× Upcoming Events Salute to our Partners Thank you to our Donors Campus Maps Ticket Information Support Us Education Rentals Enhance Your Experience Board and Council Staff Past Events
Home Salute to our Partners Thank you to our Donors Campus Maps Ticket Information Support Us Education Rentals Enhance Your Experience Board and Council Staff
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b (1806)

The most famous of the four overtures that Beethoven wrote for his lone opera Fidelio, the so-called Leonore Overture No. 3, summarizes in the space of some 13 minutes the dramatic and emotional trajectory of the entire opera, from the dark depths of the orchestra to the ultimate triumph of the thrilling coda. In the midst of the Overture a trumpet sounds from the distance, just as it will in the crucial scene near the end of the opera announcing the arrival of the enlightened minister Don Fernando that secures freedom for the unjustly imprisoned political hero Florestan. The urgency of the Overture, especially of this signal of liberation, resonates with Beethoven’s own deeply held political beliefs.

Throughout his career, Beethoven was a fervent believer in Enlightenment values and found various ways to express them in his music, as he did in letters and other writings. He grew up during the American and French revolutions and experienced war firsthand when Napoleon’s troops invaded Vienna in 1805 and 1809. His first large composition, written at the age of 19, was an impressive 40-minute cantata for chorus, orchestra, and soloists commemorating the death of Emperor Joseph II, who had done a great deal to liberalize the Austrian empire in the 1780s. Enlightenment ideals would later find expression in the political messages of Fidelio, Egmont, and the larger humanistic vision of the Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven in fact recycled some of the Joseph Cantata music years later in Fidelio, a work he struggled with for years. The opera’s premiere in November 1805 (with the Leonore Overture No. 2) was unsuccessful for various reasons, some artistic and some political. For one thing, Napoleon’s troops had just invaded the city and they accounted for much of the audience. Beethoven revised the opera the next year, shortening its three acts to two, and for the new production wrote the Third Leonore Overture, a recasting of the earlier one, which also contains the trumpet call. (He wrote the First Leonore Overture in 1807, probably for a planned production in Prague that never materialized.)

In 1814, when Beethoven was at the height of his popular and critical success, he revised the opera yet again and wrote yet another overture, this one quite short, omitting the trumpet call, and, unlike the previous three, without any direct musical allusions to melodies in the opera. The most likely reason Beethoven ultimately substituted the Fidelio Overture that opens the opera as we know it today is that the Leonore Third in particular does such an effective job of conveying the dramatic sweep of the opera in purely orchestral terms—he may have felt it lessened the power of the following theatrical representation. Donald Francis Tovey, the brilliant English music critic, argued that the revision of the Overture “profited in a fatal way, which raised it to one of the greatest instrumental works in existence, and at the same time ensured that it would absolutely kill the first act … it is about ten times as dramatic as anything that could possibly be put on the stage.”

Beethoven’s opera is today the best known of the once popular genre of “rescue operas.” Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, apprentices herself to the jailer, Rocco, in the hope that she will be able to free her husband, Florestan, an unjustly condemned political prisoner. Although she is not even sure he is still alive, she heroically risks her life to save his. On orders from the evil Pizarro, she and Rocco descend to the dungeon to kill Florestan, but she reveals her identity, to the amazement of everyone, just as he is to die. At this moment the trumpet sounds in the distance, indicating the arrival of Don Fernando. It later became the custom in many productions of Fidelio, popularized by Mahler, Toscanini, and other conductors, to insert the Leonore Third Overture at this point. (In some instances, the addition serves the practical purpose of filling time as the scenery changes from the dungeon to the triumphal concluding scene outdoors where evil is exposed, Florestan liberated, and Leonore praised.)

