God! What Darkness Here: Prison Architecture in Beethoven’s Fidelio

In a Tortoiseshell

The following excerpt is from my semester-long research paper for ART329: Architecture of Confinement, from the Hospice to the Era of Mass Incarceration. The prompt was to produce a historical research paper on imprisonment grounded in architecture and based on a thematic area. I chose the thematic area “art” and explored set design architecture within Beethoven’s sole opera, Fidelio, a prime example of the ‘prison opera’ subgenre. To track the set’s architectural evolution, I examine three productions of Fidelio from 1870, 1989, and 2020. In this excerpt, I highlight my analysis of the 1989 and 2020 productions and include a portion of an interview I conducted with NY-based teacher and playwright, Aaron Landsman, whom I spoke with to better understand how art could be used as a social/political tool. Fidelio’s plot highlights the cruelty and corruption within prisons, and therefore the set design in Fidelio depicts how prison architecture is used ‘immorally’ or against its most ideal purpose. In essence, Fidelio’s set provides a clue into how the anti-prison would be designed. By analyzing various set designs throughout the centuries of Fidelio’s performances, it’s possible to see what aspects of prisons were condemned in that particular historical moment. I therefore argue that Fidelio’s set designs across these three periods exemplify the influence and evolution of the prison reform movement on the societal usage of prisons. 

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Excerpt

Introduction 

And the prisoners sang, “Oh, freedom, freedom! Heavenly powers! Oh freedom! Will it yet be ours?”¹ Nearing the close of Act I of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, set entirely within a prison, inmates are released from their cells into the prison yard, experiencing air, light, life, and wondering if this is the moment they will finally be free. It is not yet to be, and the once hopeful prisoner’s chorus is shunted back into the prison, which they call their grave.² This heartbreaking moment of confinement forces the audience to reckon with the physical and psychological horrors of incarceration. The stage transforms into a prison. The prison, whose architectural plans, practices, and dealings are so often hidden from public view, now becomes the primary object of scrutiny. Historically, opera’s combination of visual and musical elements has allowed viewers and performers to delve deeply into the human condition, addressing a wide range of subjects, from the serious to the satirical. The operatic prison scene, rife with drama and internal, psychological turbulence, is one of the most poignant ways to explore the human condition through music. 

The theme of confinement and the display of prison scenes in opera became especially pervasive in the 1700s. Arguably, confinement has existed in opera since the genre’s inception, as the first opera with surviving music was Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1597), followed by what considered the first operatic masterpiece, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607). Both works are based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who must rescue his love Eurydice from hell, a realm she cannot escape, which is often alluded to in depictions of confinement. 

Given the storied history of confinement in opera, its onstage presentation has undergone many shifts. This paper will examine the architectural evolution of confinement in operatic set design, with a focus on social and political movements that influenced public perceptions of incarceration. Centering on Beethoven’s Fidelio, this paper will investigate the trajectory of its set through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries based on set designs from three productions (1870, 1989, and 2020. It then considers the implicit arguments of the opera’s set design architecture. I argue that designs of Fidelio’s set across these three periods exemplify the influence and evolution of the prison reform movement on prisons’ shifting societal usage. Regardless of the time period Fidelio is set in, the opera maintains a steady criticism of imprisonment for imprisonment’s sake, suggesting that incarceration must instead prioritize reform. 

From the Dungeon’s Hidden Depths to a Culture of Surveillance 

The prison reform movement began around 1750, arising from the heavy criticism of well-known prisons such as Newgate for being sites of moral vice. There was a growing fear of lower-level prisoners intermingling with higher-level criminals and becoming morally worse for it.³ As a response to these conditions, the penal reforms of the late 18th and early 19th centuries both regulated imprisonment and gave it a moral purpose rather than a solely punitive one.⁴  The primary goal of prisons shifted from security to reform and societal reentry. One important authority during this period was The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline (SIPD), which argued that prisons must ideologically account for: 

1. Punishment; 
2. Security from escape and defense from outside force; 
3. Systematic supervision of both guards and prisoners; 
4. Prevention of corruption arising from prisoners’ mutual contact; 
5. Good health of the occupants; 
6. Reformation by means of labor, religion, and possibly education.⁵ 

