Adrien Fournaison

A daring wife disguises herself in order to be hired as a prison guard and thus rescue her unjustly detained husband: the story of Leonora, taken from the French novel by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, is familiar to us through Beethoven’s only opera.

L’amor conjugale tells the same story as Beethoven’s Fidelio, but in a charmingly different adaptation of the original French text by the Italian librettist Gaetano Rossi. In Giovanni Simone Mayr’s hand, the conjugal love is not just between the two principal characters Amorveno and Zeliska, but also between two theatrical and musical traditions, a love affair between two styles developed north and south of the alps. While the orchestration is clearly influenced by Mozart and Haydn, the vocal writing is often purely bel canto, and this blending of styles is one of the most attractive and unique attributes of the opera.

L’amor conjugale tells the same story as Beethoven’s Fidelio, but in a charmingly different adaptation of the original French text by the Italian librettist Gaetano Rossi. In Giovanni Simone Mayr’s hand, the conjugal love is not just between the two principal characters Amorveno and Zeliska, but also between two theatrical and musical traditions, a love affair between two styles developed north and south of the alps. While the orchestration is clearly influenced by Mozart and Haydn, the vocal writing is often purely bel canto, and this blending of styles is one of the most attractive and unique attributes of the opera.