. She later became one of Wagner’s favourite sopranos.
1824
Fidelio enjoys a triumphant tour of Europe. The first performance of the opera in Amsterdam seems to have been on 13 November 1824. The opera premieres in Copenhagen in 1829, in London in 1832 and in New York in 1839. In the course of the nineteenth century Fidelio becomes one of the most important works in the operatic repertoire.
1826
The complete musical score of the 1814 version is published with the title Fidelio and opus number 72. The two earlier versions have the same opus number but are known as Leonore 1 and Leonore 2.
26 March 1827
Beethoven dies in Vienna aged only 56. Because of his increasing deafness, he had become increasingly isolated from others since the 1810s and had lost contact with society. His funeral in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Vienna is attended by some 10,000 people.
1945
In September 1945, Fidelio is the first opera to be performed in Berlin after the Second World War. The production is by Deutsche Oper Berlin, but its premises were completely destroyed during the war and so the performance takes place in Theater des Westens, the only theatre left intact in the city.
1946
In Amsterdam too, in March 1946 Fidelio becomes the first opera to be performed as a full series of performances after liberation from the Nazis. The Gemeentelijk Theaterbedrijf Amsterdam, which was set up during the German occupation, had already attempted to put on a production of Tosca in December 1945. However, preparations had to be terminated due to opposition to the many singers who had collaborated with the Nazis.
1986
On 6 June, a trial performance is organised in the new Muziektheater — now Dutch National Opera & Ballet — to try out the theatre. The programme includes Fidelio, directed by Harry Kupfer. This was the same production that had been performed in the preceding weeks in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg. The conductor is Edo de Waart, the man in charge of the then newly formed Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra.
‘Hungry for what I don’t know’
Director Andriy Zholdak talks to dramaturg Luc Joosten
‘Hungry for what I don’t know’
“When I’m asked what an artwork in general means to me, and Fidelio in particular, I like to refer to Francis Ford Coppola. When asked what his Godfather films were about, rather than pointing to obvious topics such as the mafia, violence or crime, he said, “The films are about family”. A surprising but apt answer that summarises the entire series of films. It is a central theme that recurs at various levels and in different forms, sometimes quite literally but often more implicitly. In that sense, the theme serves as a kind of magnet. For me, the magnet in Fidelio is ‘harmony’.
When I started working on this production, I deliberately chose not to begin with the libretto and the spoken texts; instead, I listened intensively to the music and the voices. Beethoven’s music extends further than the actions. You can hear a different dimension, one that transcends the banality of a bourgeois play or a mere political allegory. There is a religious, metaphysical dimension. The music has phenomenal associative powers, which I soaked up. The contrast between light and dark, the victory over darkness by restoring harmony and beauty — these are the great strengths of Fidelio’s music. I’ve tried to capture and visualise this – but that doesn’t mean everything permanently takes on a weighty, ponderous tone. I aim to maintain the balance we have in life between serious matters and pleasure, between the light-hearted and the solemn. That equilibrium is incredibly important in the intensive creative process as well.”
Fidelio is set in the present
“I’m creating a Fidelio for the present day. When Nabokov wrote Lolita, the book caused a huge scandal in America, but it no longer has that effect today. If I were to direct a Lolita now, I’d have to find a way to generate the same feelings, the same intention, the same conflict and the same catastrophe. That is also what I need to do to bring Fidelio up to date. When I first looked at the libretto and read the simple love story and the political intrigues, and saw how the good king helps restore order everywhere, I was struck on the one hand by the naivety and on the other by how the deeper, underlying message was obscured by the specifics of the story and the actions. That is why I’ve gone for an abstract interpretation of the original spoken text and action.
If you look at the state the world is in today, with its wars and injustice, you feel the harmony has been disturbed. That’s the key to what I want to say. How I do that is another story, but the great attractive force is that idea of a disturbance to the harmony. Of course, Fidelio is also about love, about Leonore, how loyal she is to her husband, freeing him from being held a political prisoner.
From a letter by Beethoven, 1822
In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.
This harmony is not just something in this world, it also operates at the cosmic level, and it applies to individual human lives. If the harmony is disturbed, people turn to weapons, deceive their loved ones, use violence against children and so on. That is why my production starts with a prologue: Leonore gives a talk at a scientific conference in which she discusses the influence of dark energy in the cosmos and how it can disrupt the harmony in the cosmos. Shortly afterwards, a chain of unusual events is set off, affecting the relationship between the lovers Leonore and Florestan.”
Pizarro, the personification of evil
“I once saw an interview with the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman when he was quite old, in which he talked about his demons and how they governed his life. Indeed, we all live with demons like this, personifications of evil forces. That fact is often reflected in his films. Take the famous scene with the chess game between the knight and Death in The Seventh Seal. That was a source of inspiration for me.