SIPD’s third element of reformed prisons, “Systematic supervision of both guards and prisoners,” originally served as a way of implementing a ‘moral science.’ In theory, surveillance of prisoners would enforce a behavioral code, ‘being at the conquest of human nature.’⁶ For example, Pentonville, a British carceral facility built in the 1850s, utilized a new architectural plan: the radial plan. This design allowed guards to efficiently assess the state of order within the prison by surveying the space between inmates and cells. As technology evolved, surveillance only became more acute. This was a crucial shift away from the dungeon – the original setting of Fidelio, which structurally represented pre-reform imprisonment. As Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, the three functions of the dungeon were to 1) enclose, 2) deprive of light, and 3) to hide.⁷ Now, enhanced surveillance led to a shift in the opposite direction: towards near-constant visibility. 

The Panopticon and Societal Surveillance 

The pinnacle of surveillance within prison architecture was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, designed with a central watchtower from which guards could monitor every cell while prisoners never knew when they were being watched. Although the panopticon itself was not immediately constructed, various authoritarian regimes (ex., Nazi Germany, Soviet-controlled East Germany, etc.) implemented the idea of watching prisoners (and/or citizens) in the following periods. This provides important context when analyzing a staging in the late 20th century: the powerful 1989 production of Fidelio at the Dresden Semperoper. 

On October 7th and 8th, Christine Mielitz’s production of Fidelio coincided with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany’s (SED) heavy surveillance over East Germany. Tensions were rising in the days leading up to October 9, 1989, the state’s 40th birthday.⁸In the opera’s libretto, the stage direction “Volk eilt herzu,” or “the people rush in,” cues the grand finale, representing the literal and symbolic arrival of the masses. Moray McGowan, a scholar in contemporary German social history, explored the significance of “Volk eilt herzu” in the 1989 Fidelio production by comparing it to how the word “Volk” was used by the SED in their crackdown efforts in policing the state.⁹ As SED leaders braced for protest in the lead-up to the state’s 40th anniversary, they readied the “Volkspolizei” (people’s police) and the “Volksarmee” (people’s army), two parties meant to represent the “Volk” who, in actuality, arrested civilians en masse. Between October 3 and 9, there were 1,303 arrests, completely overwhelming the capabilities of the Volkspolizei and leading to overcrowding, abuse, and increased lack of sanitation in holding facilities.¹⁰ These conditions were quite reminiscent of pre-reform jails, pointing to an interesting juxtaposition. While certain Stasi prisons used surveillance methods derived from the reform movement, the question of whether they were truly enacting a “moral science” was questionable, as many issues within Stasi prisons were considered pre-reform concerns. The SED’s totalitarian regime, exemplifying panopticism (a reform-era concept), was inadvertently reverting to pre-reform practices. Even if the architecture of Stasi prisons stemmed from reform movement principles, there seemed to be a tipping point where the new “moral science” of reform became a cover for control. 

Mielitz’s 1989 production of Fidelio purposefully alluded to two famous Stasi prisons: the Bautzen I and II. Surveillance was essential in both prisons. In the 1989 production, a guard tower looms in the background, casting unceasing beams of light upon the prisoners and high walls topped with wire.¹¹ Associating the reform-era architecture of surveillance with the ‘anti-prison’ inherent in Fidelio displays a perversion of reform ideals. 

Fidelio in the Abstract 

While the prison landscape of the Dresden Semperoper production reflected the tensions directly outside the opera house, the 2020 production of Fidelio at the Theater an der Wien (designed by architects at Barkow Leibinger, an architecture firm based in Berlin) attempted to avoid associations with specific prisons to instead emphasize the music and action. The set is a double-helix, spiralling vertically to the full height and depth of the backstage, described by the firm as a “kind of modern Piranesian vertical labyrinth.”¹² 

The set takes up the entire stage and threatens to spill over into the audience, standing in stark contrast to the more traditional, enclosed architecture of the Theater an der Wien. The stairs appear mountainous, defying logic as they fold upside down, leading nowhere. Where stairs were previously used to delineate upper and lower levels, their lack of a destination illustrates the endless, circuitous nature of incarceration. There is no up or down, escape becomes futile, and imprisonment lasts beyond the structure itself. 

