A Musical Relecture of Augustine’s Conversion: La Conversione di Sant’ Agostino by Maria Antonia Walpurgis and Johann Adolf Hasse

Sabine Lichtenstein

“Prima le parole, poi la musica.” This was the motto of the theorists on the new genre called opera, those who in the early seventeenth century advo- cated the supremacy of text over music. The debate continued for a long time, although the motto was proven to be wrong. La Clemenza di Tito, for instance, is not an opera by the poet Pietro Metastasio, but by Mozart, and we enjoy it without the text, if need be, yet never without the music. From a generic point of view, the libretto is usually developed in close consultation with the composer and alongside the music. Only popular librettos, especially those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Metastasio’s, were set to music by multiple composers. The text of La Clemenza di Tito, for example, was already set to music before Mozart composed his version by Metastasio’s friend Johann Adolf Hasse (1699– 1783), who was, according to the contemporary music historian Charles Burney, the most skilful and elegant of the composers of his time.1 This principle of reusing librettos was also sometimes applied to texts of spiritual, (mostly) non-scenic dramas, that is oratorios, such as La Con- versione di Sant’ Agostino.2 The text of this work was written by another friend of Metastasio, Maria Antonia Walpurgis (1724–80), daughter of the Archduchess of Austria and the Elector of Bavaria. She became Electress of Saxony, and “a poetess, a paintress, and so able a musician, that she plays, sings, and composes in a manner which dilettanti seldom arrive at,” as Charles Burney put it.3 Therefore she was highly esteemed by princes and artists like Hasse, her composition teacher, for whom she wrote

1 “[Hasse] may without injury to his brethren, be allowed to be as superior to all other lyric composers, as Metastasio is to all other lyric poets.” See D. J. Nickols and S. Hansell ‘Hasse, Johann Adolf,’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1985), pp. 279–93, there 282. 2 Johann Adolf Hasse and Maria Antonia Walpurgis, La Conversione di Agostino, in Denkmäler der Deutschen Tonkunst 20 (1958). 3 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces (London, 1775), p. 125. 246 sabine lichtenstein the libretto. After Händel (who worked in England) and before Mozart, Hasse brought to fruition the opera seria in Germany and because of this he became, according to the young Mozart, “immortel.”4 He also com- posed eleven oratorios, including eight for his employer of many years, the Catholic court in Dresden. The last of these eight became his best- known oratorio: La Conversione di Sant’ Agostino. He himself conducted the court orchestra, “l’ensemble le plus parfait de L’Europe,”5 in a suc- cessful premier on Easter Saturday (March 28) 1750 in the Dresden castle chapel. Soon after this, the performance was repeated in Dresden four times and the work was restaged in numerous European cities—Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Hamburg, Mannheim, Padua, Rome, Riga and Prague— during Hasse’s own lifetime. Egidio Lasnel reused the text in 1751, also for an oratorio.6 The genre of the oratorio had come into being at about the same time as opera, near the end of the sixteenth century. In Rome, the Congregazi- one del’oratorio convened to create spiritual music to accompany Latin texts. The development of the oratorio, both Catholic and Protestant, is complex, intermingling as it did with the German Passion, Historia and Actus Musicus. Here it is enough to state that oratorios, like operas, only became popular across Europe in the seventeenth century. In that century and the following one, most oratorios possessed the same characteristics as La Conversione: an overture and two parts, consisting of recitatives, arias for three to five soloists and moralizing choruses, all set to Italian text, and with a duration of about an hour and a half. Good composers of operas and oratorios, such as Hasse, did more than enhance the emotions communicated in the text. Their music was, in fact, an interpretation of the text. To recover this musical interpretation, one needs first to interpret the text. This is why the motto “prima le parole” definitely holds good for the musicologist.

4 Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Mozart: die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1961), p. 39. In his dedication to Queen Charlotte of the Violin Sonata no. 8 Op. 10 KV 15, nine-year-old Mozart wrote: “I will equal the glory of all the great men of my country, I will become as immortal as Handel and Hasse, and my name will be as famous as that of Johann Christian Bach.” Hasse, from his part, on hearing Mozart’s early opera Ascanio in Alba, made the remark: “This boy will cause us all to be forgotten.” 5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1754: “celui qui est le mieux distribué & forme l’ensemble le plus parfait, est l’Orchestre de l’Opéra du Roi de Pologne à Dresde, dirigé par l’illustre Hasse.” See Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), p. 354. 6 Arnold Schering, Geschichte des Oratoriums (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 222–5.