Early Mozart Operas

In my last post, I talked about my discovery of the Brilliant Classics series of recordings.  One of my early purchases (after the Bach set of which I spoke earlier) was the Complete Mozart Edition.

You don't need any kind of formal musicological training to know that Mozart 

• started composing at a VERY young age (his earliest works date from the ripe old age of 5 (!))
• was incredibly prolific (The Köchelverzeichnis (the official catalog of his work) lists no less than 626 works and, while some of those are fairly tiny piano works, many are full-length concert works and operas...and that's not including the five appendices to the catalog which list works which are incomplete, of questionable authenticity or known only from references in letters and such, even though the music itself no longer exists). To slightly personalize a quote from the late Tom Lehrer, "By the time Mozart was my age, he'd been dead almost half his life!"
• died tragically young (on December 5, 1791, a little less than two months shy of his 36th birthday).

I'm not going to attempt any broad overview of Mozart's life or music but, while working my way through this massive 170-CD set, two thoughts (out of many) that struck me were

• There are many lesser-known works in this box that I've not heard before. I have heard a number of the juvenile works and have always had thoughts along the line of "it's remarkable that a 5 (or 10 or 15) year-old composed this highly competent work but it sounds like the work of a 5 (or 10 or 15) year-old...an extremely talented young kid to be sure, but a young kid nonetheless."  In going through this box, that thought was reinforced but to a lesser degree than I'd have thought (i.e., I discovered more than a few pre- and early-teen works which were fairly impressive).  
• Mozart seemed much more at home in some genres than others.  Although I did not map out where my "biggest surprises" were, it's safe to say that while I did find that the earlier piano sonatas, symphonies and (to a lesser degree) the concerti often called for this "good-for-a-kid" qualification, the operas (a genre more than almost any other which you would think would need the hand of a "grown-up") almost never required such qualifiers at all!

Indeed, on this last point, not only are the very earliest operas already very good works of drama and music by all but the most stringent evaluative criteria, it's amazing just how many of them he wrote in his brief stay on earth.  For comparison, let's look at a handful of the world's best-known opera composers:

• Wagner, who lived twice as long as Mozart (dying shortly before his 70th birthday), completed only 13 of them in his life.  Granted, most of his operas are of epic proportions, but their total duration only slightly exceeds that of Mozart's output.
• Puccini wrote many of the most well-known operas in the repertoire, and died a month shy of his 66th birthday, but his list of gems amounts to a mere 12 operas (although he revised frequently, with half of those works having 2, 3, 4 or (in the case of Madame Butterfly) even 5 versions).
• Verdi, (whose name is almost synonymous with the genre)  finished about 28 operas in his 87 year-long life (an exact count is a bit arbitrary since, as with Puccini, several of them were revised one or more times...sometimes to the point of their becoming almost new works)

It's also important to note that these 3 men worked almost exclusively in this genre.  Mozart, living less than half as long as any of them, composed no less than 22 operas  (or 23 if we count Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots...see below for details on that one).  That's impressive enough but, at the same time, he was producing an enormous string of piano sonatas and concertos, violin sonatas and concertos, symphonies, piano trios and quartets, string trios, quartets and quintets and more...many of them towering as exemplars within  their respective genres even two centuries after their composer's death.  

As I work my way through these collected recordings, I've been struck not just by the quantity but by the stunning quality of even the earliest works...so much so that I feel compelled to say a bit about them.  I really just want to invite you to investigate these works on your own and I have no intention of doing any detailed analyses of these operas either as effective works for the stage or as great works of music (although I can say categorically that almost all of them rate highly in both areas).  I do, however, want to say a little bit about each of these "childhood" operas. Given the almost absurdly young age at which Mozart started composing, it seems fairly ridiculous to apply the age categories of "mere mortals" to him but, simply as a way of keeping this post to a manageable length, I'll arbitrarily look at only those operas that he wrote before his 18th birthday.  This has the further advantage of corresponding fairly neatly with the boundary of which of his operas are least known.

Mozart's opera output ranges from his first efforts at the age of 11 to the sublimely silly, deeply moving, dramatically powerful and just outright frickin' wonderful The Magic Flute, completed just a couple of months before his death.  In terms of the rather arbitrary yardstick of how well-known they are, you could divide them into 3 categories:

• The seven (or eight) completed before he turned 18 are probably unrecognizable to all but Mozart scholars (or people who shelled out the bucks for a set like this Brilliant Classics box!)
• There are another half-dozen (plus a couple of "outliers" (see below)) that I'd describe as those that you may have heard of (at least I had prior to buying this set) but probably never actually heard.  I'd put La finta giardiniera of 1774 up to Die Entführung aus dem Serail of  1782 into this category.  For the sake of neatness, I'll add two 1784 works to this group (L'oca del Cairo and Lo sposo deluso) even though these are probably as obscure as the operas in the first group.
• Finally, there are the seven towering masterpieces of the final half-decade of his life.  This group is a little bit less neat.  Certainly The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), Cosi fan tutte (1790) and The Magic Flute (1791) all belong in this group but the lesser-known The Impressario (1786) and La clemenza di Tito (1791) perhaps belong more in the previous grouping and 1790's The Philosopher's Stone is even less well-known than some of the childhood operas (although, in fairness, it's only partially by Mozart, having been jointly composed with four "somewhat less well-known" composers (Johann Baptist Henneberg, Franz Xaver Gerl, Benedikt Schack and Emmanuel Schikaneder...really!  I'm not making this up!)

