Beethoven's Fidelio A Short Guide to a Great Opera

Beethoven's opera Fidelio, for Mahler 'the opera of operas', celebrated the ostensible ideals of the French Revolution and of the dramatist Schiller, who maintained that tragic art should represent morality resisting suffering. Fidelio's Prisoners' chorus and its story portray liberation from darkness into light. With the Moonlight and Pathétique sonatas behind him, Fidelio was premiered in 1805, the year of his Third Symphony (Eroica) and of Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz. The heroine Leonore was the 'ideal woman', the virtuous wife, just like the Countess Josephine Brunsvik whom B.