Dearest Child

On Nov. 20, 1805, a clumsy little shock-haired man stood in the pit of a Vienna theatre, conducting an opera as if by might & main he could make its success. At 35, with deafness already upon him, Ludwig van Beethoven was presenting his Fidelia. Circumstances could scarcely have been worse. The week before, Napoleon had taken the city with the result that Austria's music patrons had withdrawn to the country. Temperature in the theatre was below freezing. Apathetic music critics found the score abounding in repetitions while the orchestra kept up a perpetual din. After three performances Beethoven's one & only opera was with drawn from the stage, branded a failure.

In later years Beethoven referred to Fidelia as "the one of all my children that cost me the worst birth-pangs, the one that brought me the greatest sorrow, and for that very reason the one most dear to me." Records show that for Leonore's big aria, Komm Hoffnung, he tried 18 different attacks, ten for his concluding chorus. He wrote four overtures be fore he was satisfied, each seething with symphonic ideas. Handicaps were his lack of theatre technique, his stormy impatience with what seemed to be intrigue. In a revised version the opera had a more promising start. But after two performances, Beethoven felt that he was being cheated out of his rightful share of the receipts. He complained to the manager who suggested that his earnings might be greater if he would write more for the gallery. At that Beethoven packed up his score, strode hatless from the theatre. The gallery at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House seemed altogether satisfied when Beethoven's Fidelia was given there last week, taken out of storage for the first time in six years because Soprano Kirsten Flagstad was on hand to sing the difficult role of Leonore. For his libretto the bachelor Beethoven chose one that extolled marital love and devotion. To be near her husband imprisoned in a dungeon Leonore dresses as a boy, takes a job as the jailer's assistant. Dramatic scene comes when she helps dig her husband's grave, then outwits the tyrant who had plotted his murder. Other parts of the opera move along leisurely, seem dated and old-fashioned compared with the Beethoven symphonies. A prisoners' chorus is stirring, compassionately descriptive of their pitiful existence. But there are flaccid comic opera bits unworthy of the composer's genius.

Conductor Artur Bodanzky presided diligently over the Metropolitan production. Belgian Rene Maison proved himself an actor in the role of Leonora's husband. Basso Emanuel List was at his best as the easy-going jailer. But it was Norway's Kirsten Flagstad who did most to make the performance a popular success. She sang the most taxing passages with uncommon skill and ease, acted with a simplicity completely suited to the music. Earlier in the season there were critics who feared for Flagstad's voice, wondered if she were not trying to work it too hard (TIME, Dec. 23). Last week it sounded amazingly fresh, proved without doubt that she is the great singer of the day.

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