The Operas of Mozart Part I

The Operas of Mozart Part I Professor Robert Greenberg THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Robert Greenberg, Ph.D. San Francisco Conservatory of Music Robert Greenberg has composed over forty-five works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of Greenberg’s work have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and The Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for string quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Professor Greenberg holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in music composition in 1984. His principal teachers were Edward Cone, Claudio Spies, Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson. Professor Greenberg’s awards include three Nicola De Lorenzo prizes in composition, three Meet the Composer grants, and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, XTET, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Dancer’s Stage Ballet Company. He is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served as Chair of the Department of Music History and Literature and Director of Curriculum of the Adult Extension Division for thirteen years. Professor Greenberg is resident music historian for National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered” program. He has taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, speaking to such schools, corporations, and musical institutions as the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Business School Publishing, Deutches Financial Services, Canadian Pacific, Quintiles Transnational, Lincoln Center, Van Cliburn Foundation, San Francisco Performances, University of California/Haas School of Business, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Chautauqua Institute, Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and others. His work as a teacher and lecturer has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Times of London. He is an artistic codirector and board member of COMPOSER, INC. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova Label. Professor Greenberg has recorded 328 lectures for The Teaching Company, including the forty-eight–lecture super- course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. ©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i Table of Contents The Operas of Mozart Part I Professor Biography............................................................................................i Course Scope.......................................................................................................1 Lecture One 1789 ...........................................................................2 Lecture Two Così fan tutte, Part One..............................................6 Lecture Three Così fan tutte, Part Two ...........................................10 Lecture Four Così fan tutte, Part Three .........................................15 Lecture Five Così fan tutte, Part Four...........................................20 Lecture Six Così fan tutte, Part Five ...........................................25 Lecture Seven Così fan tutte, Part Six .............................................32 Lecture Eight Così fan tutte, Part Seven.........................................37 Timeline.............................................................................................................42 Glossary.............................................................................................................43 Biographical Notes............................................................................................45 Bibliography......................................................................................................47 ii ©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership The Operas of Mozart Scope: This course discusses Mozart’s most important operas, which include Apollo and Hyacinthus (1767), La finta semplice (1768), Bastien and Bastienne (1768), Mitridate, King of Pontus (1770), Lucio Silla (1772), La finta giardiniera (1775), Il rè pastore (1775), Idomeneo, King of Crete (1781), The Abduction from the Harem (1782), The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte (1789), and The Magic Flute (1791). Eight lectures each are devoted to the masterpieces Così fan tutte and The Magic Flute, and special emphasis is also given to The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. We begin with the most personal and autobiographical of Mozart’s operas, Così fan tutte. This is one of three operasthe others being The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovannithat Mozart wrote with the master librettist Lorenzo da Pontea collaboration that can rightly be considered one of the greatest such collaborations in the history of opera. Così is a masterpiece of comic operaopera buffaand this study of it will establish an operatic vocabulary with which to measure and study Mozart’s other operas. Part II of this course begins by looking at Mozart’s earliest works and discusses his apprenticeship in the art of opera composition. We will see how he gave an increasingly important role to the orchestra as a genuine partner to the singers, enhancing the dramatic content, and how his dramatic priorities eventually led him to break with formulaic traditions to focus on character development and dramatic momentum. Idomeneo, premiered on January 29, 1781, and generally considered the greatest opera seria (“serious” opera) ever written, marks Mozart’s mastery of the form. Its dramatic momentum sweeps away the traditional rituals of opera seria; the characters are given depth and substance that transcend their archetypes, and Mozart’s compositional technique reaches an unprecedented level of mastery. Idomeneo, however, was too radical to be accepted by the audiences of Mozart’s day, unlike The Abduction from the Harem, the most popular of Mozart’s operas in his lifetime in terms of performances and general acclaim. But even the Abduction had its critics, because, like Idomeneo, it too pushed the limits of its own form, in this case, German- language singspiel. Mozart’s next operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni find him at the peak of his operatic career. He had already written, and would continue to write operas that would eclipse virtually all those of his contemporaries, including Antonio Salieri’s. In The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, we take a look at some of the greatest ensembles and finales ever written. Unfortunately for Mozart, neither The Marriage of Figaro nor Don Giovanni were popular with the majority of contemporary Viennese opera goers, who considered them too “modern” and politically incorrect, and Così fan tutte, which followed them, was deemed immoral. It was something of a relief for Mozart to score a huge success in September 1791, with the premiere of his singspiel The Magic Flute. This, his last opera, raised the popular genre of German-language singspiel to the level of operatic art enjoyed by Italian-language opera. A paean to the rituals and creeds of Freemasonry, in which Mozart so fervently believed, The Magic Flute expresses the full range of Mozart’s genius no less than do The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. The latter eventually became as popular as The Magic Flute and is recognized, along with The Magic Flute, as a masterpiece of the operatic repertoire. ©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1 Lecture One 1789 Scope: In his early years in Vienna (1783–1785), Mozart enjoyed considerable success as a composer and performer. In 1786, however, his income began to decrease. He began to receive fewer commissions, the demand for his published music was diminishing, and he had fewer opportunities to perform, partly because of the political situation. By the end of June 1788, Mozart and his wife, Constanze, were suffering ill health and marital problems and their infant daughter had just died. Things were no better the following year, when Mozart wrote the music for the opera Così fan tutte (All Women Behave Like This), an opera that mirrored Mozart’s private life in its theme of sexual infidelity. One of three operas on which Mozart collaborated with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Così fan tutte is a masterpiece of comic opera (opera buffa). Outline I. Mozart in 1789at the age of thirty-threewas not a pretty sight. He was short; he had a pasty complexion; bulging, protruding eyes; thin, fine, sandy-colored hair and not much of it; a malformed ear (about which he was very sensitive); a face somewhat disfigured by smallpox scars; a bit of a paunch; and a rather large nose. A. I provide you with this decidedly unflattering description of Mozart because once observed, we can now forget about it completely. For as we all know, Mozart’s genius was such that his appearance becomes irrelevant the moment we encounter his music. B. In 1789, Mozart was in particularly bad shape. As was so often the case with Mozart, the root cause of his physical problems was money, or lack of it, and the attendant stress-related ill health and depression that went hand-in-hand with his financial difficulties. 1. The popular image of Wolfgang Mozart as an impoverished artist buried in a pauper’s grave is completely bogus. During his lifetime, Mozart made a lot of money; during the “great years” of his career1783, 1784, 1785he was one of the most highly paid musicians on the European

Load more