Given its materialist subject, one can’t help thinking that musicologists ought to be interested (if not excited) by the so-called Gold Aria (‘Hat man nicht auch Gold beineben’), sung by the jailer Rocco in Act I of Beethoven’s Fidelio. And yet its words are more promising to the musicological interpreter prospecting for material than the music turns out to be. Frederic Scherer’s study of the financial pressures of (mostly) nineteenth-century musicians, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes, uses the Gold Aria in typical fashion: the words of the aria are cited at the very beginning of the book, and the song never appears again.Footnote ¹

From the start, scholars and opera lovers have rarely done more than tolerate the Gold Aria. As part of the 1805 fiasco in the Theater an der Wien during the French occupation, Rocco’s solo was cut altogether from the barely more successful version of Fidelio performed the following year. It was reintroduced in the overhauled two-act opera of 1814, mostly because the latest Rocco, Carl Weinmüller – one of the home-grown actor-celebrities whose stock had risen sharply towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars – would have expected a solo number, as would his appreciative public.Footnote ² Still, in a heavy-breathing philosophical exploration of Fidelio produced in Leipzig in the months following the 1814 Viennese revival – and so in the absence of the acting that reportedly made Weinmüller’s roles worth seeing – one of the Hegelian high-priests of Beethoven reception, Amadeus Wendt, proposed that the Gold Aria be taken out of circulation altogether: ‘Should any piece be set aside to shorten the whole, it may be this.’Footnote ³

It’s the sort of irony that only a present-day critic could discern and enjoy, perhaps: that a song that has always struggled to circulate should concern that quintessential object of circulation, money – the joyful noise when coins ‘roll and jangle’ in pockets, the truck and barter of bourgeois social intercourse; ‘gold is a mighty thing’ Rocco repeatedly tells his daughter Marzelline. Beethoven’s only surviving song about hard cash may not have helped him to earn much of it, yet the Gold Aria has struck generations of critics as similar to money at least in one respect: generic and substitutable, it has few distinctive qualities of its own.

The sight of members of the vulgar merchant classes delivering narrow-minded paeans to money was common enough on the early nineteenth-century Viennese stage, and the Gold Aria remains well within this conventional buffo territory. Beethoven’s terse little number is built around a single textual contrast, expressed in a change of affect and metre. A declamatory trumpet-voluntary melodic line opens the plodding first section in 2/4 – without gold ‘life drags on miserably’ sings Rocco – and gives way to a more lively second section in 6/8, introduced by a trickling contredanse figure in the violins, on the joys brought by wealth. A conclusion returns to the opening metre, and sums up the song’s message (‘gold is a mighty thing’) over repeating cadence formulas.

The whole aria amounts to barely more than formula, in fact, not only in its overall layout but also in its well-worn vocabulary of prefab melodic patter, reminiscent of solfeggi – the triad-plus-do-re-mi opening gesture and the relentless mi-re-do cadences accompanying the tagline at the end. One could easily interpret the disdain that has greeted the Gold Aria over the years as the predictable consequence of a superannuated Beethovenian conception of convention: as a constraint to be subverted, rather than an enabling condition or the premise of mesmerising performances. Yet, especially given that opera and opera studies are by and large more susceptible to the charms of a charismatic soprano than those of a bass, it is hard to imagine a drastic vocal delivery that could bring about an alchemical transformation of these base musical metals. (No performances of the Gold Aria are the subject of fond recollection by opera buffs, unless you count Ludwig Weber’s roistering Wagnerian take on the song at Covent Garden in 1947.) And in the absence of one of those self-conscious Beethovenian transgressions on conventional limits or a lustrous singing voice, neither has the Gold Aria accrued value through any meaningful history of operatic journeys and transactions: the pleasure of witnessing a familiar song unpacked from a singer’s suitcase, of rehearing a tune in its latest incarnation, of comparing what it has done in previous iterations with what it is doing now. Neither gloriously eluding the logic of circulation altogether – as those vaunted aesthetic objects of old were thought to – nor reminding us of a long history of pleasurably sociable exchange, the Gold Aria has ended up curiously inert, jangling away meaninglessly like an obsolete currency.

