helping to dig.  The tale is simple enough—­there is scarcely enough of it to call a tale.  Leonora’s husband, Florestan, has somehow fallen into the power of his enemy Pizarro, who imprisons him and then says he is dead.  Leonora disbelieves this, and, disguising herself as a boy and taking the name of Fidelio, hires herself as an assistant to Rocco, the jailer of the fortress in which Florestan is confined.  At that time the news arrives that an envoy of the king is coming to see that no injustice is being done by Pizarro.  Pizarro has been hoping to starve Florestan slowly to death; but now he sees the necessity of more rapid action.  He therefore tells Rocco to dig a grave in Florestan’s cell, and he himself will do the necessary murder.  This brings about the great prison scene.  Florestan lies asleep in a corner; Leonora is not sure whether she is helping to dig his grave or the grave of some other unlucky wretch; but while she works she takes her resolution—­whoever he may be, she will risk all consequences and save him.  Pizarro arrives, and is about to kill Florestan, when Leonora presents a pistol to his head; and, before he has quite had time to recover, a trumpet call is heard, signalling the arrival of the envoy.  Pizarro knows the game is up, and Florestan that his wife has saved him.  This, I declare, is the only dramatic scene in the play—­here the thing ends:  excepting it, there is no real incident.  The business at the beginning, about the jailer’s daughter refusing to have anything more to do with her former sweetheart, and falling in love with the supposed Fidelio, is merely silly; Rocco’s song, elegantly translated in one edition, “Life is nothing without money”—­Heaven knows whether it was intended to be humorous—­is stupid; Pizarro’s stage-villainous song of vengeance is unnecessary; the arrangement of the crime is a worry.  These, and in fact all that comes before the great scene, are entirely superfluous, the purest piffle, very tiresome.  Most exasperating of all is the stupid dialogue, which makes one hope that the man who wrote it died a painful, lingering death.  But, in spite of it all, Beethoven, by writing some very beautiful music in the first act, and by rising to an astonishing height in the prison scene and the succeeding duet, has created one of the wonders of the music-world.

Being a glorification of woman—­German woman, although Leonora was presumably Spanish—­“Fidelio” has inevitably become in Germany the haus-frau’s opera.  Probably there is not a haus-frau who faithfully cooks her husband’s dinner, washes for him, blacks his boots, and would even brush his clothes did he ever think that necessary, who does not see herself reflected in Leonora; probably every German householder either longs to possess her or believes that he does possess her.  Consequently, just as Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” became the playground of the Italian prima donna, so has “Fidelio” become the playground of that terrible apparition,