In her book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Nicole Fleetwood, an academic, prison abolitionist, and curator, deconstructs spaces of solitary confinement. She addresses Giorgio Agamben’s theory of “bare life,” where prisoners in isolated spaces yell at each other through walls to navigate exclusion from human interaction. The set’s simplicity and the endless white of the space are reminiscent of the sensory deprivation in solitary confinement and prisons generally. Perhaps this set is a physical depiction of confinement extending beyond corporeal constructs. The repercussions of extreme isolation (unnatural and jarring to humans who require socialization) extend for years following imprisonment. Some prisoners must relearn how to walk, following long-term, unnatural enclosure in tight spaces.¹³ Fleetwood also discusses how they experience “dead time,” struggling to keep track of days of the week and hours of the day.¹⁴ In the space of the double helix, a representation of infinity or endless time, there is no way to mark the passing of the days. Any light coming in is artificial, and without windows, the structure creates a space entirely separated from the outside world. Within this paradigm, the prospect of reentry grows dim, and imprisonment centers on punishment rather than reform. 

Imagining a Post-Prison World 

Today, there is another philosophical offshoot of the prison reform movement: the prison abolition movement. A key originator of the movement, Angela Davis (American Marxist and political activist), explains in her book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, that while the prison system is generally seen as an “unconditional standard,” an abolitionist approach calls for rethinking the carceral system and replacing it both physically and ideologically with alternative strategies and institutions.¹⁵ Within the context of this new philosophy, perhaps there is yet another way to examine the lack of a prison within Theater an der Wien’s 2020 Fidelio production. Rather than the extensive white space and double helix design representing the barrenness and endless nature of modern prison facilities, it may instead portray undefined abolitionist alternatives. 

To understand art’s role in exploring issues of confinement, I spoke with New York-based playwright, performer, and teacher Aaron Landsman, who is interested in how power dynamics and institutional systems impact human behavior. In response to my question on the process of theatermaking for social impact, Landsman discussed a practice he’s been approached with by other artists: seventh-generation stewardship.¹⁶ Originally derived from The Great Law of Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the framework for the political, cultural, and spiritual union of the tribes within the Iroqois Nation), seventh-generation stewardship calls people to consider the impacts of their actions seven generations in advance.¹⁷ Reconsidering the 2020 Fidelio production in tandem with ideas of prison abolition and seventh-generation stewardship as a guide to art-making, another interpretation of this staging actually points to the idealization of a world without prisons. 

Interpreting the 2020 production as a prison-abolition-alluding work allows the audience to imagine a post-prison future. By taking an opera inherently about prison and removing the prison, the production questions whether prisons are truly essential, an increasingly topical issue within the modern movement. The prison reform movement instigated countless shifts in architecture, many in alignment with new prison-governing principles. The acceptance and prevalence of emerging architectural prison plans were aided by forms of visual media, such as set design, that either supported or protested those design choices. In the midst of an ongoing reform movement, art today can envision the potential future of prisons. As Fidelio maintains its criticism of imprisonment for imprisonment’s sake and necessitates reform within prison, perhaps it can extend to a new vision of reform that extends beyond prison walls, eventually turning them to dust. 

