Chapter Six - Vestas Feuer: Beethoven on the Path to Leonore

Summary

Clinging all his life to an improbable dream of operatic success, Beethovenachieved it only once, with Fidelio in 1814—thethird version of the opera he had originally written asLeonore in 1805 and revised in 1806. All his otherdramatic projects remained mirages, though some were vivid, since he wasnever able to develop any of the operatic subjects that he soughtindependently or those that were urged on him by his friends andacquaintances. His letters and conversation books contain various referencesto operatic ideas, some of them matched by brief musical jottings in hissketchbooks. But aside from Leonore the only operatic scenethat he ever actually set to music in essentially complete form was thefirst scene of Emanuel Schikaneder’s Vestas Feuer,written in late 1803 before he gave up the project and began work onLeonore.

How should we understand Beethoven’s lifelong hope of writing operas,only once fulfilled? It is a commonplace that his only finished work centerson a faithful and courageous wife who saves her imprisoned husband. Thisidealistic theme fit well with Beethoven’s high moral standard foroperatic plots and, on the personal side, his obsessive fantasy, equallyunfulfilled, of what an ideal woman might do for him if he could achieve alasting relationship.

But opera was uncomfortable terrain for him, and he knew it. Immersed in hiswork and career, in later years increasingly deaf, sick, isolated, andeccentric, he always understood that instrumental music was his naturalhabitat, the domain in which he was free to develop his creative powers tothe fullest. He could write effective vocal music, both secular and sacred,solo and choral, to keep his hand in or to satisfy occasional commissions,but he was never able to put his highest artistry into lieder until he cameto write the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte in 1815, norinto sacred music until the monumental Missa solemnis in1819–23. As for stage music, he could compose overtures and sometimesincidental music for spoken dramas, such as Coriolanus, Egmont, KingStephen, and The Ruins of Athens, for theseprojects enabled him to elaborate his dramatic imagination without becomingentangled in the constraints of opera.