Fidelio

As Florestan wanted to expose Don Pizarro's brutal and lawless despotism, the latter had imprisoned him in a state prison run by him out of revenge, where Florestan was forced to vegetate under inhumane conditions.

In order to free him, his wife Leonore, disguised as a man under the name Fidelio, hires herself out as a jailer. And Leonore actually manages to prevent the planned murder of her husband by Pizarro at the last moment. And so the just minister, who arrives at the prison for inspection purposes, is able to set his friend Florestan and all the other political prisoners free again.

Director Nikolaus Habjan has staged Beethoven's only opera to be premiered in Vienna and created a timeless view of the work that stands above a specific era. In this production, Leonore and Florestan are each doubled by a puppet, split, as it were, into an inner life, an expression of the soul and an outer figure. Leonore's agonizing state of tension between intense emotionality and the pressure to conceal her true identity is thus made clear. "If you think about what Beethoven wanted with his works, you always come across a great idealization. And such an idealization stands above a specific epoch. That's why I want to create something that is ultimately independent of time. The less I try to set the plot in a narrow, temporally or politically precise situation, the more timeless the work becomes. It's about the big themes that Beethoven deals with, and you can understand them quite clearly without using a historical frame of reference." (Nikolaus Habjan)

In some respects, Beethoven's Fidelio is still strongly rooted in the traditional Singspiel world, but at the same time points far into the future in terms of its emotionality and affinity to music drama. Not least in such unique passages as Florestan's feverishly visionary dungeon aria, Leonore's haunting invocation of hope, Pizarro's cruelly triumphant "Ha, what a moment!", the multi-layered, precious, floating quartet "Mir ist so wunderbar" and finally the frenetically erupting jubilant chorus at the end.

Ludwig van Beethoven completed only one opera, Fidelio, but in three versions: first, Joseph Sonnleithner, director of the Theater an der Wien, translated and adapted Pierre Gaveaux's and Jean Nicolas' French rescue opera Léonore, ou L'Amour conjugal into German. Beethoven set this libretto to music and premiered it in 1805 under the title Fidelio. A year later, the first revision was published as Leonore, and finally in 1814 the last version, the version commonly used today, was published as Fidelio. Fidelio was deliberately chosen for the reopening of the Vienna State Opera after its destruction in the Second World War - as a symbol of hope, brotherhood and freedom regained after the Nazi dictatorship.