11:00 am | Nationaltheater

FIDELIO

Ludwig van Beethoven

Opera

Opera

FIDELIO

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Libretto by Joseph Sonnleithner after the amendments by Georg Friedrich Treitschke after Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's libretto Léonore, ou L'Amour conjugal.


Opera in two acts (1814)

Coproduction with the English National Opera

recommended for 16 years and older

In German. With German and English surtitles.

BMW GLOBAL Partner

Dressed as a man and calling herself “Fidelio”, Leonore surreptitiously gains the confidence of the jailer Rocco and his daughter Marzelline, thus gaining access to the high security tract where her husband Florestan has been despotically incarcerated by Don Pizarro. Florestan is in mortal danger, but this does not intimidate his wife, who is determined to liberate him. Finally, however, the two of them can only be rescued by an emissary from the monarch. At the end, a Utopia in the form of a final chorus sets the stage aglow, not only as a plea for freedom and justice, but also concurrently as a condemnation of the anxieties and restrictions of human existence.


Beethoven had several plans for operatic compositions, but he only managed to realize one of these projects: in a decades-long process of creativity and rewriting, inspired by a French work entitled Léonore or Marital Loyalty by composer Pierre Gaveaux and librettist Jean Nicolas Bouilly, which was in turn based on a real event from the epoch of the French Revolution, Beethoven crafted his only opera, Fidelio – a musical cross-over between a light opera and a grandiose theatrical symphony.