Why Fidelio?

Since the inception of my new life in the discomforts of reality, that is, unprotected from the glitzy and cushy fabrications of the mephistophelian corporate contract, a contract I was always prone, if not altogether destined, to breach in the most unceremonious fashion, people have been asking me the question Why Fidelio? a number of times. It is of course a more than valid question to ask, given the ever-present Italian-sounding name in anything relating to me and my mostly-musical activities. I have come to accept that it is high time to provide a more than casual explanation to my choice of this name, its roots and its consequences.

For those in the know—an ever-shrinking portion of humanity, despite the ever-growing rate of literacy, particularly in the Western World—Fidelio is forever associated to the only attempt that Beethoven made to write an opera. Attempt, what am I saying! Attempts! For Beethoven worked and reworked his operatic project three times over, always being partially dissatisfied with it, partially proud, always despairing about the financial catastrophe, perhaps the only stable feature in the various iterations.

Fidelio (the opera) tells the story of a woman by the name of Leonore who, driven by love for her husband Florestan, who has been arrested for political reasons by the local tyrant Pizarro, decides to disguise as a man, calling herself Fidelio, to free him from prison with the help of a guard, Rocco. Fidelio is therefore first and foremost a disguise, a cunning decoy to go around the cultural assumption that a woman would never be capable of a sleight of hand involving violent confrontation with men. This was hardly an original idea in those years, it is enough to think of the many women involved in the barricades of the French Revolution, barely fifteen years old at the time of Beethoven's writing. But Beethoven being Beethoven, he turns this banal early romantic idealistic plot into a musical laboratory where the idea of the modern man is shaped. Incidentally he also invents the concept of leitmotif—something that Wagner would later claim for himself—and in practice forces every operatic German composer after him, that is, those who pledged allegiance to his legacy, to think of musical theatre as a drama more than as a story.

Fidelio is chiefly about freedom but not one that finds an easy definition or an allegiance to a philosophy of life as prescribed by an intellectual circle. Fidelio vividly presents the birth pangs of the romantic movement, the only credible human reaction to the highly dissatisfactory replacement of God with Reason.

Revisiting Fidelio more than two-hundred years after its conception, we can see how relevant it still is to those who aspire to freedom outside of any definition to a public use. The romantic movement never claimed to conjure up a recipe for a sustainable model for society. It only cared about private pursuits to the benefit of the collective humanity. This is as idealistic as it is naive, but it is the last attempt that humanity has made to realise itself before giving in to the least worse of models for its progress.

When I left the bank cursing a man wearing a possibly very expensive suit (though who can tell these days!) with the words may you be shagged in perpetuity by a trip of goats, I wasn't really believing in the likelihood of such an ignoble end for that poor man. I was simply voicing hope, which is the last thing man can hold on to amidst the overpowering might of culture.

What distinguishes hope from will is the severance of any direct link between ideas and actions. He who hopes for survival or death of somebody else's doesn't necessarily participate in its concrete realisation and therefore cannot be held responsible for the evolution of the facts. When Leonore sings Komm Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern der Müde nicht erbleichen (Oh hope, don't allow the last star to disappear from my weary sight) she is not talking about any concrete action she will take to save her husband. She is just gathering the force of hope within herself, as conveyed by her commitment to her duty as a spouse. Is there anything more romantic (in a philosophical sense!) than this?

So a big part of the answer to the question Why Fidelio? is given above. Fidelio embodies the hope that things I consider worth pursuing (music, social interactions, meaningful conversations, relationships) will always be part of the human universe. But there is another side to it, a less philosophical but more psychological one, which has to do with what we do in practice and also with how do we fund such ideals in an ultra-competitive society like the one we are part of. Fidelio is a reference to the password that Tom Cruise is asked to give to gain access to a secret party in a grand Viennese palace in the film Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick. This film is itself a re-elaboration of a novella by the viennese author Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle or Dream Novel. In this groundbreaking psycho-drama, a young doctor and his wife fall prey to extra-marital sexual fantasies that threaten their relationships, itself a celebration of the establishment with all its comforts. They both pursue their fantasies in their dreams, though after visiting a secret orgy as an interloper and barely being able to escape all in one piece, the doctor is not able distinguish reality from dream any longer. Fidelio is therefore also a reference to the party scene that has since its inception animated our central London premises. A party is an escape from the posture that society requires from its members and therefore needs to contemplate obscenity among its possible course of development. Most often it doesn't, but Fidelio is a nod to such uncertain territory, where dream and reality overlap in a dance of intoxicating fantasies.