Fun Facts

Fidelio is the only opera Beethoven completed, but throughout his life he experimented repeatedly with the form. Among the operatic subjects he considered were Macbeth, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Romulus and Remus (the mythological founders of Rome), and a libretto titled Vesta’s Fire by Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist for Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Today, Beethoven is remembered primarily as a composer, but when he first moved to Vienna, he was known for his remarkable skill as a pianist. To make a name for himself in the Austrian capital, he engaged in a number of piano contests with other noted virtuosi (a common event at social gatherings at the time). One competitor, Abbé Joseph Gelinek, was so impressed by Beethoven’s playing that he jokingly remarked that Beethoven “must be in league with the devil.”

Beethoven was known to heavily edit and revise his works during the composition process. While writing the first version of Fidelio, he rewrote the first scene’s quartet nearly a dozen times. As for Leonore and Florestan’s Act II duet, it was a revised version of a duet Beethoven had drafted for an opera (that never came to fruition) about Alexander the Great in India.

Librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly claimed that his opera Léonore was based on real events that he had personally witnessed in the French city of Tours during the Reign of Terror. What he didn’t add was that during the Revolution he had worked as a public prosecutor, a job that included stifling counter-revolutionary activities. Thus, while Bouilly may have felt that he was on the side of good, from another perspective he was more like Fidelio’s repressive Don Pizarro than the noble Florestan.