The following year, Beethoven's friend Stephan von Breuning rewrote the libretto, shortening the work from three acts to two.

Bouilly's scenario fits Beethoven's aesthetic and political outlook: a story of personal sacrifice, heroism, and eventual triumph.

With its underlying struggle for liberty and justice mirroring contemporary political movements in Europe, such topics are typical of Beethoven's "middle period".

Notable moments in the opera include the "Prisoners' Chorus" (O welche Lust—"O what a joy"), an ode to freedom sung by a chorus of political prisoners, Florestan's vision of Leonore who comes as an angel to rescue him, and the scene in which the rescue finally takes place.

"[3] Many of these operas were so-called "rescue operas", which Dean describes thus: The ... singspiel form, the background of domestic realism tinged with comedy, the superposition of a heroic or patriotic story involving violence and often a spectacular catastrophe, a happy end produced not by a deus ex machina but by an act of superhuman courage, a strong ethical content tending to divide the characters into sheep and goats: this was the pattern of rescue opera ... Beethoven adopted it lock, stock, and barrel.

[4] This new kind of heroic opera appealed far more to Beethoven than the (to him) frivolous-seeming dramas of character that had impelled Mozart's earlier work.

[5] These include Pierre Gaveaux's opera Léonore, ou L'amour conjugal (1798) and Ferdinando Paer's Leonora (1804).

[6] The distant origin of Fidelio dates from 1803, when the librettist and impresario Emanuel Schikaneder worked out a contract with Beethoven to write an opera.

He spent about a month composing music for it, then abandoned it when the possibility presented itself of joining the new, to Beethoven more meaningful, French heroic tradition.

Although Beethoven used the title Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe ("Leonore, or The Triumph of Married Love"), the 1805 performances were billed as Fidelio at the theatre's insistence, to avoid confusion with the operas by Gaveaux and Paer mentioned above.

The first version, with a three-act German libretto adapted by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, premiered at the Theater an der Wien on 20 November 1805, with additional performances the following two nights.

[11] Fidelio was Arturo Toscanini's first complete opera performance given in the United States since 1915 and the first to be broadcast on radio, over the NBC network, in December 1944.

Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra, featuring soloists Rose Bampton, Jan Peerce and Eleanor Steber, with the performance divided into two consecutive broadcasts.

[12] Fidelio was the first opera performed in Berlin after the end of World War II, with the Deutsche Oper staging it under the baton of Robert Heger at the only undamaged theatre, the Theater des Westens, in September 1945.

[13] At the time, Thomas Mann remarked: "What amount of apathy was needed [by musicians and audiences] to listen to Fidelio in Himmler's Germany without covering their faces and rushing out of the hall!

"[14] Not long after the end of World War II and the fall of Nazism, conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler remarked in Salzburg in 1948: [T]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....

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.

The first night of Fidelio at the Semperoper in Dresden on 7 October 1989 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the DDR (East Germany) coincided with violent demonstrations at the city's main train station.

[16] Four weeks later, on 9 November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of East Germany's regime.

But as an intensely dramatic, full-scale symphonic movement it had the effect of overwhelming the (rather light) initial scenes of the opera.

Beethoven accordingly experimented with cutting it back somewhat, for a planned 1808 performance in Prague; this is believed to be the version now called "Leonore No. 1".

Finally, for the 1814 revival Beethoven began anew, and with fresh musical material wrote what is now known as the Fidelio overture, in E major.

As this somewhat lighter overture seems to work best of the four as a start to the opera, Beethoven's final intentions are generally respected in contemporary productions.

When performed at this point in the opera, the overture acts as a kind of musical reprise of the rescue scene that has just taken place.

As the boy Fidelio, she earns the favor of her employer, Rocco, and also the affections of his daughter Marzelline, much to Jaquino's chagrin.

Jaquino leaves, and Marzelline expresses her desire to become Fidelio's wife (O wär ich schon mit dir vereint—"If only I were already united with thee").

Fidelio, hoping to discover Florestan, asks Rocco to let the poor prisoners roam in the garden and enjoy the beautiful weather.

As they dig, Rocco urges Fidelio to hurry (Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewölbe!—"How cold it is in this underground chamber" and Nur hurtig fort, nur frisch gegraben—"Come get to work and dig", the "Gravedigging Duet").

When Florestan learns that the prison he is in belongs to Pizarro, he asks that a message be sent to his wife, Leonore, but Rocco says that it is impossible.

The orchestra consists of 1 piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, and strings.