Emanuel Schikaneder, better known for having written the libretto of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, was the artistic director of Vienna's main and largest theater: the Theater an der Wien – formerly Theater auf der Wieden – where operas were performed for a bourgeois audience that preferred entertaining shows in the German language. However, starting from 1802, the French operas of Luigi Cherubini and André Grétry, heroic, dramatic, and with great musicality, began to make their way in. At the beginning of 1803, Schikaneder proposed to Beethoven to compose a German opera to try to stem this phenomenon. In the contract, he offered Beethoven and his brother Karl the opportunity to reside in a service apartment of the theater on the second floor, in the capacity of composer for the same.
The libretto of the opera, naturally, was offered to the composer by Schikaneder himself, and it was Vestas Feuer. Did Beethoven look at the libretto or not? Certainly, regardless, he set it aside momentarily.
In the last part of the year, Beethoven tried to begin focusing on the outline that Schikaneder had proposed to him. But work proceeded very slowly and regarding Vestas Feuer, the composer only composed the first scene: he did not like the coarseness of the magic-themed text at all and the "language and verses like our fruit sellers here". All this caused him to start looking around for other subjects that would convince him more. The fact of living in the theater gave him the opportunity to attend the operas being presented there. It was thus that he discovered the French repertoire and, listening to the opera Les deux Journées by Luigi Cherubini, he discovered what he considered the greatest composer among his contemporaries.
What I discovered this morning, to my great surprise, while listening to the Overture of Les deux Journées for the first time, was how Beethoven must have had in mind when composing the Coriolan Overture, and especially the Egmont Overture, the opening music of Cherubini's. And not only that! Right?
