In January 1803, Beethoven was appointed composer at the Theater an der Wien. Shortly afterward, he and his brother Carl took up lodgings there. Six months later, Beethoven and Emanuel Schikaneder (1751-1812), then director of the Theater an der Wien, began planning a new opera, Vestas Feuer, to a libretto by Schikaneder. By the end of 1803, Beethoven had abandoned Vestas Feuer in favor of Leonore, with a libretto adapted by Joseph Sonnleithner (1766-35) from Bouilly's Léonore. In April 1804, Beethoven was dismissed from the Theater an der Wien and plans to perform Leonore were abandoned. By late August, however, Beethoven was reinstated; he completed the opera in September 1805. This proved to be only the beginning of the composer's problems with his new stage work.

At the end of September, a planned performance of Leonore for October 15 was banned by the court censor. A petition from Sonnleithner persuaded the censor to lift the ban a week later, but the performance date had already been moved back. One week before the newly projected premiere of Leonore the French army occupied Vienna and Napoleon established his headquarters in the Schönbrunn Palace, just outside the city. Beethoven's important patrons had all left the Vienna for the safety of the countryside, and a great part of the theater-going public consisted of French soldiers. Thus, the opera was staged amid inauspicious circumstances and given only three performances, the first of which took place on November 20, 1805 at the Theater an der Wien.

Reviews of Leonore were not favorable. People found the first act to be tiresome because nothing "happens" in it. Instead, Beethoven piles musical structure upon musical structure creating lengthy numbers that delay the progress of the action. In fact, after the curtain falls on Act II the orchestra continues playing for sixty measures in order to complete the musical structure begun in the act's Finale. At first, Beethoven was adamantly against any revisions, but eventually consented. These occurred in two phases, first by Stephan Breuning (1774-1827) and later by Georg Treitschke (1776-1842), at which time the title was changed to Fidelio.

Breuning reduced the first two acts of the three-act Leonore into a single act, keeping most of the numbers and moving the Trio, "Ein Mann ist bald genommen," from No. 3 to No. 10. (This Trio would be cut from Fidelio.) Also, the present No. 9, containing the aria, "Komm, Hoffnung," is preceded in Leonore by a duet for Marzelline and Leonore. (Treitschke eliminated this duet as well.) Whereas Breuning and Beethoven closed the new first act with the original Act II Finale, the final version contains an entirely new ending for the first act. Possibly the most unfortunate cut from the original Leonore appears near the very end of the opera: as Leonore unchains her husband, all assembled sing, "Ach Gott, welche ein Augenblick!" To set these words Beethoven looked back to a theme from his Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II, WoO. 87, of 1790. After the successful performances of Fidelio in 1814, the original Leonore was lost, seemingly forever.

Eric Prieger, who completed invaluable research on the original Leonore, published a vocal score of the opera in 1905. After languishing in silence for a century, Leonore was performed at the Royal Opera House in Berlin on November 20, 1905, under the baton of Richard Strauss, exactly one hundred years after it first was played to the public.

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