Fidelio was the first opera performed after the Second World War in Berlin and Vienna respectively. It was chosen to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the first opera Toscanini broadcast with the NBC Symphony. The Met has been producing it since their second season, in 1884. But no one thinks of it as a great opera.

Fidelio‘s storyline would have been tailor-made for Mozart: A Spanish nobleman is unjustly imprisoned; his wife dresses up as a man to get a job in the prison so she can rescue him, and her disguise is so convincing that the warden’s daughter falls in love with her. There is comic misunderstanding, sexual tension, political intrigue, a truly improbable plot—all things that Beethoven couldn’t have cared less about. Mozart might have written Fidelio as a Marriage of Figaro-style opera buffa. With Beethoven, the music towers so far over the story that this is not an opera in the conventional sense.