nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
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 标题: The Background of Zaide (219 reads) 时间: 2006-8-12 周六, 上午1:35 |
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The Background
In 1779, aged 23, Mozart had just returned from an abortive trip with his mother to Mannheim, Munich and Paris in search of a 'kapelmeister' post; while in Paris his mother had died. and Mozart was unhappily installed as a rank-and-file court musician at Salzburg.
Responding to a rumour that the Emperor Joseph II was looking to set up a new German-language opera troupe in Vienna [Italian being until then the universal language of opera], Mozart's father urged him to compose a German opera. If Wolfgang could present a brand new opera, they believed, he might be appointed to the post of music director of such a company.
Mozart therefore started writing Zaide, and was hard at work on it when a major commission came in from Munich for Idomeneo, the first of his indisputably great operas. Zaide was therefore put aside, even though he had by then completed 15 numbers, constituting probably about three-quarters of the music. After the triumph of Idomeneo Mozart left the employment of the Archbishop of Salzburg (somewhat acrimoniously!) and settled permanently in Vienna.
He asked his father to send the manuscript of Zaide on to him, but subsequently complained that it was too serious for Viennese tastes. Soon he was commissioned to write Die Entführung aus dem Serail, an opera which was altogether more comic and 'vaudeville' in style than Zaide, but which shared a very similar subject matter. With no prospect of having Zaide performed there presumably seemed little point in completing the work, especially with the composition of Die Entführung being his immediate priority, and the manuscript was left to gather dust.
The Libretto of Zaide
The libretto on which Zaide was based was titled 'The Seraglio, or The Unexpected Reunion of Father, Daughter and Son in Slavery' written in 1778 by a certain Franz Josef Sebastiani, and an earlier source may well have been Voltaire's Zaire, although no 18th century opera, however bleak, would have shared Voltaire's tragic ending. We do know, however, that Mozart was planning possibly quite radical changes to the original in his own adaptation [his friend in Salzburg, the court trumpeter Schachtner, collaborated with Mozart in adapting the libretto].
The Music of Zaide
The music of Zaide is missing an overture and a short final act, and none of the spoken text survives - the manuscript which has survived is a cue score, containing only the final couple of words of text before each number. The sung text of the surviving music, of course, gives us quite a clear impression of storyline, but because we are missing not only the spoken dialogue but also the final act, we don't even know how Mozart intended the story to end.
Maybe this was also part of the reason why he didn't complete the opera - in the Sebastiani and Voltaire, Zaide and Gomatz, who have fallen in love with each other at the very beginning of the opera, discover at the end that they are brother and sister, and Allazim, who has helped them escape from the seraglio, realises that he is their father. Not only is this rather a trite ending, but it feels out of keeping with Mozart's ravishing music, and indeed with style and spirit of all his other operas.
Completing Zaide
What survives of Zaide is the skeleton of the first three-quarters of the story; although we know what the surviving 15 numbers are about, the dialogue and the way these numbers are set up (and of course the whole ending) are an open & unwritten book.
The task of completing a new text and a new version is partly entirely creative, partly jigsaw-like, and partly musical, and we are not attempting to create a backwards-looking, 'this is how we think it might have been' work, but a piece of and for today. Given Zaide's setting & subject matter there are obvious resonances with recent world events.
These themes include those of tyranny, imprisonment and power, but in creating a piece for today which at the same time remains true to the spirit and legacy of Mozart it is important to recognize, and to appreciate, that the work is about courage and the power of love to overcome life's tyrannies.
So much of contemporary art offers a 'critique' of humanity without proposing a more positive alternative; it seems to me that Mozart, as Shakespeare did before him, was able to create a world which, despite the depth and acuteness of its pain and suffering, ultimately offered a compassionate, forgiving and uplifting vision of hope, and in creating a completed version of Zaide it feels crucial that we aspire to this vision.
Our biggest restriction, of course, is that Mozart isn't around to write any new music for us; to expect a contemporary musician to write pastiche Mozart that bears comparison with the real thing seems neither fair nor practical, and to write new music in a non-Mozartian style, however sensitively approached, would compromise the unity and flow of the piece.
What we are therefore proposing is to use other music by Mozart to complete the score; the period of Zaide was a particularly rich and fascinating one, and by restricting ourselves as much as possible to music written by Mozart within a year or two of Zaide we hope to retain a stylistic unity within the score, while at the same time maybe even adding to its quality.
This is clearly a bold and potentially hazardous challenge, but I am absolutely convinced that if we approach the task with integrity we can create something very exciting and special.
http://www.classicalopera.co.uk/Zaide.html
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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US premiere of Mozart's unfinished 'Zaide'
