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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair
Overture to Fidelio, Op. 72
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, Sinfonia eroica
Ludwig van Beethoven
L
udwig van Beethoven seemed perpetually
stymied when it came to opera. At different
times he toyed with writing operas based on
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the medieval fairy tale
Melusine, a drama about ancient Rome titled
Vestas Feuer, and legends of the deceived knight
Bradamante and the questing scholar Faust.
The one opera he did manage to sink his talons
into and carry through to completion — and another completion, and yet another after that —
was the work he unveiled in 1805 under the title
Leonore and then transformed, by fits and
starts, into what is known today as Fidelio.
In the years immediately following the
French Revolution, theatrical plots involving
political oppression, daring rescues, and the
triumph of humanitarianism grew popular in
many European countries. The plot of Leonore /
Fidelio fit the bill perfectly. It involves a marriage rendered rocky not by spousal squabbling
but rather by the imposition of ominous political forces from the outside. Florestan has been
unjustly imprisoned by Don Pizarro (a nobleman in 18th-century Spain), but his devoted
wife, Leonore, manages to get a job in the
prison disguised as a boy, in which guise she
calls herself Fidelio. Don Pizarro decides to execute Florestan before the imminent arrival of
the Prime Minister and his virtuous prisoninspection team, but “Fidelio” intercedes and
holds him at bay with a pistol until the good
guys arrive — at which point Leonore (shedding
her disguise) and Florestan are reunited in their
marriage and Don Pizarro’s goose is cooked.
Leonore was not well received at its 1805 premiere and its run ended after three performances.
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IN SHORT
Born: Probably on December 16, 1770 (he was
baptized on the 17th), in Bonn, Germany
Died: March 26, 1827, in Vienna, Austria
Works composed and premiered: Fidelio
Overture, composed in May 1814, for the second
revision of the opera then known as Leonore,
newly recast as Fidelio; premiered May 26,
1814, at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, three
days after the opera’s premiere. The first
sketches for Symphony No. 3 date from summer
or fall 1802, most of the composition was carried
out in 1803, and the symphony was completed
in the spring of 1804, dedicated to the musicloving nobleman Prince Franz Joseph von
Lobkowitz; premiered at Prince Lobkowitz’s
palace in Vienna during the second half of 1804;
the first public performance took place on April 7,
1805, at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, with the
composer conducting.
New York Philharmonic premieres and
most recent performances: Fidelio Overture,
premiered November 19, 1859, Carl Bergmann,
conductor; most recent performance, July 19,
2014, at Bravo! Vail, in Colorado, Alan Gilbert,
conductor. Symphony No. 3, premiered on
February 18, 1843, Ureli Corelli Hill, conductor;
most recently performed, May 10, 2014, Bernard
Haitink, conductor
Estimated durations: Fidelio Overture, ca. 6
minutes; Symphony No. 3, ca. 50 minutes
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The work’s failure has often been attributed to
the fact that Vienna was being invaded by
Napoleonic forces just then and that many of the
city’s nobles and other opera-going types were
busy getting themselves out of town. The
Beethoven biographer Lewis Lockwood has
protested that “in fact, the audience at the first
performance was well stocked with French army
officers, but it may be that the opera was over
the heads of many listeners accustomed to
lighter stage works.” Indeed, Leonore was in part
a “lighter stage work”; one of its principal idiosyncrasies is that it grafts together a story of
heroic humanitarianism and an opéra comique
plot. In any case, Beethoven set about revising
the piece following its initial failure, and on
March 29, 1806, he introduced a truncated and
restructured version of Leonore. This fared
hardly better, and its run was cut short by an argument between the composer and the theater’s
management. When plans surfaced to revive the
work in 1814, Beethoven effected still further alterations and renamed the opera Fidelio. Finally
it was a hit, and it is in that final form that one
almost always finds it produced today.
Each of these versions sported a different overture. (Beethoven even composed yet
another overture, known today as the Leonore
Overture No. 1, for a performance that was
planned for Prague in 1807 but ended up not
taking place.) The so-called Fidelio Overture
was crafted specifically to introduce the 1814
version of the opera, and it was greeted with applause so enthusiastic that the composer was
called to take two bows before the action of the
opera proper could begin. Taut, tense, and dramatic, it serves as a splendid introduction, more
appropriate in that context than the longer,
weightier, and better-known Leonore Overture
No. 3, which threatened to overwhelm the ensuing action when it opened the opera back in
1806. Where the earlier Leonore Overtures had
been cast in the key of C major, corresponding
to the more momentous and heroic sections of
the action, the Fidelio Overture is set in the sunnier E major, which relates instead to the opera’s
lighthearted secondary plot. Unlike the earlier
Leonore Overtures, the Fidelio Overture does not
try to mimic the story line, and allusions to the
opera’s later music are minimal. Nonetheless,
its music foretells the opera’s spirit with power
and elegance from the orchestra’s opening fanfare, through sections of elegiac poignancy, to
a blazing conclusion.
