In the world of classical music there are what I've perhaps only half jokingly called the "Alpha Beta's," that is, the major composers whose surnames begin with B. Any music student can rattle them off without a second thought: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. What's rather fascinating about these three is that only one of them, Beethoven, ever wrote a traditional opera. Bach's music theater offerings tend to be in the more static Oratorio format, a genre in which he obviously excelled, delivering unparalleled masterpieces built around the Lutheran liturgical year. Brahms most likely eschewed the operatic idiom for a couple of reasons. First, he was a stalwart proponent of "pure" music, that is music removed from any extra-musical meanings. Second, he was famously pitted in critical minds of his day against the theatrical excesses of Richard Wagner, and probably wanted to keep as much distance between Wagner's theatrical ambitions as possible. And so we're left with Beethoven, another "pure" music adherent who nonetheless wasn't totally averse to at least dabbling in programmatic composition, as in his sylvan Sixth Symphony, which admirably recreated a bucolic sound world full of frolicking country folk and the occasional thunderstorm. For all his emphasis on music for music's sake, Beethoven had a sub-textual through line underlying a fair number of his compositions, many of which were unapologetically political, or at least sociological, in nature. Caught up in the foment of his era, Beethoven certainly didn't shrink from espousing the equality of men, and their inalienable right to freedom and liberty. Fidelio stands as one of his most explicit statements in this regard, fording a stream he would visit again in a purely choral and instrumental setting with his "call to arms" for uniting humanity in brotherly love, his Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony.