Fidelio at La Monnaie

Love inspires my endeavours, true love fears nothing.’ Leonora dresses up as a man and under the name of Fidelio, finds work in the prison where her husband Florestan is being held as a political dissident. Through her tenacity, love and sacrifice, she is able to save Florestan from the claws of the cruel Don Pizarro, who wanted him out of the way because he had seen through his infamous plans. Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, is not only a musical miracle but also a superb humanist manifesto on love, on man in all his facets and depths, on liberation and self-realisation, and on ethics and human duties. From a Marxist point of view, the work is seen as an opera of revolution, while the philosopher Ernest Bloch has labelled it a utopian opera, but above all it always remains an ode to human values.