Rescue opera

Rescue opera was a popular genre of opera in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in France and Germany. Generally, rescue operas deal with the rescue of a main character from danger and end with a happy dramatic resolution in which lofty humanistic ideals triumph over base motives. Operas with this kind of subject matter became popular in France around the time of the French Revolution; a number of such operas dealt with the rescue of a political prisoner. Stylistically and thematically, rescue opera was an outgrowth of the French bourgeois opéra comique; musically, it began a new tradition that would influence German Romantic opera and French grand opera. The most famous rescue opera is Ludwig van Beethoven's Fidelio.

"Rescue opera" was not a contemporary term. Dyneley Hussey used the term in English in 1927 as a translation of Karl M. Klob's 1913 reference to Fidelio as "das sogenannte Rettungs- oder Befreiungsstück" in Die Oper von Gluck bis Wagner. David Charlton believes that rescue opera is not an authentic genre, and that the concept was coined to make what he believes is a nonexistent connection between Beethoven's work and French opera. Patrick J. Smith, on the other hand, observes: "The 'rescue opera'...antedated the Revolution, but 'rescue opera' as a genre was a product of it."

In French, this genre is referred to as the pièce à sauvetage or opéra à sauvetage, while in German it is called Rettungsoper, Befreiungsoper (liberation opera), or Schreckensoper (terror opera).

Early opéras comiques with rescue themes include Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's Le roi et le fermier (1762) and Le déserteur (1769), and André Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784). These are sometimes called early rescue operas, or conversely predecessors of the rescue opera.

Henri Montan Berton's Les rigueurs du cloître (1790) has been described as the first rescue opera;Luigi Cherubini's Lodoïska (1791) has also been named a founding work of the genre. Other examples from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the period when rescue opera flourished, are Nicolas Dalayrac's Camille ou Le souterrain (1791), Jean-François Le Sueur's La caverne (1793), and Cherubini's Les deux journées (1800).

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