Overture: Leonore No.3

Beethoven really wanted to call his opera Leonore. But, as that title was already associated with a then highly successful opera on the same subject by Ferdinando Paer, he had to resort to his heroine’s masculine pseudonym and call it Fidelio. The risk of confusion with Paer’s Leonora is long past, however, and the Leonore title has had a valuable function as a label for those versions of the opera and the three C major overtures which Beethoven rejected before he completed the final version of Fidelio and its E major overture in 1814.

The overture now known as Leonore No.2 was written for the original three-act version of the opera of 1805 and Leonore No.3 for the two-act revision of 1806. The comparatively slight Leonore No.1 was intended for a projected production of Fidelio in Prague in 1807 and not performed until Mendelssohn conducted it in Düsseldorf in 1836. It was Mendelssohn, incidentally, who first demonstrated the superiority of Leonore No.3 when he performed all three of the C major overtures together in a concert in Leipzig in 1840 - although that scarcely justifies the tradition (started by Felix Mottl and most influentially continued by Gustav Mahler) of inserting it between the two acts of Fidelio.

As a concert work Leonore No.3 has the advantage of a self-contained and dramatically articulated construction combined with remarkably much of the spirit which makes the opera such an uplifting experience. The Adagio introduction is concerned with the political prisoner Florestan, the darkness of his prison cell, the enlightened quality of his thinking as suggested by the allusion (on clarinets and bassoons) to his aria In des Lebens Frühlingstagen. The Allegro, on the other hand, is concerned with the rescue and the heroic struggle of Leonore inspired, as the comparatively lyrical second subject indicates, by her love for Florestan. The moment of release, signalled by the two distant trumpet calls, is skilfully worked in as the most dramatic event in the development section. There is a recapitulation of the main Allegro material and a brilliantly scored Presto adds yet another layer of excitement to the celebration.