Ch'io Mi Scordi Di Te? . . . Non Temer, Amato Bene, K
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher Wolfgang Mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria. Ch’io mi scordi di te? . Non temer, amato bene, K. 505 The manuscript of this aria is dated December 26, 1786. The date of the first performance is uncertain, but Mozart himself played the keyboard when Nancy Storace sang the piece at her farewell concert on February 23, 1787. The score calls for soprano, piano obbligato, and an orchestra consisting of two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and strings. Performance time is approximately ten minutes. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Mozart’s Ch’io mi scordi di te? were given at Orchestra Hall on October 13 and 14, 1955, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and George Schick as soloists and Fritz Reiner conducting. Our most recent subscription concert performances were given on November 29 and 30, December 1 and 4, 2001, with Dorothea Röschmann as soloist and Daniel Barenboim conducting from the keyboard. The Orchestra first performed this work at the Ravinia Festival on July 28, 1956, with Jennie Tourel as soloist and Leonard Bernstein conducting from the keyboard, and most recently on July 14, 1996, with Frederica von Stade and Claude Frank as soloists and Semyon Bychkov conducting. Mozart fell in love with the soprano voice long before he met sixteen-year-old Aloysia Weber, for whom he developed a mad crush, in 1777. He began to compose arias with her voice in mind, and even after she spurned his advances, he continued to write music for her to sing. (In the end, he married her sister Constanze, a soprano of lesser talent, but a woman with a more sympathetic heart.) The soprano voice inspired some of Mozart’s most sublime music, including not only the familiar arias from the great operas, but many neglected treasures among the works we know as concert arias. Mozart wrote several of them as substitute numbers for his own operas; others were intended for insertion into another composer’s opera, or, just as the name implies, to be performed in concert. He usually designed them for singers he particularly liked, which is partly why most of the fifty-four concert arias in his catalog are for soprano. He composed eight for Aloysia Weber (before and after she became his sister-in-law). In 1786 he wrote Ch’io mi scordi di te?, arguably the greatest of all, for Nancy Storace, who had recently created the role of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. Born in London of an Irish mother and an Italian father, Nancy Storace arrived in Vienna in 1783, when she was just eighteen, to sing with the Italian opera company. The following year she married a young violinist, John Abraham Fischer, who treated her so badly that Nancy left him within the year, taking back her maiden name (an unusual gesture at the time) as if to wipe him from her memory. Both she and her brother Stephen, who also had moved to Vienna, became close friends of Mozart, and Stephen apparently even took composition lessons from the young master. Nancy wasn’t a great singer—the British historian Charles Burney thought her voice had “a certain crack and roughness”—but she was charming and charismatic on stage and, in Burney’s estimation, “a lively and intelligent actress.” She enjoyed extraordinary success as Mozart’s first Susanna—earning her place in music history at the age of nineteen—and the composer was genuinely fond of her, on stage and off. He was quite supportive as she recovered from her unfortunate marriage and, perhaps inevitably, that kindness has invited speculation about the nature of their relationship. They were, without question, good friends, and when she and her brother decided to return to London, Mozart wrote this grand and heartfelt concert aria as a farewell gift, adding a prominent obbligato piano part for himself, making it a close-knit duet. He entered it in his catalog on December 27, 1786, with the unusual personal note that it was “for Mlle Storace and me.” Nancy sang the new aria, with Mozart at the keyboard, at her farewell concert on February 23, 1787. Ch’io mi scordi di te? is one of Mozart’s most extraordinary creations, merging in one work elements of opera and the concerto—two forms in which he excelled beyond all others. (In Mozart’s output it falls midway between Figaro and Don Giovanni; it’s the exact contemporary of his great C major piano concerto, K. 503.) Mozart had already set the same text earlier in 1786, as an additional aria for a revival of his opera Idomeneo, but this time he finds something unusually personal—perhaps a confession of his own love—in its conventional verses. By writing a rich and commanding piano part for himself, Mozart turned the formal concert aria into a great operatic duet. The dialogue between soprano and piano is unusually intimate throughout, and the piano writing is so deeply expressive, even by Mozart’s own standards, that we scarcely notice that this second voice has no words. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. © Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their entirety and with express written permission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice. 2 .