A young man sits in the stalls of the opera, in the middle of a performance of Fidelio, at the parkett level. Beside him sits another man whom he finds likable and perhaps would like to get to know better. In other words, it’s an unremarkable moment—until a mysterious force seizes his body and hurls him high into the air. With extraordinary velocity he is flung diagonally toward the far end of the stalls, where he reflexively claps his own mouth and ends up pulling out two teeth. A striking, yet still enigmatic scene. For Sigmund Freud, the matter was clear: his patient was homosexual.
The dream served as an indication of a repressed libido: with Beethoven’s Fidelio guiding the way to another work by the same composer, the Ode to Joy. In that piece, Schiller’s words accompany a latent homoerotic male friendship as a “great leap.” The verbal analogy to the literal “throw” experience in the dream stood, in the eyes of the father of psychoanalysis, as proof to decipher his client’s unacknowledged same-sex desire. It is notable that Freud, in his dream analysis, did not further comment on the action unfolding on stage.
Same-sex betrothal right in the very first scene
Yet Freud could have reinforced his thesis simply by focusing on Fidelio’s glittering starting premise. For in Beethoven’s opera, the very first scene centers on nothing other than a same-sex betrothal: a woman has fallen head over heels in love with another woman. Marzelline desires Leonore. The upcoming marriage is announced, thus sealing the wedding night—at least in the audience’s mind, the moment where things really get intimate, especially in the imagination of spectators.
It’s hard to imagine anyone not having visions of those images immediately after the opening scene, even though—or perhaps precisely because—Leonore has assumed the male identity Fidelio in order to rescue her imprisoned husband, Florestan, for political reasons. Her role as the jailer, she embodies with utmost commitment: in her introductory appearance she hefts a heavy load of forged iron chains to secure the prisoners. Rocco even admonishes her to avoid overburdening herself.
Queer feelings overwhelm Marzelline
If only she didn’t sing soprano! A deeper female vocal range might have made it easier to justify Marzelline’s naive fall for Fidelio’s ruse. One must contend instead that the daughter of the jailer “loves Fidelio because she secretly knows that ‘he’ is actually a woman,” as Slavoj Žižek provocatively suggested in his work The Second Death of Opera.
To extend the thought: it is likely the very butch demeanor of a different woman that excites Marzelline enough to give Jaquino the cold shoulder. It soon becomes evident that even he suspects his beloved’s true sexual preference. In the rivalry with Marzelline’s new romance, he has no weapon to keep pace—and resigns, conceding defeat without a serious attempt to win his beloved.
The tensions are enormous: not only is the spurned suitor confused, but the rival herself, who already crosses genders in her demeanor, has no erotic or identity-based motive in mind. Marzelline herself is unsettled by what she experiences. Her feelings for Fidelio feed her lust even as they constrict her heart.
“I feel so wonderful”
In the famous quartet, which is regarded as a musical apex of the opera, the helplessness of all involved is expressed as a canon. Beethoven’s time attributed to the adjective wunderbar also the meaning of wundersam or uncanny. Marzelline, Fidelio, Rocco, and Jaquino each sing the same melody—what unites them is a shared sense of insecurity about their personal relationships. That they are all driven by distinct motives and feelings, and practically talk past one another, becomes apparent not only in their monologues and staggered entrances of voices, but also in the varied instrumentations.
Direct link | Moving: Lucia Popp as lovestruck Marzelline |
It is reasonable to assume Beethoven did not deliberately center Marzelline’s sexual longing in the opera—if he even had any such aim. The exploration of the human psyche with all its contradictions did not rank highest for him. Instead he cherished “something moral, uplifting.” He would never parrot the “vulgar texts” and frivolities that Mozart often put to music; Beethoven was determined not to indulge in that.
Three revisions and two gender switches in the title
Thus the revolutions-opera genre suited him perfectly. It authorized him to subordinate the multi-layered motivations of the characters to universal Enlightenment ideals. In terms of musical dramaturgy, the chorus of prisoners longing for freedom proved the most convincing. On their promenade, they sing with such poignancy that it becomes clear these men are unjustly imprisoned: “Oh, what pleasure.”
Direct link | “Oh what pleasure”: excerpt from a Fidelio production at the Metropolitan Opera |
The high standards Beethoven set for himself did not make Fidelio an easy project. For his commission, he chose the French libretto Léonore ou L’amour conjugal by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, which Pierre Gaveaux had already set as an opera in 1798. Beethoven aimed to surpass that work in musical quality. He labored for a full two years on an initial draft. After the disappointing 1805 premiere, the final version of 1814—which achieved the hoped-for success—went through three revisions and two gender changes in the title. From Leonore, it briefly became Fidelio again, as he had originally planned—but even so, Beethoven was far from completely satisfied with his sole opera.
Given his stubborn refinement of the literary source and his conspicuous lack of irony, the motif of Marzelline’s unfulfilled desire appears more serious than ever. She stands out as the only character denied a happy ending. What remains for her is the memory of a passionate chapter that fundamentally unsettled her self-conception. That Beethoven, perhaps unintentionally, wrote one of the earliest operas about identity, desire, and freedom makes Fidelio feel impressively modern to this day.
This text is a slightly revised version of the 2019 opera guide “Casta Diva” published by Querverlag.
