Editing Fidelio (section)

==Backdrop==
In its time, ''Fidelio'' was Beethoven's contribution to an ongoing and successful tradition of operatic composition; a tradition harder to discern today because none of the operas involved, other than Beethoven's, has survived into the modern repertory. The tradition was imported to Beethoven's Vienna from Revolutionary France and involved work of many composers, most notably [[Luigi Cherubini]], whose work Beethoven (unusually) strongly admired. The new French school arrived in Vienna in 1802 with the performance of Cherubini's [[Lodoïska]], and led, per Dean, to "an avalanche of French operas, many of which became more popular in Vienna than in Paris."<ref>Dean (1971:333-334</ref> Many of these operas were so-called "rescue operas", which Dean describes thus:

<blockquote>
The ... [[singspiel]] form, the background of domestic realism tinged with comedy, the superposition of a heroic or patriotic story involving violence and often a spectacular catastrophe, a happy end produced not by a ''[[deus ex machina]]'' but by an act of superhuman courage, a strong ethical content tending to divide the characters into [[The Sheep and the Goats|sheep and goats]]:  this was the pattern of rescue opera ... Beethoven adopted it [[lock, stock, and barrel]].<ref>Dean (1971:373-374)</ref>
</blockquote>

This new kind of heroic opera appealed far more to Beethoven than the (to him) frivolous-seeming dramas of character that had impelled Mozart's earlier work. Beethoven, who heard Cherubini's work in Vienna, joined the new trend with enthusiasm; and indeed ''Fidelio'' borrows its plot, characters, and (according to Dean) even certain musical devices from the work of Beethoven's predecessors in the French rescue-opera tradition.<ref>For extensive discussion see Dean (1971:340-349, 373-378)</ref> These include [[Pierre Gaveaux]]'s opera ''[[Léonore, ou L'amour conjugal]]'' (1798) and [[Ferdinando Paer]]'s ''[[Leonora (opera)|Leonora]]'' (1804).