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Footnotes

1. Joseph Sonnleithner and Georg Friedrich Treitschke, Fidelio: An Opera in Two Acts, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, Libretto from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, English translation by Edward J. Dent, Belwin Mills Publishing Corp., New York, 197-?, 25. ↩︎
2. Joseph Sonnleithner and Georg Friedrich Treitschke, Fidelio: An Opera in Two Acts, English translation by Edward J. Dent, 25.  ↩︎
3.  Robin Evans, “Introduction,” in The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840, (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2. ↩︎
4.  Evans, “Introduction,” 1.  ↩︎
5. Johnston, Forms of Constraint, 44.  ↩︎
6. Robin Evans, “Introduction,” 4.  ↩︎
7. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, (Vintage Books, 1995), 200. ↩︎
8. Moray McGowan. “‘Volk Eilt Herzu’: Beethoven’s Opera Fidelio in Dresden on October 7 and 8, 1989, and Its Ambivalent Afterlife.” In Edinburgh German Yearbook 13: Music in German Politics / Politics in German Music, edited by Siobhán Donovan and Maria Euchner, 115–32. Boydell & Brewer (2022), 116. ↩︎
9.  McGowan. “Volk Eilt Herzu,” 115.  ↩︎
10. McGowan. “Volk Eilt Herzu,” 118.  ↩︎
11.  Jacqueline Z. Wilson and Ian Boyle. “Representing Political Oppression: The Stasi Prison as an Edifice of Cultural Memory in Modern Berlin.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017, 501. ↩︎
12. “Fidelio,” Barkow Leibinger, accessed November 7, 2025, https://barkowleibinger.com/en/projects/fidelio.  ↩︎
13. Nicole Fleetwood, “Resisting Isolation: Art in Solitary Confinement,” in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, (Harvard University Press, 2020), 200. ↩︎
14.  Nicole Fleetwood, “Resisting Isolation: Art in Solitary Confinement,” in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, (Harvard University Press, 2020), 190-230.  ↩︎
15. Angela Davis, “Abolitionist Alternatives,” in Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003), 106-107.  ↩︎
16.  Aaron Landsman, interview by Gabrielle Liberman, Dec 2, 2025.  ↩︎
17.  Law, K. F., Syropoulos, S., Young, L., & Bo, B. (2025). Mapping prescriptive beliefs on seventh generation stewardship and increasing the temporal scope of intergenerational concern. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 37618. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-21466-9  ↩︎

Works Cited 

Barkow Leibinger. “Fidelio.” Accessed November 7, 2025, https://barkowleibinger.com/en/projects/fidelio. 

Davis, Angela. “Abolitionist Alternatives.” In Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Evans, Robin. “Introduction.” In The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982. Journal of Social Policy. 

Fleetwood, Nicole. “Resisting Isolation: Art in Solitary Confinement.” In Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Harvard University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11vcfjs.

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1995.

Johnston, Norman. Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. University of Illinois Press 2000.

Law, K. F., Syropoulos, S., Young, L., & Bo, B. (2025). Mapping prescriptive beliefs on seventh-generation stewardship and increasing the temporal scope of intergenerational concern. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 37618. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-21466-9

McGowan, Moray. “‘Volk Eilt Herzu’: Beethoven’s Opera Fidelio in Dresden on October 7 and 8, 1989, and Its Ambivalent Afterlife.” In Edinburgh German Yearbook 13: Music in German Politics / Politics in German Music, edited by Siobhán Donovan and Maria Euchner, 115–32. Boydell & Brewer, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv134vk5c.10.

Sonnleithner, Joseph and Treitschke, Georg Friedrich. Fidelio: An Opera in Two Acts, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, Belwin Mills Publishing Corp., New York, 197-?. Libretto from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. English translation by Edward J. Dent. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

Wilson, Jacqueline Z. and Ian Boyle. “Representing Political Oppression: The Stasi Prison as an Edifice of Cultural Memory in Modern Berlin.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017.

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Author Commentary / Gabrielle Liberman 

This was my first semester-long research project, and it pushed me as a writer and scholar in ways I didn’t even know of. Having the privilege of taking on a paper like this as early as my Fall semester of sophomore year has given me an incredible sense of self-assurance and excitement for research to come. The topic of this paper had been circulating in my head for at least a year or two preceding this project, since I fell in love with opera at 10 years old and discovered a passion for prison reform my freshman year of high school. 

The structure of writing this paper was unique. Before searching for arguments, we submitted a purely historical version without any inherent thesis. This allowed me to dive deeply into the context surrounding Fidelio and prison architecture, but it also sometimes caused uncertainty regarding the amount of context the reader needed. This was a focus of my revision process, and I hoped to clearly center not just the new thesis I was writing, but the motive – why this topic mattered. I knew many readers might not come into this paper with a background in opera or see the connection between Fidelio and its political implications offstage, so I hoped to first ground my audience in the rich history of opera and the prison opera subgenre. 

