[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAVID LANG: I saw a production of Fidelio--
I must have been 20 years old, 21 years old--
and there were a lot of unanswered questions
in the piece.
Questions about who wins, why they win,
what the story is about--
and I've been thinking about those questions ever since.
And so, I thought I would think about politics,
think about that experience I had
with the opera a million years ago,
and try to go into this piece and figure out
how it can more relate to what I am thinking now
and how I feel now, and the questions
I want to ask now about the world I live in.
I took Beethoven's original libretto,
and I got rid of the secondary stories in that.
And so a lot of what I'm doing in the opera
is I'm concentrating on the things
that Beethoven concentrated on.
What the relationship of the husband and the wife should be?
What the relationship of the people living in this prison
to the rules which imprisoned them?
What's the relationship of this prisoner to the state that
has imprisoned him?
And how we essentially have given power to the state
to put us in this prison.
- (SINGING) I'm [INAUDIBLE]--
DAVID LANG: These are things that are
present in the original opera.
And what I did is I tried to take texts from other sources
to shine a light on these things,
to pull them out of the original,
and to bring them to the foreground in my piece.
- (SINGING) Better to be feared than to be loved.
DAVID LANG: I have to say, this is
one of the most exciting things I've ever done.
Because I've been thinking about this piece for so long.
And to see it made real, to see these incredible actors,
to see Elkhana's great direction,
and to see The New York Philharmonic--
it's just unbelievable to see this thing take shape.
So this really, it was like a figment
of a dream, of a memory, of a tiny little seed.
And now, all of a sudden, it's something real.
I can't believe my good luck.
- (SINGING) If you can't be loved--
[NOTE FADES]
(SOFTLY) --be feared then.