Reception
Fidelio was Arturo Toscanini's first complete opera performance to be broadcast over the NBC radio network, in December 1944, by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, featuring soloists from the Metropolitan Opera (though a shortwave broadcast of one act, conducted by Toscanini, had earlier been relayed from an August 16, 1936 performance at Salzburg.) Divided into two consecutive broadcasts, the 1944 performances were later issued by RCA Victor on LPs and CDs. Toscanini made it clear that Beethoven believed in liberty and was opposed to tyrants such as Napoleon Bonaparte; in the conductor's opinion, Beethoven would have likely opposed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well.
Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler remarked in Salzburg in 1948, not long after the end of World War II and fall of Nazism:
- "he conjugal love of Leonore appears, to the modern individual armed with realism and psychology, irremediably abstract and theoretical.... Now that political events in Germany have restored to the concepts of human dignity and liberty their original significance, this is the opera which, thanks to the music of Beethoven, gives us comfort and courage.... Certainly, Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theater, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary. That which disturbs us is not a material effect, nor the fact of the 'imprisonment'; any film could create the same effect. No, it is the music, it is Beethoven himself. It is this 'nostalgia of liberty' he feels, or better, makes us feel; this is what moves us to tears. His Fidelio has more of the Mass than of the Opera to it; the sentiments it expresses come from the sphere of the sacred, and preach a 'religion of humanity' which we never found so beautiful or necessary as we do today, after all we have lived through. Herein lies the singular power of this unique opera.... Independent of any historical consideration ... the flaming message of Fidelio touches deeply.
- We realize that for us Europeans, as for all men, this music will always represent an appeal to our conscience.
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