Fidelio | Beethoven

Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio is a striking hymn to freedom and justice, with very contemporary resonances. Cyril Teste uses American prisons as a metaphor for the world, to reflect on what surveillance and punishment mean today.

Beethoven was 18 when the French Revolution broke out, and he was enamoured of the ideals of freedom and fraternity. Several years later, Fidelio would provide striking proof of his political convictions and demonstrate the social role that he believed music should fulfil. When her husband has been missing for two years, having fallen into the hands of the enemy governor Don Pizarro, Leonore disguises herself as a prison guard to go and save him from torture and an atrocious death. The opera, with its subject, its energy and the strength of its writing, is a visionary work: a fight for a world in which love can flourish; a powerful message of humanism and hope; a dream of freedom, generosity and solidarity. With his virtuoso use of video on stage, Cyril Teste follows the heroine's radical approach to exalt the power of images as a tool of resistance in the face of corruption.