Romance and the Romantics with Simon Rees

Beethoven, Liszt and the Romantic Imagination

Ludwig van Beethoven based his only opera, Fidelio, on a Romantic play by Jean-Nicholas Bouilly. It tells the story of a woman, Leonora, who rescues her husband Florestan from imprisonment and death by dressing as a boy and working for Rocco the turnkey, under the nose of the brutal and tyrannical jailer. The famous chorus ‘O welche Lust’, as the prisoners are let out for a brief glimpse of sunlight, and Leonore’s recitative and aria ‘Abscheulicher!’ are two of the greatest declarations of Romantic liberty. Franz Liszt was fascinated by Lord Byron’s poems, so much as to make a pilgrimage to Byron’s home at Newstead Abbey. He failed to write a Byronic opera, but much of his Années de Pèlerinage was based on Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, complete with quotations from the poem.

In the series:
May 14: Walter Scott’s Novels and Poems, and the Operas They Inspired
May 21: Beethoven, Liszt and the Romantic Imagination
May 28: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Constable and Turner – with a bit of Mendelssohn