Illegal detention, political prisoners and the unpunished crimes of the powerful: Sound familiar?

I’m not talking about contemporary politics, but rather Beethoven’s operatic masterpiece Fidelio. Houston Grand Opera continues its 58^th season with an innovative staging of this master composer’s only opera, premiering Friday night and runs through Nov. 13.

Only one you say? The perfection of Fidelio has left many wishing he’d written more.

Fidelio is perhaps the most well-known instance of the rescue opera, a term that refers to a subset of works popular with French and German audiences around the turn of the 19^th century. A certain enthusiasm in the wake of the French Revolution motivated the creation of works in which wronged characters, sometimes political prisoners, are, over the course of the opera, liberated or redeemed. Virtue triumphs over the tyranny of the power-hungry. Fidelio is, then, comedic opera because of its happy ending rather than because of the hilarity that characterizes HGO’s season-opener, The Barber of Seville, and other comic operas.

The plot thickens

In many respects it is a story of the love and devotion of a wife who more than stands by her man. Prior to the action of the opera, Florestan has incurred the wrath of Pizarro for trying to reveal his crimes to the world. Conveniently, Pizarro is the governor of a prison and knows just what to do with the meddling Florestan.

Enter, two years later, Fidelio, the masculine persona of Florestan’s cross-dressed wife, Leonore. Prison keeper Rocco hires Fidelio to help out around the prison, and as Fidelio plots Florestan’s escape, Rocco’s daughter, Marzelline, falls in love with “him.”

As Pizarro tries to hire Rocco to kill Florestan, a series of erotic complications evolve around Fidelio, Marzelline, and her suitor Jacquino. Graves are dug, plots are hatched, and ruin seems right around the corner until at last Don Fernando arrives to end tyranny, liberate everyone, and pack Pizarro off to prison.

Fidelity is the name of the game in Fidelio — quite literally. Indeed, it’s fair to say this is an opera primarily about love, longing and devotion, which are enshrined in the glorious score. But the genre of the rescue opera and the vision of director Jürgen Flimm raise the question of political opera or, more generally, of the political nature of art.

Flimm’s 2000 production premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, and to the fascination of some and the perturbation of others, it places Fidelio in a grim, totalitarian world apparently somewhere in the 20^th century. Some associated it with South America, while others describe it merely as “a stark and corrupt modern-day prison in some placeless and repressive country that seemed all too familiar.”

It's no easy conversation to have, in spite of myriad operatic works that engage directly with political themes or emerge from historical moments of great political import. Some would say everything is political, whether it seems so or not, a generalization that's perhaps true, but not very useful.

What was Beethoven thinking about — the French Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Bonaparte? Perhaps all of these things. Or, perhaps, he hoped to escape the particularities of the political into a world in which universal values of love and community win out.

Other "political" operas

As I prepare to be introduced to and enthralled by this infrequently produced work, I find myself thinking about operas I have recently seen or that I’ll be seeing soon. Last season’s HGO production of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walkingcomes to mind. When someone’s executed on the stage in front of you, how can you not think about it as a political opera, even though much of the attention is on the relationship between Sister Helen Prejean and Joseph De Rocher.

Political, yes. Dogmatic? No. This is an opera staged around an incredibly divisive issue. No matter how one feels about the death penalty, there’s no triumphant end, even if one feels satisfied by the execution of justice or comforted by the power of compassion.

I’m thinking, too, of John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Nixon in China, which I saw staged last year at the Met. What an extraordinary opera — one that premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987. This, too, is no dogmatic work. It’s more a biography of a moment, a setting out of geopolitical tensions and complications in the idiom of opera. What triumph could there be? Nixon returns home, perhaps relations with China are better, but is it a work of art that imagines political change or redemption? History is much murkier than that, it seems.

Last year I was fortunate to see Fort Worth Opera’s rather stellar staging of Hydrogen Jukebox, a collaboration between Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg. Selections from Howl and other poems perform a rather radical analysis of both the serious ills and the potential grandeur of America. There is affirmation in the beautiful “Father Death Blues” at the end, but this is cosmic, not political, affirmation. Mammon holds sway, alas, over Wall Street and Kansas alike.

I’m not yet sure what to expect from Nico Muhly and Stephen Karam’s Dark Sisters, which premieres in November at the Gotham Chamber Opera. Muhly’s chamber work takes as its theme a government raid of polygamists as a consequence of accusations of child abuse. Sound familiar, Texas?

Olivia Giovetti assembled her own list of “The Top 10 Politically-Charged American Operas,” which includes Nixon in China, Hydrogen Jukebox, Dead Man Walking, and others. But my sense is that opinions vary wildly on this subject.

So, please write in and share your thoughts: is Fidelio political? Is opera political? What political operas are on your minds?