Writers and adaptors and publishers need to learn that when a genius abandons something they were working on whether that work was for 2 months or 20 years and it is found at the bottom of a draw or trunk after their death there is almost always a good reason why the work was never performed or published. It never was very good. Such is the history of Beethoven’s aborted opera Vestas Feuer. Jay Stephenson’s Beethoven’s Wrong Note is an example of that bad decision making by an adaptor.

Stephenson’s concept of taking a piece of classical music and providing new instrumentation is one that has been employed successfully in all sorts of musical genres. Many rock bands have successfully borrowed from classical music. Nutcracker, the Musical takes all of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker symphony and brilliantly adapts it to a musical with Nancy Holson writing the book and lyrics and Paul Rigano, Bruce Kiesling, and David Rigano doing the arrangement. Their work has made the Nutcracker into an extraordinary musical. But 10 minutes of an abandoned Beethoven opera with libretto by Emanuel Schikanede, by 1803 a fading talent, is not a good place to invest an effort and what is on the Sargent Stage is a reminder of what were they thinking?

The music may have worked better, and the performers may have performed better, with a live band. The opera was certainly better whenever James Higgins used the keyboard to introduce and play a piece, but the lack of lead-ins in the recorded music created chaos on the stage. The show did have the bright spots of the underutilized James Harkness and solid tenor of Dante Zaccaro. The acting and puppetry Mikayla Cintron added some freshness to the otherwise all over the map production. Stephenson should also have known that you never use more than one soprano in a production. Sopranos have to be alphas, and one is inevitably better than the others which makes listening to the others hard to tolerate. Choosing three or arranging for three sopranos is an amateur error.

This show did win a community theater award in 2024, but community theater and festivals are the only places that it will ever be seen (which is still probably more places than Vestas Feurer was seen during Beethoven’s lifetime).