Freedom and Unity

The evening’s greatest surprise came early. After the house lights had dimmed, the first sound to emerge from the darkness was not the familiar figure that opens the overture to Fidelio, but a single mighty chord, underscored by timpani, which receded into an uneasy silence before returning, no less forceful than before. It was, of course, the Leonore overture No. 2, which was used when the opera was first performed in 1805, but later replaced on the advice of his friends with something more concise and upbeat. Just as audiences of the early nineteenth century weren’t quite ready for a twenty-minute fugue as the final movement of a string quartet, they might not have been sure what to do with such an overwhelming prelude to a dramatic work.

The surprise lay not so much in the fact that Daniel Barenboim chose to reinstate the earlier…