Commissioned and premiered by the Music in Bloom Festival Ensemble (Amy Petrongelli, soprano, Clare Longendyke, piano, Baldwin Giang, keyboard, Nick Zoulek, saxophones, Matthew Coley, percussion) at Indianapolis Central Library, August 2021. Audio Recording by Eric Dluzniewki. Video by Luka Pajovic and Baldwin Giang.
TEXT
Fidelio Descending
by Baldwin Giang
I.
How dark it is where injustice has bound you.
My rights, my force,
this prison's form construe.
But the light I follow
is my inner calling.
My dungeon shook,
and your chains fell off.
II.
Speak softly.
We are watched
with eye and ear.
Speak softly.
The gaze is alert
everywhere
Speak softly...
Yet with eye and ear,
Do I not feel
The soft whispering air?
The haunting memory
Of contagions,
Of rebellions,
Of characters who
appear and disappear:
Light my way.
To cross from cell to cell,
Dark sail surround me--
Threadbare.
Dark sail surround me--
I dare to speak boldly.
PROGRAM NOTES
Fidelio Descending is a reimagining of a scene that happens offstage in Beethoven’s Fidelio during intermission between the first and second acts. Leonore (disguised as the male Fidelio) descends into the basement of the prison where her husband Florestan is being held as a political prisoner. In my reimagining, on her way down, Leonore comes to an epiphany, aided by her own disguise as a man. Leonore realizes that the necessity of the prison in which her husband is kept is ensured by the individual rights and sense of safety guaranteed to her male alter ego. Despite this realization, Leonore feels still yet an “inner calling,” that the liberties and privileges she enjoys as the male Fidelio are not worth the cost of enduring the suffering and denial of rights of others. This “inner calling” is depicted musically by the use of strong difference tones that emerge from organ part, which are heard in our inner ear, but are never actually sounded in the air. The epiphany that her freedom cannot be truly be possible simultaneously with the oppression of others, metaphorically represented by the prison “shaking” and depicted musically by the extreme microtonal beating, is ultimately the mechanism that releases Florestan and the rest of the prisoners from their chains. As my text draws on the libretto to Fidelio, as well as Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete?, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, it is my hope that this piece is able to connect the already rich emotional life of Fidelio with contemporary conversations in prison abolition and critiques of the carceral state.