Excerpt from Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made?

“Sometimes the philosophy of an age is epitomized in a work of art; and to my mind the modern programme for morality was never better expressed than at the very begin­ning of the modern period, in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, surely the greatest of all artistic tributes to the French Revolution. It appeared in 1805, fourteen years after Mozart’s The Magic Flute; the difference between the two is the difference between two worlds. The journey from darkness to light which is charted  in Mozart’s masterpiece is presided over by the priest-king, Sarastro, who represents wisdom. In Beethoven’s programme for enlightenment (I ascribe to him for convenience the ideas he found in the libretto by J. N. Bouilly) there is no place for a Sarastro, nor could there be. The story tells of a devoted wife, Leonora, who, in order to rescue her husband, Florestan, who has been imprisoned in the dungeons of the tyrant, Pizarro, disguises herself as a young man, Fidelio, and becomes an assistant to the jailer. At the point of crisis, when Pizarro is about to slay Florestan, she  withstands him, and, as it were by a preordained fate, at that very moment the king’s minister arrives to release the prisoners (all of them, it appears, political prisoners) and overthrow Pizarro’s power. The message of the plot is simple: the revolution which will bring brotherhood in place of op­pression is accomplished, not by the traditionally masculine virtue of wisdom, but by the traditionally  feminine virtue of compassion, which must, however, clothe itself in the masculine attributes of ‘Mut und  Macht’, resolution and might. When such an emotion assumes such a resolution, and is driven to say a decisive ‘No’ to tyranny, tyranny must fall before it. But how does it say ‘No’? The crisis takes this form: Pizarro rushes at Florestan to strike him down with a knife, and Leonora-Fidelio interposes herself and stops the tyrant in his tracks with a gun. One can object that the moment is dramatically embarrassing: gun­ powder is a deus ex machina for which the audience has not been properly prepared. But one would be wiser to think that it says exactly what Beethoven wished to say. Compassion, when it is driven to it, will arm itself with superior technique. Its strength over the enemy lies not, like Sarastro’s, in its ability to appeal to nature, the way of wisdom, but in its ability to resort to artifice, the way of progress. In that moment on the stage the modern pro­gramme announced itself. Everything that we have to dis­ cuss in these lectures was promised to us then.”