Vestas Feuer
Vestas Feuer ("The Vestal Flame"[1]) is a fragment of an opera composed in 1803 by Ludwig van Beethoven to a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder.
He had already achieved a form of immortality in 1791 by authoring the libretto of (and generally sponsoring) Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, a tremendous success at its premiere and still an important part of his company's repertoire.
The theater opened with an opera about Alexander the Great, composed by Franz Teyber; the libretto had been offered by Schikaneder first to Beethoven, who had declined it.
[3] By 1803, the year of his Beethoven collaboration, the 51-year-old Schikaneder was already seeing his career go into decline (ultimately, it collapsed entirely), but at the time he was still an important figure in the Viennese theatrical and musical scene.
Schikaneder made sure he could continue this practice by incorporating into the new Theater an der Wien a four-story apartment house where he and a number of members of his theatrical company dwelt.
In early 1803 Schikaneder made another attempt to collaborate with Beethoven: he asked him to compose an opera for his theater, providing as a partial incentive free housing in the apartment complex.
Beethoven agreed and moved into the complex, where he was to live from about April 1803 to May 1804, apart from some summer visits (his custom) to nearby rural locations in Baden and Oberdöbling.
After various episodes, including the reappearance of Porus and Sartagones, Romenius has Malo drowned in the Tiber but is himself stabbed by his jealous lover Sericia.
The setting for this scene was given thus by Schikaneder: The theater [i.e. stage ] is an enchanting garden of cypresses; a waterfall gushes forth in the center and runs into a brook at the right.
[11] Lockwood gives the action of the scene: Malo has been spying on the lovers, Volivia and Sartagones, and he rushes on to tell Porus he has seen them together, presumably all night since it is not morning.
But Porus, whose anger turns in a flash to sympathy, strikes the sword at once from Sartagones's hand, singing with Volivia, "Halt ein!"
Malo, upset by all this, leaves the stage, whereupon the three main characters -- the father and the two lovers -- close the first scene in a joyful trio of mutual affection.
portion of the scene Beethoven set an echo of 'a parallel moment in The Magic Flute in which Papageno is saved by intervention of the Three Boys from suicide.
Beethoven eventually felt as intolerable both the Vestas Feuer libretto and the task of collaborating with Schikaneder, and he dropped the project.
He expressed his opinions in a letter to Johann Friedrich Rochlitz: I have finally broken with Schikaneder, whose kingdom has been entirely eclipsed by the light of the clever and thoughtful French operas.
Meanwhile he has held me back for fully six months, and I have let myself be deceived simply because, since he is undeniably good at creating stage effects, I hoped that he would produce something more clever than usual.
[17] Lockwood speculates that Beethoven must have felt some empathy at this stage with the long-dead Mozart, who unlike him had managed to bring his Schikaneder collaboration to a successful conclusion.
Early in 1804, after dropping Vestas Feuer, Beethoven began work on a different opera, then entitled Leonora;[3] which ultimately became Fidelio, now a cornerstone of the repertory.
Jan Swafford narrates ... a shake-up that resolved Beethoven's sticky contract situation with his nominal employer and ex-librettist Schikaneder.
It is a ponderously heroic affair set in ancient Rome (though the names of the characters suggest Parthia or India) and replete with tedious intrigue.
Schikaneder had lapsed from pantomime into the stagnant backwash of Metastasio while retaining (in Beethoven's words to Rochlitz) 'language and verses such as could only proceed out of the mouths of our Viennese apple-women.
We see him carefully fashioning an opening scene on the Mozartean model, devoting himself to it with his usual concentration and creative seriousness, determined to give it his best despite the triviality of the text.
More than a few moments in the score -- Malo's running feet, the hero and heroine's quiet pledge of love, Sartagones' confrontation with Porus, and finally, the swiftly moving, well-knit Trio -- show the mature Beethoven endeavoring to make something emotionally and musically effective from the materials he had to work with.