The Overture begins with a slow descending scale that may relate in some way to Florestan’s imprisonment; in any case, out of this follows a theme alluding to his aria “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” (In the springtime of my life), in which he sings of the price he paid for speaking the truth and envisions an angel resembling Leonore leading him to freedom in heaven. This theme is transformed later in the Overture, in the allegro section, and yet again in the triumphant presto coda that concludes the work. The trumpet call interrupts twice in the middle of the development section, separated by music derived from what the thankful Leonore and Florestan sing immediately after the trumpet announcing their salvation at the end of the first scene of act 2 (“Ach! Du bist gerettet! Grosser Gott!” [Ah! You are saved! Almighty God!]). A thrilling coda brings the Overture to a triumphant close.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b (1806)

The most famous of the four overtures that Beethoven wrote for his lone opera Fidelio, the so-called Leonore Overture No. 3, summarizes in the space of some 13 minutes the dramatic and emotional trajectory of the entire opera, from the dark depths of the orchestra to the ultimate triumph of the thrilling coda. In the midst of the Overture a trumpet sounds from the distance, just as it will in the crucial scene near the end of the opera announcing the arrival of the enlightened minister Don Fernando that secures freedom for the unjustly imprisoned political hero Florestan. The urgency of the Overture, especially of this signal of liberation, resonates with Beethoven’s own deeply held political beliefs.

Throughout his career, Beethoven was a fervent believer in Enlightenment values and found various ways to express them in his music, as he did in letters and other writings. He grew up during the American and French revolutions and experienced war firsthand when Napoleon’s troops invaded Vienna in 1805 and 1809. His first large composition, written at the age of 19, was an impressive 40-minute cantata for chorus, orchestra, and soloists commemorating the death of Emperor Joseph II, who had done a great deal to liberalize the Austrian empire in the 1780s. Enlightenment ideals would later find expression in the political messages of Fidelio, Egmont, and the larger humanistic vision of the Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven in fact recycled some of the Joseph Cantata music years later in Fidelio, a work he struggled with for years. The opera’s premiere in November 1805 (with the Leonore Overture No. 2) was unsuccessful for various reasons, some artistic and some political. For one thing, Napoleon’s troops had just invaded the city and they accounted for much of the audience. Beethoven revised the opera the next year, shortening its three acts to two, and for the new production wrote the Third Leonore Overture, a recasting of the earlier one, which also contains the trumpet call. (He wrote the First Leonore Overture in 1807, probably for a planned production in Prague that never materialized.)

In 1814, when Beethoven was at the height of his popular and critical success, he revised the opera yet again and wrote yet another overture, this one quite short, omitting the trumpet call, and, unlike the previous three, without any direct musical allusions to melodies in the opera. The most likely reason Beethoven ultimately substituted the Fidelio Overture that opens the opera as we know it today is that the Leonore Third in particular does such an effective job of conveying the dramatic sweep of the opera in purely orchestral terms—he may have felt it lessened the power of the following theatrical representation. Donald Francis Tovey, the brilliant English music critic, argued that the revision of the Overture “profited in a fatal way, which raised it to one of the greatest instrumental works in existence, and at the same time ensured that it would absolutely kill the first act … it is about ten times as dramatic as anything that could possibly be put on the stage.”

Beethoven’s opera is today the best known of the once popular genre of “rescue operas.” Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, apprentices herself to the jailer, Rocco, in the hope that she will be able to free her husband, Florestan, an unjustly condemned political prisoner. Although she is not even sure he is still alive, she heroically risks her life to save his. On orders from the evil Pizarro, she and Rocco descend to the dungeon to kill Florestan, but she reveals her identity, to the amazement of everyone, just as he is to die. At this moment the trumpet sounds in the distance, indicating the arrival of Don Fernando. It later became the custom in many productions of Fidelio, popularized by Mahler, Toscanini, and other conductors, to insert the Leonore Third Overture at this point. (In some instances, the addition serves the practical purpose of filling time as the scenery changes from the dungeon to the triumphal concluding scene outdoors where evil is exposed, Florestan liberated, and Leonore praised.)

The Overture begins with a slow descending scale that may relate in some way to Florestan’s imprisonment; in any case, out of this follows a theme alluding to his aria “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” (In the springtime of my life), in which he sings of the price he paid for speaking the truth and envisions an angel resembling Leonore leading him to freedom in heaven. This theme is transformed later in the Overture, in the allegro section, and yet again in the triumphant presto coda that concludes the work. The trumpet call interrupts twice in the middle of the development section, separated by music derived from what the thankful Leonore and Florestan sing immediately after the trumpet announcing their salvation at the end of the first scene of act 2 (“Ach! Du bist gerettet! Grosser Gott!” [Ah! You are saved! Almighty God!]). A thrilling coda brings the Overture to a triumphant close.

—Christopher H. Gibbs