The pandemic is celebrating its second birthday, Austria is in chaos over movement restrictions for the unvaccinated, and this profile is at risk of sliding into the territory of a curated Instagram timeline.
That said, since we’re already talking about Vienna and a country that has always mass-produced, let’s say, robust political options (and no, I don’t mean Arnold Schwarzenegger), on November 20, 1805, Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, was performed for the first time.
Why is this relevant?
Because it interests me – but also because Beethoven believed that by listening to (his) music, a person could free themselves from misery. And perhaps find inspiration in these times of troubling social divisions.
Fidelio brought together the great composer’s ideals: love of freedom and of one’s fellow human beings, integrity, personal sacrifice, and heroism. In the opera, a woman risks her life to save her husband, a political prisoner (which is why the opera was also known as The Triumph of Marital Love). Seen through this lens, Fidelio stops being a romantic opera and reveals itself as a work about political imprisonment, resistance, and the moral courage to defy unjust power – themes Beethoven understood not abstractly, but personally.
Thomas Mann, a German novelist in exile during Nazism, would later write: “How much apathy must have been required for someone in Nazi Germany to listen to Fidelio and not run out of the hall, their face buried in their hands!”
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Beethoven achieved global fame in Vienna, but with time, he went deaf and withdrew into isolation. Depressed, he nearly took his own life. In the end, what saved him were long walks in nature and the decision that he would nevertheless “defy fate.”
His struggle with himself and his will to live triumphed in a series of symphonies, the most famous of which is the Ninth Symphony.
Into it, he incorporated Schiller’s Ode to Joy, celebrating the “brotherhood and unity” of humankind.
The Ode to Joy would go on to become the European anthem, but also an anthem of the oppressed around the world: Chileans overthrowing Pinochet, Chinese students standing before tanks at Tiananmen Square, Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At its premiere in 1824, Beethoven sat in front of the orchestra with his back to the audience. Deaf, he turned the pages of the score, trying to imagine sounds he could no longer hear.
When the symphony ended, he turned toward the audience. It was then – in their eyes and in their applause – that he understood what he had created.
It was his last public appearance.
After everything, he told Schiller: “To do good wherever we can, to love freedom above all else… what more could a person wish for?”
