Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces by Laura Tunbridge

Author:Laura Tunbridge [Tunbridge, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, music, Individual Composer & Musician, Genres & Styles, Classical
ISBN: 9780300257977
Google: x0YAEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-10-26T00:24:29.065523+00:00

6. Liberty: Fidelio, op. 72 (1814)

In celebration of the allied armies’ very recent victory over Napoleon in France, on 11 April 1814 there was a performance at Vienna’s Kärtnertortheater of Die gute Nachricht (The Good News). Bruno, a local landlord, has promised his daughter Hannchen’s hand in marriage to whoever brings the longed-for news that Paris has fallen. Fortunately for Hannchen, her beloved Robert beats his rival by using her father’s white dove to deliver the message to the villagers, who break into song: ‘Germania! Germania!’

Die gute Nachricht had been hastily devised by playwright Georg Friedrich Treitschke. It is a Singspiel, a type of German opera with spoken dialogue, and, appropriately, was a display of Viennese musical talents, with arrangements of numbers by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Joseph Weigl, Adalbert Gyrowetz, Friedrich August Kanne, and some repurposed Mozart. The concluding chorus was newly composed by Beethoven.1 Amid its celebration of German virtues, Treitschke’s five verses for ‘Germania!’ namecheck the newly victorious allied leaders: Russia’s Czar Alexander, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and, finally, the Austrian emperor, Franz. The music’s popularity is apparent in the decision to publish it immediately in piano arrangement, and the rousing chorus was successful enough to be used in performances of Treitschke’s next production, Die Ehrenpforten (The Gates of Glory), given in honour of the emperor’s name day. (This was a Catholic tradition by which children would be named according to the calendar of saints’ feasts, which was extended to certain names being celebrated on certain dates. In an era when birth dates could be uncertain – as was the case with Beethoven – name days were reliable party prompts.) On sending a copy of the piano version of the chorus to Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven made the grand claim that ‘the song “Germania!” belongs to the whole world’.2

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