With the start of the eighteen hundreds opera went in two different directions. The previous century had seen the genre still dominated by the Italian tradition – for all their innovation Mozart’s three da Ponte works, Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, still adhere to the Italian language and operatic style, however, with his final stage work Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute], the composer returned to his native language and to the alternation of speech and music that characterised the German singspiel.
Fourteen years after the premiere of The Magic Flute (1791) Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio (1805), was given its first performance. Like the Mozart it was in German and a singspiel, but there any resemblance between the two ends…
Ludwig van Beethoven:
Fidelio, Op. 72
The canonic quartet:
The villain, Don Pizarro, plans the murder of Florestan:
Florestan, in the deepest dungeon, laments his fate while remembering happier times:
The lovers are reunited:
The triumph of good over evil and liberty over political oppression:
You can watch the whole opera by clicking on Fidelio.
Fidelio in its use of the vernacular and its structure, established a new benchmark for German speaking composers, marking a departure from the bel canto of Italy that was eventually to lead to the works of Wagner and his followers.
Eleven years later a slightly younger composer by the name of Gioachino Rossini, who was to write 39 operas (as compared to Beethoven’s one) had the first performance in Rome of what was to be his most famous opera, a ‘prequel’ of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Il barbiere di Siviglia [The Barber of Seville]. The bel canto style was far from moribund! But that’s for next week…
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The Art of Listening 