For the rest of the history of the opera I shall draw upon the preface to “Fidelio,” which I wrote some years ago for the vocal score in the Schirmer collection.  The score was finished, including the orchestration, in the summer of 1805, and on Beethoven’s return to Vienna, rehearsals were begun.  It was the beginning of a series of trials which made the opera a child of sorrow to the composer.  The style of the music was new to the singers, and they pronounced it unsingable.  They begged him to make changes, but Beethoven was adamant.  The rehearsals became a grievous labor to all concerned.  The production was set down for November 20, but when the momentous day came, it found Vienna occupied by the French troops, Bonaparte at Schonbrunn and the capital deserted by the Emperor, the nobility, and most of the wealthy patrons of art.  The performance was a failure.  Besides the French occupation, two things were recognized as militating against the opera’s success:—­the music was not to the taste of the people, and the work was too long.  Repetitions followed on November 21 and 22, but the first verdict was upheld.

Beethoven’s distress over the failure was scarcely greater than that of his friends, though he was, perhaps, less willing than they to recognize the causes that lay in the work itself.  A meeting was promptly held in the house of Prince Lichnowsky and the opera taken in hand for revision.  Number by number it was played on the pianoforte, sung, discussed.  Beethoven opposed vehemently nearly every suggestion made by his well-meaning friends to remedy the defects of the book and score, but yielded at last and consented to the sacrifice of some of the music and a remodelling of the book for the sake of condensation, this part of the task being intrusted to Stephan von Breuning, who undertook to reduce the original three acts to two. {1} When once Beethoven had been brought to give his consent to the proposed changes, he accepted the result with the greatest good humor; it should be noted, however, that when the opera was put upon the stage again, on March 29, 1806, he was so dilatory with his musical corrections that there was time for only one rehearsal with orchestra.  In the curtailed form “Fidelio” (as the opera was called, though Beethoven had fought strenuously from the beginning for the retention of the original title, “Leonore”) made a distinctly better impression than it had four months before, and this grew deeper with the subsequent repetitions; but Beethoven quarrelled with Baron von Braun, and the opera was withdrawn.  An attempt was made to secure a production in Berlin, but it failed, and the fate of “Fidelio” seemed to be sealed.  It was left to slumber for more than seven years; then, in the spring of 1814, it was taken up again.  Naturally, another revision was the first thing thought of, but this time the work was intrusted to a more practised writer than Beethoven’s childhood friend.  Georg Friedrich Treitschke