A Deadline Not Met
Georg Friedrich Treitschke, the Kärntnertortheater stage manager who had a hand in reworking
the libretto for the 1814 version of Fidelio, related that several nights before the premiere
Beethoven suddenly started scribbling some musical sketches on the back of a dinner menu at the
Römischer Kaiser restaurant, commenting, “I have the idea for my Overture.” Ideas are one thing,
completed works another; in this case, the former failed to grow into the latter by opening night and
the overture Beethoven had penned several
years earlier as incidental music for the play
The Ruins of Athens was pressed into service instead. Beethoven later admitted, “The
people applauded, but I stood ashamed; it
did not belong to the rest.” Only at the second performance, three nights later, did the
new Fidelio Overture get its first hearing.
Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, fends off Don Pizarro
in Act III of Fidelio, as depicted here, in the ThéâtreLyrique production of 1860
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Listen for … a False Entrance?
The course of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony is quite unpredictable, and one of its quirks led
to an incident that must have been fearsome at the
time. Just before the recapitulation, Beethoven writes
what sounds like a false entrance for the horn, prefiguring immediately upcoming material but sounding dissonant against a chord being played just then
by the violins. An account by the composer’s pupil
Ferdinand Ries from the rehearsal states:
The first rehearsal of the symphony was terrible,
but the hornist did in fact come in on cue. I was
standing next to Beethoven and, believing that he
had made a wrong entrance, I said, “That damned
hornist! Can’t he count? It sounds frightfully wrong.”
I believe I was in danger of getting my ears boxed.
Beethoven did not forgive me for a long time.
Beethoven was a partisan of noble humanitarian principles, joining those who saw the democratic ideals of ancient Greece reflected in the
aspirations of Jacobins in post-Revolutionary
France. At the head of the Jacobins was
Napoleon Bonaparte, and Beethoven was
among the political idealists who viewed
Napoleon as a repository of hope for the social
enlightenment of humankind.
At the urging of the future King of Sweden,
Beethoven began contemplating a musical celebration of Napoleon as early as 1797. As his
sketches coalesced into Symphony No. 3,
Beethoven resolved not to simply dedicate his
composition to Napoleon, but to actually name
it after him. In the spring of 1804, just as
Beethoven completed his symphonic tribute,
A Change of Title
Beethoven’s original autograph score to his Symphony No. 3, with the title page he destroyed in rage, has disappeared, but the library of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde owns a copyist’s manuscript that the composer marked and used for conducting — and it tells a similar tale. Its title page originally read (in Italian)
Sinfonia grande intitolata Bonaparte del Sigr Louis van Beethoven (Grand Symphony titled Bonaparte by Mr.
Ludwig van Beethoven). But the words “titled Bonaparte” were erased with such vehemence that a gash
stands largely in their place. When
the piece was published, it was
presented as Sinfonia Eroica …
per festeggiare il sovvenire di un
grand Uomo (Heroic Symphony …
to Celebrate the Memory of a
Great Man), and the work’s dedication, originally intended for
Napoleon, was given over instead
to Beethoven’s patron Prince
Lobkowitz. It became a leitmotif in
Beethoven’s life that individuals
would fail to live up to his idealizations, and that the composer
would prefer Mankind in the abBeethoven’s conducting score, torn by furious erasing
stract to Man in the flesh.
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news arrived that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, that the standard-bearer of republicanism had seized power as an absolutist
dictator. It fell to Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand
Ries to inform the temperamental composer,
and to relate the scene (which must have occurred in May 1804) in a later biography:
Beethoven held [Napoleon] in extremely
high esteem at that time and compared him
to the greatest Roman consul. Both I and
several of his closer friends saw this symphony lying on his table, already copied out
in score; at the very top of the title-page was
the word “Buonaparte” and at the very bottom “Luigi van Beethoven” — and that was
all. Whether he intended to fill in the middle, and with what, I do not know. I was the
first one to bring him the news that Buonaparte had declared himself emperor —
whereupon he flew into a rage, shouting: “Is
even he nothing but an ordinary man! Now
he will also trample upon human rights and
become a slave to his own ambition; now he
will set himself above all other men and
become a tyrant.” Beethoven went to the
table, grabbed the top of the title-page, tore
it in two, and threw it to the floor. The first
page was re-written and the symphony was
then for the first time given the title of Sinfonia eroica.
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At first, critical response was guarded. On
February 13, 1805, readers of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung ingested this report:
The reviewer belongs to Herr van
Beethoven’s sincerest admirers, but in this
composition he must confess that he finds
too much that is glaring and bizarre, which
hinders greatly one’s grasp of the whole, and
a sense of unity is almost completely lost.
The same critic maintained that the piece “lasted
an entire hour.” Eroica was the longest symphony
ever written when it was unveiled, and listeners
and critics commented widely on that fact. “If I
write a symphony an hour long,” Beethoven is
said to have countered, “it will be found short
enough,” and he was proved right in the long
run. Opinion about the Third Symphony shifted
rapidly. By 1807 nearly all reactions to the piece
were favorable, or at least respectful, and critics were starting to make sense of its more radical elements and to accept it as one of the
summit achievements in all of music.
Instrumentation: Fidelio Overture calls for two
flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons,
four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, and strings. Symphony No. 3 employs two
flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons,
three horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.