BACKGROUND TO… Beethoven’s Leonore

Beethoven composed just one opera, albeit its two substantial revisions, based on a real life event in which a woman daringly rescued her aristocratic husband from prison. Though originally an anti-French Revolution story, when staged in Paris in 1798 as an opera by Pierre Gaveaux the audience took it as revolutionary in intent, as did Beethoven and his librettist Joseph Sonnleithner. was the opera’s original title, named after its heroine.