Beethoven’s “Fidelio” has overshadowed the other “Leonore” operas. But Ferdinando Paër’s “Leonora” is undoubtedly worthy of attention. A new edition will help its rediscovery.

The four “Leonores”

In the context of the 2020 Beethoven anniversary year, the parallel settings of Fidelio have once again come under the spotlight. What’s more, all four “Leonores” will be performed as part of the Beethovenfest Bonn in autumn this year. Apart from Beethoven’s setting, these are Leonora ossia L’amor conjugale by Ferdinando Paër, the one-act “farsa sentimentale” L’amor conjugale by Simon Mayr and the French opéra comique Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux. The festival in Bonn will thus offer the rare opportunity to see and hear all four operas in sequence.

As is well-known, the subject matter of Leonore had its origins in the French Revolution: in 1798 Jean Nicolas Bouilly wrote the libretto Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal, which was set to music by the singer and composer Pierre Gaveaux. At the centre of the plot is Léonore who, disguised as a man and under the name of Fidélio, does everything she can to rescue her wrongfully imprisoned husband Florestan from captivity. The background was a real event in France, but the stage action was transferred to Spain. Bouilly’s dramatic text evokes the ideal of conjugal love which, against all odds, brings the humanitarian to the fore. The libretto is one of a number of French “revolution operas” of the 1790s in which the politics is sometimes so prominent that it threatens to obscure the love plot. However, in Bouilly’s Léonore, it is conjugal love which is the driving force of the plot.

Although Bouilly and Gaveaux’s two-act “fait historique” was identified very early on as the source for the libretto of Beethoven’s Fidelio, musicologists only relatively recently identified the two Italian operas which are also based on Bouilly’s libretto: Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora ossia L’amor conjugale (Dresden 1804) and the one-act setting by the Ingolstadt composer Simon Mayr (Venice 1805). Together with Gaveaux’s “original Leonore”, they circle like satellites around Beethoven, exerting a more or less gravitational pull.

In a study of Paer’s Leonora, the music historian Richard Engländer identified a librettist for Leonora as early as 1930, namely the singer Giacomo Cinti, who was responsible for adapting libretti at the Hofoper in Dresden. This went unnoticed for a long time, instead the name of Giovanni Federico Schmidt was mentioned in the operatic literature. However, clarification of the primary authorship of the libretto only came in 2016 after the Mayr specialist Iris Winkler found a manuscript libretto of Leonora which she was able to attribute definitively to Giuseppe Maria Foppa (1760–1845). This now meant that a genuine and prominent librettist had been involved, for Foppa wrote over 100 libretti for a wide range of composers. Not least, this also links him in a collaboration with his fellow countryman Paër who set a good dozen of his libretti. In light of Foppa’s authorship, Cinti’s role now becomes clearer – his task was probably primarily to carry out the textual adaptations in Dresden which the composer desired.

French libretto – Italian opera

With Leonora we have a classic case of a cultural transfer, insofar as a French libretto was remodelled into an Italian opera. Even more so, a transfer of genre was associated with this, for the Léonore by Bouilly and Gaveaux was an opéra comique – that is, an opera with spoken dialogue – which had to be transformed into a through-composed musical stage work. This was precisely one of Foppa’s specialities; he was well-versed in adapting French opera libretti for the Italian opera. The result, as with Leonora, was often an opera semiseria, a genre which enriched serious subject matter with “lighter” traits. In Paër’s opera this includes the role of Giachino, a potential husband for Marcellina whose role is upgraded here so as to create a second pair of lovers alongside Florestano and Leonora. The crucial alterations compared with the original French text include the figure of Pizzarro, who had had a spoken part in Bouilly’s version and now gained considerably in importance through the transformation of his role into a vocal one. Unlike Beethoven’s version, Pizzarro is a tenor in Paër’s version, as is the King’s minister Don Fernando, owing something to the traditional division of voices found in Italian opera.

The true transformation from the French Léonore into Foppa and Paër’s opera lies in the creation of more extended musical numbers. This applies both to the solo arias, which sometimes barely go beyond the strophic form in the French original, up to large, more involved numbers such as the finales. Elements relevant to the plot and grand passions are set to music in equal measure. In the process Paër never merely uses a schematic approach: large orchestrally-accompanied recitatives not only lead up to a musical number, but also continue these at the end of the aria. Alongside this, the very reduced secco recitatives sound like the echoes of a bygone age.

Structural analogies to Beethoven’s “Fidelio”

In Beethoven’s Fidelio the composer’s wrestling with the large-scale format on the one hand, and the traditional Singspiel structure with spoken text on the other, can be observed at every turn. His changes to the established conventions of this genre was a result of his unique opera. By contrast, Paër’s Leonora was far more unified, an integrated whole as it were, as his contemporaries attested.

Although it is unclear when exactly Beethoven became aware of Paër’s opera – a copy of the score was found in his papers – the structural analogies, that is the musical solutions for the individual scenes, are astounding.

The Dresden premiere of Leonora, which the composer himself conducted, was not entirely positively received. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung reported that “an even greater effect was expected from the whole”. But this did not stop the success of the work in European theatres: the cities where the opera had been performed by 1816 included Vienna, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich, and abroad, Fontainebleau, Florence and Naples. In the 1820s performances lessened considerably when the increasing success of Beethoven’s Fidelio began to overtake that of Paër’s opera. Paër’s setting of Leonora only entered the repertoire again in the 20th century with some isolated performances, including in Schwetzingen in 1976, and a (considerably shortened) 1979 recording with Peter Maag and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The first critical edition of Päer’s Leonora was created by the editorial project OPERA – Spectrum of European Musical Theatre in Separate Editions, edited by Christin Seidenberg. A pre-publication score based on the primary sources has been prepared for the 2020 performances. Päer’s autograph manuscript has been lost. The aim of the edition is a reconstruction of the early Dresden version based on various types of sources with a Dresden provenance. As these sources also contain different forms of arrangement from later Dresden performances, it was necessary to consult further sources for comparison in making the reconstruction.

This critical edition of Paër’s opera Leonora ossia L’amor conjugale makes a key work from the “Sattelzeit” (saddle period) around 1800 available once again. It is to be hoped that 21st century musical life will also reaffirm its quality. The potential for a “rediscovery” performed in a historically-informed manner seems particularly promising.