Gaveaux: Leonore

Léonore, ou L'Amour conjugal, with a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and music by Pierre Gaveaux, is one of the most famous pieces of lyric theatre that virtually no contemporary audiences have ever witnessed. This opéra comique, which premiered at the Parisian Theatre Feydeau in 1798, is emblematic of a persistently neglected category of dramatic repertory-the dialogue opera of the French revolutionary period. It also, of course, provided the source material for an object of widespread renown and sustained scholarly fascination: Fidelio, the sole surviving (and much revised) opera of Ludwig van Beethoven. Bouilly and Gaveaux's Léonore is thus a work with a uniquely bifurcated historical identity. On the one hand, it's plot and musical idiom are tied closely to the time and place of it's creation; it betrays a clear debt to the conventions of Classical-era opéra comique and to the specific political circumstances of the late 1790s. On the other hand, the opera's abstract and broadly generalisable themes-of the strength of conjugal devotion and the necessity for rebellion against unjust persecution-would prove eminently adaptable, exerting an enduring hold on the popular imagination in France and throughout 19th-century Europe. Filmed on 23 February 2017 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, John Jay College, New York.