seldom visits our concert halls.

Otherwise the principal productions of these years include a quantity of the brightest jewels in Beethoven’s crown. Leaving aside the chamber music, which we prefer to consider by itself, they comprise the opera Fidelio and the three “Leonore” Overtures written in connection with it; the Violin Concerto (which the composer also arranged as a sort of piano concerto); and the “Coriolanus” Overture.

Fidelio, which Beethoven originally called Leonore, was begun in 1804. A child of sorrow to its composer, it was not to achieve the form in which we now know it till 1814. In the odd century and a half of its existence it has been attacked for countless reasons in spite of which it lives on with an incredible tenacity and obstinately refuses to die. It has been reproached for being poor theater, undramatic, unvocal, patchy, and countless other things. The book, originally adapted from Leonore, ou l’amour conjugale, by the Frenchman, Bouilly, and translated into German by Joseph Sonnleithner, was cast into its definitive form by Friedrich Treitschke. For a variety of reasons the work failed when it was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in November 1805. A bold attempt at revision the following season did not manage to keep it afloat and it was not till eight years later that the composer, with the clever dramatic surgery of Treitschke, made a final attempt to salvage it. Just how drastic were the alterations that the composer and librettist made in the piece can best be appreciated by those who have had the opportunity to examine the reconstruction of the original version which Erich Prieger published in 1905 on the occasion of the centenary of the work. From this it can be seen that not only have entirely new musical numbers supplanted the old but the opera (or rather Singspiel) has been reduced from its original three acts to two and that the dramaturgy betrays a vastly more experienced hand. The musical changes and condensations of Beethoven have, in their way, been no less thorough.

Far from being bad theater or unoperatic as sometimes charged, Fidelio is basically one of the most dramatic and profoundly moving masterpieces the lyric theater can show. The 1805 version lacked a number of its most striking musical features. The original, for example, shows no trace of the great outburst, Abscheulicher, which introduces Leonore’s tremendous scena in the first act; and in the second, Florestan’s dungeon air lacks its present “Und spür ich nicht holde, sanft säuselnde Duft,” which took the place of the long-winded bravura phrases the composer originally gave the presumably starving prisoner to sing. Even the present touching close of the dungeon episode was originally quite different.

It has often been claimed that the previous “failure” of the work so discouraged the composer that his operatic achievements ended then and there. As a matter of fact, Beethoven to the end of his days never gave up his search for another libretto. That he never found it was due to the very special slant of his requirements. As for the “unvocal” character of his writing for voices, it is necessary to remember that, for all the opera’s undeniable exactions, generations of great dramatic singers have repeatedly triumphed in the chief roles of Fidelio.

Beethoven composed four overtures to his opera—the three so-called “Leonore” Overtures in C and the one in E major, known as the “Fidelio” Overture. The last-named was written in 1814 for Treitschke’s new version of the piece. It is the slightest of them all and is the one that invariably prefaces performances of the opera. For years controversies have raged as to the order in which the “Leonore” Overtures were written and for what reason one supplanted the other. The Second Leonore was the first used to preface the drama at its 1805 hearing; the Third introduced the 1806 revision. Theories have been bandied about for generations to account for the First Overture, which was issued as Opus 138 only some years after the composer’s death. The researches of Dr. Joseph Braunstein in his exhaustive study Beethovens Leonore-Ouvertüren, eine historischstilkritische Untersuchung have settled the problem for us. The overtures were composed in the order of their numbering. “Leonore” No. 1 was found too light for its purpose and, after a private try-out, was discarded before being publicly performed. “Leonore” No. 2, less polished and formally perfect than the more structural and popular No. 3, ranks if anything as more dramatic, modern, and powerful, even if it does lack the brilliantly jubilant coda that is the particular glory of No. 3. Neither of these two, however, is a wholly well-conceived introduction to Fidelio, for the reason that both overpower the opera as a whole and might almost be said to render the drama superfluous. Actually, a Fidelio representation profits by the omission of all the “Leonore” Overtures, though practically every audience these days expects the “Leonore” No. 3 quite as a matter of course and ordinarily gets it as a sort of interlude between the dungeon and the concluding scenes.

A word as to the “Fidelio” Overture of 1814, which has none of the features of the “Leonore” tone poems, either thematically or otherwise. It is more in the character of a Singspiel overture and has as good as no dramatic connection with the opera itself—no reference to Florestan’s dungeon song nor to the off-stage fanfare of the rescue scene; yet it leads quite properly into the light moods of the opening episodes of the chattering Marzelline and Jacquino in the first scene and does not, like the Second and Third “Leonore,” completely overweight the remainder of the score. At that, it is structurally and otherwise fully worthy of its composer and is a more logical adjunct to Fidelio than any one of the “Leonore” Overtures. Actually, it is a good deal more interesting in its own right than the average person imagines and merits far closer study than it ordinarily receives.

The “Coriolanus” Overture virtually coincides, in point of time, with the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies. One of its creator’s most striking, yet economically fashioned works, it is in no way related to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as has frequently been imagined, but was derived from a Coriolanus tragedy by Heinrich von Collin. Yet many (including Richard Wagner) have interpreted it in terms of Shakespeare’s drama, the basic emotional pattern of which it can suggest.

Symphony No. 7, in A Major, Opus 92

After the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Beethoven let several years pass without giving the world another, though he continued to compose diligently in spite of uncertain health and ever-increasing deafness. At length, in 1812, he finished two symphonies, which were probably played in private for the first time at the house of the Archduke Rudolph in Vienna on April 20, 1813. He was unable, however, to obtain a public performance for either of them till the Seventh Symphony was given in the great hall of the University of Vienna on December 8 of the same year.

Beethoven himself spoke of this work as his “most excellent” symphony, an opinion that not a few have echoed. He composed it in all the exuberance of his creative maturity, and each of its four movements brims over with the fiery essence of his inspiration. The listener is overpowered by the very lavishness of its beauty. In this symphony you feel Beethoven’s genius as something inexhaustible, glorying in its own titanic power, as of a high god ignoring lesser breeds, proud