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Cinar Atilla

MHST 463

Gregory E. Smith

10/11/2019

A Critique of Beethoven and opera by Winton Dean

Dean’s article on Beethoven’s opera Fidelio discusses the opera’s creation and editing

process. He makes a suggestive claim with the first sentence of his essay by stating that

“Beethoven’s contribution to the operatic repertory must be ascribed to temperament rather

than environment.” (Dean 22) His approach to this topic feels familiar to the way he addresses

Beethoven as “not a born opera composer” (Dean 22) since I believe he gets a little side tracked

and goes off topic while making his arguments. He emphasizes his points by segmenting his

article into different sections and talking about Beethoven’s environment and the creation of

Fidelio; however, he doesn’t round things up and make a definitive statement in the end.

While comparing Beethoven’s environment and temperament, Dean starts off by giving

background information on Beethoven’s life and the beginning of his musical career in the

Introduction sub-section of his paper. Here, Dean talks about how Beethoven was introduced

to music and operas in general. Dean gives examples of the great composers Beethoven was

surrounded by the great and various works he had access to, and even the opportunities he had

of performing in these works during his life in Bonn and Vienna. All these factors support the

environmental effects and contributors Beethoven had starting from his early life, and these
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factors form an antithesis to Dean’s claim. Dean supports his antithesis further by talking about

Beethoven’s introduction to opera composing and his acquaintance with Fidelio’s source

material. However, Dean eventually gets off topic in this section by starting to talk about Fidelio

and the opera’s creation and the success, or rather failure, of its first performance and its

different versions. At this point of my reading I was a little lost in the paper and had to go back

several times to correlate what I just read with everything Dean wrote about so far. It was a

little confusing when he suddenly started talking about Fidelio, the opera, instead of Beethoven

the composer.

Although I think he got off topic towards the end, in his introduction sub-section Dean

successfully portrayed the environmental factors which affected Beethoven as a composer.

After establishing such an accomplished antithesis, I was expecting him to now talk about

Beethoven’s temperament and how it affected Fidelio’s creation and editing process. It would

not be right to claim that he doesn’t do that, but after the introduction sub-section, the paper

stops being about Beethoven and his relation to opera and starts analyzing Fidelio as an

operatic work, and comparing and contrasting its different versions.

The next sub-section in the paper is Gaveaux’s Leonore and talks about Gaveaux’s score

and Bouilly’s libretto. Dean makes an analysis of Gaveaux’s score, emphasizing some of his

statements about the music with examples and sections from the music score before making

the only claim in this sub-section which I think is relevant to his statement: “Bouilly tells an
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intensely dramatic story in clear straightforward terms. The compound of realism, low life, and

earthly humor on the one hand(…) and heroic endeavor, a last minute rescue, and an elevating

moral on the other(…) Leonore contains many premonitions of Romantic opera.(…) Therein lay

part of its appeal to Beethoven.”(Dean 31) This sub-section of the essay feels redundant in its

length and off topic analyses, except for the one statement mentioned above. It disrupts the

flow of Dean’s arguments and weakens the essay’s claim.

Unfortunately, Dean does not recover from this derailed subject and starts to talk about

The Operas of Paer and Mayr in his next sub-section. In my opinion, this sub-section is even

more disruptive than the analysis of Gaveaux’s opera, since this part of the paper is focused on

Paer and Mayr’s compositional techniques and some musical similarities between their operas

and Fidelio, which don’t have anything to do with Beethoven’s temperament. This whole sub-

section doesn’t provide anything to Dean’s argument and feels completely out of place in the

essay. At the end of this sub-section Dean himself states that: “No one has suggested that

Beethoven knew his[Mayr] opera” (Dean 35)

The last three sub-sections of the essay revert back to Fidelio. They offer a very

thorough analysis and comparison of the 1805, 1806, and 1814 versions of the opera, and Dean

even makes a different sub-section for each of them. He introduces the different librettists who

worked on all three different versions, he analyzes the key dramatic points in the story and how

Beethoven made changes to his musical interpretation at those points by providing specific
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examples from the different versions of the scores. It is a semi-detailed and very informative

analysis of Fidelio; however, it is not what Dane started writing about at the beginning of his

paper. He starts the paper with the intention of comparing the environmental and

temperamental effects on Beethoven’s opera composition, but goes way off-track and ends it

with an analysis of Fidelio.

It may be my misinterpretation of the paper, but I don’t think Dean draws a conclusion

at the end of his paper, he doesn’t even accumulate enough arguments to form a conclusion.

Maybe he wanted to parallel Beethoven’s clogging the story progression with music in Fidelio

No. 1 by clogging the argumentative progression with disruptive musical analyses. Or maybe

since this essay is taken out of a book, in isolation and out of context it feels like it is left open

ended. Whatever the reason, I don’t think Dean manages to support his statement after making

it in the opening paragraph.

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Bibliography

1) Dean, Winton. “Beethoven and Opera.” In Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio. Ed. Paul

Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 22-50.