I’m telling the story of Fidelio as if it were a story about me, how I’ve had to confront evil and fight against it. Evil determines who we are — it takes on various forms, constantly appearing in a different garb, with another language, a different gender. Ultimately, it deprives us of control. If I can see this in myself, I assume other people experience this too. I believe that harmony, and the love in which this harmony is achieved, can conquer evil. That is a belief that transcends the boundaries of religion: whether you are Catholic or Buddhist, it is a belief in harmony and love.
Pizarro is the character who wants to disrupt the harmony and thwart love. In my interpretation, he isn’t someone external to ourselves but rather a part of who we are and how the world is constructed. Indeed, I have him say that in the opera: “Beethoven is dead. I am taking over and I shall sow evil and disrupt order. I am part of everyone, and everyone is a part of me.” He takes Florestan away from his beloved Leonore and — like a Mephisto — transports him to a Dantean world of fears, desires, nightmares, dreams, the past, pain and violence. I essentially already show what fate has in store for Florestan before we meet him in jail, as is the case in the original opera. I show the journey to the dungeon as the result of a kidnapping by the master of evil.
The devil speaks his own language too. He has renounced human language and prefers to express himself in numbers — the language of machines, robots and a heartless world. He forces everyone in his power to adopt that language. This lets him magnify the distance between the lovers. This turns language into something divisive, rather than functioning as a means of communication.”
Leonore, c’est moi
“When I get asked who Leonore is, I have a simple answer, for which I quote Flaubert: ‘Madame Bovary, that’s me’. Leonore, that’s me. Pizarro is a kind of Lucifer, the fallen angel. He is the evil that wants to destroy the human system, and he also destroys the child in me. He destroys the Truth concealed in the child.
But Leonore is a strong woman. She goes in search of her lover, determined to restore the state of harmony. She attempts to break into the mirror through which her loved one was spirited away. It all reminded me of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, and of course the strange world of Alice through the Looking Glass. Our culture has numerous stories of descending to the underworld or being transported to another plane. Leonore too descends towards the circles of the inferno, voluntarily entering the darkness to bring back her lover to the world of light. In this respect, my account is quite close to the meaning of the original text, the struggle between light and darkness. Searching the caverns of the human soul, overcoming your fears...”
Our mindsets have changed
“Modern-day audiences are very savvy. That’s why I want my production to give the audience something that is more than a mere illustration. The world I show on stage is populated with images, characters and movements that act as symbols and evoke associations in the audience. I draw on the wealth of sources in mythology, painting, the films of directors such as Tarkovsky, von Trier, Bergman and Cocteau, the world of art, literature, life and dreams.
What interests me in the work of other theatre-makers is how a stage director can tell a story about love, for example, or war using a distinctive voice. I see each performance as a book, an encyclopaedia with many layers that can be read in multiple ways. One person may merely consider the story or the aesthetic quality, while another will probe the deeper layers. Opera as an art form automatically encompasses that multiplicity of layers.
Nowadays, we can’t simply put on the same operas that were produced in the past. It’s 2024; we are already a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. Often, you see the major opera houses still applying the aesthetics of thirty years ago, or longer. Those productions are all perfectly professional with great sets and impressive lighting, but the times have changed. We are currently living in the age of the quantum and artificial intelligence — our mindsets have changed. Art needs to offer an answer to this. I’m hungry for what I don’t know — for me, that is art. And that hunger is my starting point.”
Fidelio - an opera with a rich performance history
Beethoven only wrote one opera, one moreover which he never seemed to consider finished. That is evident from the various efforts the composer made to revise the opera after its world premiere. The opera’s subsequent performance history also shows it to be a work that invites creative treatment. Both the spoken texts and the music have provided the starting points for numerous innovative interpretations.
Fidelio - an opera with a rich performance history
Beethoven’s first and only opera had its premiere on 20 November 1805 in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, with the composer himself as the conductor. Barely one year later, Beethoven decided to revise the score. The premiere of this first new version of the opera was in the same theatre on 29 March 1806, again with the composer conducting the orchestra. The changes included replacing the original overture (nowadays known as the Leonore Overture No. 2) with a new one in C major (these days referred to as the Leonore Overture No. 3). But Beethoven was still not satisfied, and a second revised version of Fidelio (the title Beethoven himself had now embraced) had its inaugural performance on 23 May 1814 in Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. The new overture he wrote for this version is called the Fidelio Overture, in E major. After all the amendments, the opera ended up with two acts rather than the three of the original version.