This is all to say that the problem of the Gold Aria is a bourgeois problem – and it has been ever since Wendt. The plot of Fidelio was ‘only drawn from bourgeois life’ (aus dem bürgerlichen Leben), Wendt professed, yet Beethoven ‘elevates this bourgeois [bürgerliche] scene with magic power into a stronger and more romantic world’, ultimately exposing the moral law rooted in every human breast.Footnote ⁴ But the Gold Aria didn’t contribute much to this noble project: the music remained as ‘ordinary’ as the ‘money morality’ (Geldmoral) that it promoted.Footnote ⁵ Paul Robinson’s 1996 study of the opera hardly advances from this position, except to vacillate over whether the world of the opera counts as bourgeois or petty bourgeois: the Gold Aria is ‘an exercise in petty-bourgeois philosophizing’ in which ‘Rocco holds forth with bourgeois satisfaction’.Footnote ⁶ And in the end, the song turns out to be valuable be only because it contrasts so starkly with the monumental conclusion of the piece, in which the ‘world of bourgeois routine’ is obliterated, and in the most extravagant terms: ‘the opera depicts the redemption … of the entire social universe to which it introduces us’.Footnote ⁷ Paradoxically, in most of the Beethoven literature this final redemption (even though it is brought about by the last-minute intervention of a good prince) is precisely what turns Fidelio into a central document of post-revolutionary bourgeois liberalism. The opera thus describes a journey between the contrasting historical roles of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, frequently unreconciled in sweeping analyses of the sort that Robinson undertakes: on the one hand, the small-time shopkeepers and money-grubbers of aristocratic caricature; on the other hand, those high-minded self-forming gentlemen with side whiskers, soberly seeking aesthetic transcendence.Footnote ⁸

At this point one can hardly help thinking of the psycho-social predicament that was Beethoven’s notorious ‘nobility pretence’: his reluctance to correct the widespread misinterpretation of his Flemish ‘van’ as an aristocratic German ‘von’. Once he was found out by the Austrian Landrecht, his reaction, reported by Anton Schindler, seems appropriately double-edged: pointing to his head and his heart, he announced, ‘my nobility is here and here’.Footnote ⁹ Thus does the bourgeoisie incorporate and spiritualise the ancient protocols of aristocratic distinction. Indeed, Beethoven’s vision of an aristocracy of culture had, in 1801, prompted him to fantasise about a ‘market for art [Magazin der Kunst] to which the artist would only bring his works to take what he needed’ and to complain in the same breath that ‘one must be half businessman’.Footnote ¹⁰ The bourgeois tension in a nutshell: homo economicus versus homo aestheticus; the Gold Aria and its sublime opposites.

And yet, to thinkers such as Wendt, it was precisely the gross materialism of the Gold Aria that barred it from circulation, even while the most transcendent moments in Fidelio deserved to circulate widely. One may take this seeming paradox as revealing, yet again, the ways in which the spheres of the economic and the aesthetic are mutually implicated: raptures over art objects can always be unmasked as some variety of commodity fetishism – the fantasy that the logic of exchange value is temporarily suspended – just as the desire for exchangeable consumer objects can always be dignified as a form of aesthetic attraction. Yet even to hazard a claim of this sort may be to force the Gold Aria to tell us more than it can. The challenge of striking interpretative gold in this song may teach us something more fundamental. To experience the pleasures of commodity fetishism, one must first have a commodity – and the Gold Aria never truly became one, never jangled and rolled as much as the money it extols. The tangled relationships and circulating motions of people and things are among the musicologist’s primary objects of knowledge nowadays, we are frequently told. Yet the Gold Aria might remind us that most things that pass before our eyes and ears – whether we encounter them as scholars or music lovers – never entirely claim our attention. The song is above all a symbol of that vast ocean of things not-quite-present to the music historian or operagoer – the things that they tolerate as an essential yet indistinct part of the landscape of their knowledge and appreciation. Only some objects circulate with the perpetual vibrancy lionised by present-day theorists of social relations or neo-liberal politicians; the rest just keep turning up now and again, forgettable, but not forgotten.