Ludwig von Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio, and it cost him so much vexation as he worked on it, and re-worked it, and re-worked it yet again, that he said he would never write another one. And he kept his word. The history and background of this work, therefore, is long and complicated, well beyond the scope of this post that focuses on just one chorus from the work. But here’s a brief overview:
We know that Beethoven was quite taken with the (supposed) ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and brotherhood. This rather diffuse and wayward event began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille prison, progressed through the establishment of the French Republic which rapidly devolved into the Reign of Terror, and then eventually resulted in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. By 1799 Napoleon had declared himself dictator, and he would be crowned Emperor 5 years later in 1804. By 1805 he was ruler of all Europe, including Austria. In the midst of all this drama and trauma Beethoven had become interested in a French play titled Léonore, ou l’Amour Conjugal (Leonora, or Marital Love). The play couldn’t be set to music directly, of course, so Beethoven needed a librettist. He also needed government approval in order for his opera to be staged publicly, and an opera set in France and having as its theme the evils of political oppression wasn’t going to fly with the Napoleonic government that was in place at the time. So the setting was shifted to Spain, and the emphasis was shifted to the heroine’s faithfulness to her imprisoned husband and away from that thorny issue of civil rights. There were three versions in the end: an unsuccessful 1805 three-act premier, then a trimmed-down two-act version the next year, and a final revision in 1814 as the Congress of Vienna was meeting to decide the future of post-Napoleonic Europe. This last included an additional choral ending that emphasized more clearly the significance of the newly liberated prisoners. That chorus, however, is not the subject of this article and is indeed never called the “Prisoners’ Chorus.” Instead, it’s the chorus at the end of Act I which describes only a brief liberation before the prisoners are hustled back into the prison which was given that title. And, speaking of titles, it is accepted practice to call only the final version of the opera Fidelio, with the earlier ones bearing the name of its heroine Leonora.