Changes by conductors
Even after Beethoven’s own amendments, other conductors continued to tinker with his Fidelio. Attempts were soon made to reincorporate the impressive Leonore Overture No. 3, for instance. In Vienna in 1841, Otto Nicolai placed the overture before the second act, while Karl Anschütz used it as an intermezzo before the finale of the second act in 1849. This latter solution became something of a tradition after Gustav Mahler’s production of Fidelio in 1904. After his appointment as the director of the Hofopera in Vienna, Mahler was bold enough to make numerous changes to his Fidelio: he divided the first act into two scenes (the jailer’s room and the prison courtyard), he dropped Rocco’s ‘Gold’ aria and, as said, he inserted the third Leonore overture between the dungeon scene and the finale.
Other adaptations were tried too. In Leningrad in 1928, the overture was inserted after the trumpet signal while the performers removed their costumes, finishing the work as a “plastic oratorio composition”. The idea behind this was to express the difference between the Soviet people’s situation and a liberation by royal decree. The overture was even played as an orchestral piece after the finale — for example in the interpretation of Gottfried Wagner (Bonn 1977), and in the production by Yuri Lyubimov (Stuttgart 1986), where women dressed in black came onto the stage after the finale and lit candles for the prisoners held down in the dungeons, whereby the third Leonore overture served to end the performance with an open question, as it were.
Staging
Right from the early days, performances of Fidelio have taken an extremely wide variety of forms. The work has been subject to a great deal of experimentation, not only musically with changes to the score but also in terms of the staging. Like a chameleon, Fidelio has constantly adapted to the context in which the performances took place. In the 1920s, for instance, Beethoven’s Fidelio did not escape the rage for experimental freedom that reigned supreme in the opera world of those days. The 1930s saw a strong rejection of realistic interpretations of Fidelio, to be replaced by pseudo-romantic productions that added mystery to the story. In theatres in the German-speaking world, the Völkisch heroic movement dominated after 1933 and was particularly evident in interpretations of Fidelio. After the Second World War, the work’s characterisation as a ‘liberation opera’ took on a whole new meaning, thus showing how each era attaches its own connotations to this label. What is beyond doubt is that no other work of music theatre has been able to expose in its performances the lack of freedom in the society of the time quite so mercilessly or with such powerfully ethical pathos.
Scepticism about the libretto
Opera houses rarely choose to perform the first Leonore overture. One exception to this rule was the production of Fidelio in 2008 in Palais Garnier in Paris (conductor Sylvain Cambreling, director Johan Simons). This Parisian production was also notable for its scepticism regarding the original libretto, a tendency that is a recurring feature of recent performances of Fidelio. Modern productions are more likely than not to use new versions of the spoken parts. Even in Wieland Wagner’s pioneering Stuttgart production of Fidelio in 1954, which opened with the second Leonore overture and also contained the trio from the earlier versions, the dialogues were replaced by narrated textual intermezzos. In Wieland Wagner’s interpretation, an oratorical abstract setting was created to relieve the opera of its historical associations and thereby depoliticise it — a reaction to the performances of the opera in Nazi Germany.
Another noteworthy premiere of Fidelio is the Kassel production from 1968. The director Ulrich Melchinger, conductor Gerd Albrecht and set designer Thomas Richter-Forgach not only did away with sets, costumes and props, they also radically cut the score. The opening duet between Marzelline and Jaquino, and Rocco’s ‘Gold’ aria were removed, as were all dialogues and the melodramatic jail scene. The dialogues were replaced by twentieth-century poems by writers including Nelly Sachs, Apollinaire, Walter Bauer, Brecht, Jiří Orten and Henri Krea, dealing with topical political issues.
In his staging in Wuppertal in 1969, Kurt Horres decided his singers would only be singing and not speaking. The original dialogues became ‘inner monologues’ read out by actors, recorded onto an audiotape and then played back during the performance; the idea was they expressed the reactions and motives of the characters. In some productions, the spoken text was left out of the performance altogether with the aim of letting the emotional power of the music dominate the opera. That was the approach taken in the most recent Dutch production of Fidelio, by Nederlandse Reisopera in April 2023 (conductor Otto Tausk, director John Fulljames).
Revealing changes
Directors made no secret of their changes to Beethoven’s material. Various productions introduced a narrator, a device that emphasised the theatricality and drew the audiences’ attention to the staging interventions such as the addition of the third Leonore overture. That was the case for example in the above-mentioned production by Kurt Horres in Wuppertal, and in Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s interpretation in Bremen in 1974. Lehnhoff decided to install the narrator in the first row of the auditorium, from where he provided a commentary on what was happening on stage.
What this brief sketch of the performance history of Fidelio shows is that Andriy Zholdak’s radical treatment of Beethoven’s opera fits in with a long tradition of amendments and adaptations, a tradition that is as old as the work itself.
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