Beethoven’s Opera “Fidelio”: A Methaphor for the World-wide Effort of Practitioners to Stop the Persecution in China

In this opera, so the story goes, Don Pizarro the tyrant keeps the protagonist Florestan incarcerated in a secret dungeon, because he had verbalized the truth about Don Pizarro’s secret, shady dealings. He was destined to be put to death, because a minister announced his visit, to collect proof in which manner the state prison authorities perpetrate willful force on victims. Don Pizarro’s gruesome character is revealed as he speaks about “cooling his revenge.” In the meantime, Florestan, from his lonely prison cell, says that he harbours no resentment, because “he had done his duty to speak out the truth,” , which has given him strength and peace of mind. At the same time his wife Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, has gained access to the prison and attempts to rescue him. At the climax of the opera, she stands before Florestan, shielding him, as Pizarro attempts to kill him. In the end, justice triumphs through the advent of compassion and the scene ends in overflowing jubilation.

Falun Gong practitioners in China intervene with their action to speak the truth about Falun Gong and to bring to daylight the unjustified persecution of Falun Gong and the torture of the practitioners. They are similar to the choir of the prisoners in the above opera which surfaces and sings of freedom and the desire to lift their breaths and hope for God’s intervention. The prisoners in the opera even sing that they are monitored, by sight and by listening in on them. A parallel can be drawn to the practitioners in China whose telephones are tapped and their conversations recorded.

Because practitioners in China hold fast to the virtues of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, they are being incarcerated, like Florestan, without due process of law, and are supposed to be re-educated, away from public scrutiny, through torture and abuse. Sometimes they are even killed. Just like Don Pizarro, the Chinese political group, gathered around Jiang Zemin, persecutes the practitioners even more cruelly, the closer the public – in the opera represented by the minister from Seville – gets to the facts. Just as Leonore did for her husband in the opera, so the practitioners who enjoy freedom [of belief] come to intervene for the incarcerated, to give worldwide support to the practitioners in China. With Leonore, the motive for her courageous deed is her love for her husband, a motivation that is easily understood and quickly accepted by opera visitors. Can the public, however, grasp the effort of us practitioners?

We want people all over the world to know that the efforts of us practitioners for the suppressed practitioners in China comes from a feeling of deep compassion and that this compassion is bigger than us, just like Leonore’s who stood protectively in front of Florestan and risked her life at the moment when Don Pizarro wanted to knife him to death. In times as these, when values crumble, this compassion represents a value for which one could easily give one’s life, if the only alternative would be to live a life without compassion. Perhaps the world will understand, as an afterthought, that this is the reason why practitioners from China and abroad repeatedly return to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, to bring about the redemption of those practitioners in China who are incarcerated and are being tortured. This compassion is like a “perpetual mobile,” a self-generating energy source, a continuum, which lets us endure all manner of difficulties. That is why we practitioners outside of China will never stop our appeals, not until our Chinese friends have been returned to freedom. The end result has already been established – as compassion rescued and freed Florestan, so it will lead the persecuted practitioners to freedom.

I myself would like to wish that in front of every theatre that shows this opera “Fidelio” there would be practitioners distributing this information and truth-clarifying materials about Falun Gong. “Fidelio” is not only an opera for a performance on the stage of a theatre, but has become reality on the stage of life in China.

The opera addresses ideals. Those become reality in the effort for Falun Gong. Everyone can help to unmask the evil and save lives. Florestan already saw it as his duty to reveal the truth.

By a German practitioner
January 6th, 2002