I'm listening to Fidelio now on his radio, and felt inspired to read some reviews on it.
Now those famous bars proclaim the opening of Beethoven's one and only opera, Fidelio—one of his greatest works, containing some of the most glorious music ever conceived by a mortal, one of the most cherished and revered of all operas, a timeless monument to love, life, and liberty, a celebration of human rights, of freedom to speak out, to dissent. It's a political manifesto against tyranny and oppression, a hymn to the beauty and sanctity of marriage, an exalted affirmation of faith in God as the ultimate human resource. All of those, and more, are Beethoven's Fidelio.....
http://www.leonardbernstein.com/ypc_...on_of_life.htm
The Music of Fidelio
When I look back across my entire life, I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced on me.
— Wagner on seeing a performance of Fidelio
Beethoven was not a facile composer; virtually everything he wrote was accompanied by tremendous, sometimes monumental effort. We can easily see this when we look at existent manuscripts and sketch books from the composer's hand. The surfaces are often covered with erasure marks, cross-hatching, passages hidden by solid ink blots and disconnected notes flying from one end of the page to the other. It often took years for him to complete a symphony, sonata or string quartet, to say nothing of Fidelio which was the result of a twelve-year creative process, at the end of which the composer had still not produced a single, definitive version of the work.
Whether by accident or purposeful calculation, this sense of struggle is communicated in the music of Fidelio to a great degree. Surely all of the classic elements that we recognize as being peculiar to Beethoven are present in the score: heightened emotion, syncopation and heavily accented weak beats, a sense of equality amongst all of the sections of the orchestra, a motivic rather than a melodic approach to musical development and an overall sense of craggy individualism, the singular artist battling against all odds for meaning and understanding. One will find all of these Beethovenian hallmarks in nearly every one of the composer's mature works. These style characteristics were surely enhanced by his gradual deafness, a handicap that must have underscored the sense of isolation that he already experienced due to his unique personality. ...
https://www.sdopera.com/Content/Oper...elio/Music.htm
Now those famous bars proclaim the opening of Beethoven's one and only opera, Fidelio—one of his greatest works, containing some of the most glorious music ever conceived by a mortal, one of the most cherished and revered of all operas, a timeless monument to love, life, and liberty, a celebration of human rights, of freedom to speak out, to dissent. It's a political manifesto against tyranny and oppression, a hymn to the beauty and sanctity of marriage, an exalted affirmation of faith in God as the ultimate human resource. All of those, and more, are Beethoven's Fidelio.....
http://www.leonardbernstein.com/ypc_...on_of_life.htm
The Music of Fidelio
When I look back across my entire life, I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced on me.
— Wagner on seeing a performance of Fidelio
Beethoven was not a facile composer; virtually everything he wrote was accompanied by tremendous, sometimes monumental effort. We can easily see this when we look at existent manuscripts and sketch books from the composer's hand. The surfaces are often covered with erasure marks, cross-hatching, passages hidden by solid ink blots and disconnected notes flying from one end of the page to the other. It often took years for him to complete a symphony, sonata or string quartet, to say nothing of Fidelio which was the result of a twelve-year creative process, at the end of which the composer had still not produced a single, definitive version of the work.
Whether by accident or purposeful calculation, this sense of struggle is communicated in the music of Fidelio to a great degree. Surely all of the classic elements that we recognize as being peculiar to Beethoven are present in the score: heightened emotion, syncopation and heavily accented weak beats, a sense of equality amongst all of the sections of the orchestra, a motivic rather than a melodic approach to musical development and an overall sense of craggy individualism, the singular artist battling against all odds for meaning and understanding. One will find all of these Beethovenian hallmarks in nearly every one of the composer's mature works. These style characteristics were surely enhanced by his gradual deafness, a handicap that must have underscored the sense of isolation that he already experienced due to his unique personality. ...
https://www.sdopera.com/Content/Oper...elio/Music.htm
I must get the Bernstein DVD sometime.
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