The interdisciplinary nature of the paper was both a challenge and an opportunity. I wanted to thread in architectural drawings of prisons, set diagrams, the opera’s libretto, and other materials that merged the world of incarceration with opera. The multimedia elements of this paper made research challenging as I scoured databases for the ideal images, but this work was necessary, given that architecture is a primarily visual medium. The time I took to select the images also led to my favorite analytical chunks of the essay, where I pried into minute details as our professor, Dr. Baudez, taught us to do. We spent a lot of time in class discussing the form and function of prisons. Often, details such as the width of stairs, distribution of windows, or size of dormitories provided vital clues into the architect’s/institution’s intentions. When evaluating spaces of confinement, every element provides hints to whether/how imprisonment serves to punish or reform. 

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Editor Commentary / Nikki Han and Wendy Wang

It is no easy task to marry incisive close-reading and sweeping socio-political evaluation in one paper, but Gabrielle manages to do just that. The relationship between aesthetics and politics, visual representation and social critique, is perceptively sketched out in Gabrielle’s essay. “God! What Darkness Here: Prison Architecture in Beethoven’s Fidelio” epitomizes the effective writing that takes place when a writer’s “deep dive” spans numerous oceans. 

The historical stakes of the different productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio are effectively delineated by Gabrielle’s orienting. She situates the reader within the reformist ambitions of the 18th-century Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline (SIPD), while simultaneously placing these ideals in tension with the emergence of new carceral technologies across the 18th and 19th centuries. It is equally impressive how Gabrielle weaves in theoretical texts alongside this orienting. Pivoting from the Pentonville facility to French theorist Michel Foucault’s concept of the “panopticon” in Discipline and Punish, and then moving directly into Christine Mielitz’s production shows an important lesson: deeply engaging with—but never over-relying on—lens texts. Including canonical theorists like Foucault and modern critics like Nicole Fleetwood, she adds depth to the argumentation while never fully obscuring her own writer’s voice. 

Her close readings are especially compelling in this regard. Gabrielle resists the temptation to treat visual documentation as merely illustrative; she approaches them as generative sites of discovery and meaning. Whether she is unpacking the guard tower in Mielitz’s 1989 production or tracing the logic of the double-helix set in the 2020 staging that “illustrates the endless, circuitous nature of incarceration,” her attention to form becomes a way of thinking through ideology. These moments construct bridges between the micro and the macro, the tangible and the abstract, where each detail actively speaks to her larger argument about control, surveillance, and the evolving logic of incarceration. 

Perhaps most importantly, this essay presents a strong case for motive and thesis. Gabrielle does not simply present a claim about the evolution of prison architecture; she orients the reader toward why this question matters in the first place. The essay’s motive emerges through her sustained effort to connect operatic staging to broader socio-political structures that extend far beyond the stage. In this sense, her thesis, that “regardless of the time period Fidelio is set in, the opera maintains a steady criticism of imprisonment for imprisonment’s sake, suggesting that incarceration must instead prioritize reform,” functions more as a throughline, pressure-tested across historical contexts. 

Moving fluidly across multiple disciplinary frameworks without fragmenting her argument, Gabrielle traverses history, architectural analysis, performance studies, and critical theory while remaining grounded in each analytical turn. This is the essay’s central strength: a sustained commitment to connecting close reading with broader socio-political stakes, allowing each lens to sharpen rather than diffuse her argument. 

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Author 

Gabrielle Liberman ‘28 is a sophomore from Summit, New Jersey. She is thrilled to soon declare as a History major! At Princeton, Gabrielle is President of the Princeton Opera Company, a member of the Glee Club, sings in the Princeton Tigerlilies, and enjoys attending guest speaker lectures, reading historical fiction, and proudly representing her residential college, Forbes. She loves nothing more than spending time with her parents and friends.

Editors 

Nikki Han ’28 is an English major from Sydney, Australia. On campus, she is a Writing Center Fellow, the head Features editor for The Daily Princetonian, and a poetry editor for Moon Press. She enjoys wandering around art galleries, watching films in movie theaters, and collecting miscellaneous items for her scrapbook. 

Wendy Wang ’28 is a Comparative Literature major from Shenzhen, China. On campus, she is a Writing Center Fellow, a Peer Health Advisor, and the Community Engagement Chair and a barista at Coffee Club. She enjoys city-biking, dark roast coffee, and films where not much happens.