No matter how problematic the neatness of that tripartite division may be, let's just say that we'll be focussing on the early operas here.

I've repeatedly prevaricated above on whether there were seven or eight operas in this early period and that's because of the questionable designation of the 1767 piece Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots (K. 35) which is variously described as a Singspiel, as a Sacred Musical Play and as an Oratorio.  The claim to being an opera comes from the fact that there are some directions for staging the action in the manuscript.  That would be consistent with a designation of "singspiel" or "sacred play" designations but not "oratorio."  Composed jointly with Michael Haydn and Anton Adlgasser, only Mozart's portion (which is part 1 of 3 parts) survives.  It is known to have been performed at the Archbishop's Palace in Salzburg on March 12, 1767 (Haydn's and Adlgasser's sections were performed in subsequent weeks) but I found no documentation for subsequent performances until the latter 20th century.  Of these early works, I found this one the least compelling with both the music and any sense of drama of minimal interest.

A couple of months later, Apollo et Hyacinthus (K. 38) was performed at the University of Salzburg as part of its end-of term "final comoedia."  Because of this inclusion in a larger selection of works and because Mozart himself never referred to this as an opera and never even gave it a name (it apparently acquired its status (and name) as a stand-alone opera when his sister entered it into a posthumous catalog of the composer's works).  Regardless, it is remarkable for an 11-year-old boy and already much more entertaining than Die Schuldigkeit but it remains far from a mature opera.  Some of the arias are attractive but, overall, neither the characters, the moods or the plot seem very well delineated and I was left with the sense that these folks could be singing about pretty much anything.  I'm sure there were many adult composers of 1767 who were writing lesser pieces but this one can probably serve as a baseline for Mozart's jumping-off point.

Fast-forward a whole year (!) to Bastien und Bastienne (K50) of 1768 and we have a rather cute one-act singspiel.  It's still a bit nondescript but there are already some charming touches, especially with some nice little rhythmic surprises in the finale.  It's still difficult to call this a "mature" work but it already shows a more deft hand than K.38 although it's a bit of an unfair comparison because, as a singspiel, it relies more on spoken narrative to forward the action.  The work is thought to have been premiered in 1768 at the home of the Viennese physician Dr. Franz Mesmer (who is said to have commissioned the work) although this has never been historically confirmed.  The first documented performance is not until October of 1890 when it is known to have been performed in Berlin.

Also from 1768 (and possibly composed before K.50) is La Finta Semplice (K.51).  To my mind, this sounds like the more mature work...indeed, it seems to show remarkable growth over K.50.   It is a bit heavily weighted towards recitatives at the expense of arias (which implies an as-yet underdeveloped ability to use the less-text-heavy arias as a means of sustaining the action of the opera).  Still, I suspect that many lesser contemporary composers would have proudly signed their names to this work.  This is nowhere near his late masterpieces but it is quite sophisticated by mere mortal standards.  Unlike the earlier works which appear to have been premiered while the ink was barely dry, this one waited almost a year, being performed (like K.35) at the Archbishop's Palace in Salzburg on May 1, 1769.

We wait almost two years (until 1770) to get to K.87: Mitridate, Re di Ponto which is one of my favorites from this early group.  Already at his fourth (or fifth) opera, the fourteen-year-old Mozart creates a highly effective, large-scale dramatic work with lovely music and some very impressive coloratura writing.  The overall tessitura is quite high (5 of the 7 roles are sopranos and the other two are tenors) but we have to understand that half of the soprano parts (in fact, the ones with the flashiest coloratura writing) were actually castrato roles (if you don't know what a "castrato" is, look it up but men may want to cover their private parts before reading the description!).  I'm done saying that "lesser adult composers would gladly claim this work as their own" but this one, to my mind, is a fully mature work.  Qualifiers are necessary only insofar as, a couple of decades later, Mozart went on to write some of the most sublime entries in the entire operatic literature.  Mitridate "suffers" only in comparison to works of that rarified mastery.  It was also Mozart's first big operatic success.  After its premier at the Teatro Regio Ducal in Milan on December 26, 1770 it went on to 21 performances. Oddly, it then disappears for a couple of centuries.  There was a single aria rediscovered (and performed) in 1901 but it was not fully mounted again until (I believe) 1963.

Another year goes by and 1771 gives us Ascanio in Alba (K.111).  I must confess that I prefer the music in Mitridate but, from a dramatic standpoint, this is an even more mature sounding work.  I was unable to find much information about its performance history other than, like Mitridate, it premiered at the Teatro Regio Ducal on October 17, 1771.

Finally, there are are two works from 1772.  Il sogno di Scipione (K.126) was actually written when he was still 15 but selections were performed in Salzburg on May 1, 1772.  The first complete documented performance was not until two centuries later when it was featured at the 1979 Mozart Festival in Salzburg.  Although I found K.87 a more enjoyable listen, this one exhibits an even greater sense of musical, emotional and dramatic maturity.  In particular, Fortuna's soprano aria "A chi serena io miro" is especially beautiful.

A few months later, he completed Lucio Silla (K.135), the last of his "underage" operas.  Premiered yet once again at the Teatro Regio Ducal (on December 26, 1772), I could find no reference to a subsequent performance until a 1962 Italian recording and the UK premiere in London in 1967. 

As mentioned above, all of these works are available in the Brilliant Classics box in good to very good performances (although the Lucio Silla recording is live and there is a lot of noise from the stage whenever there is any action...to the point that some of the quieter recitatives are drowned out in spots).  Many are also available elsewhere although I've not done any research to determine how easily obtainable these other recordings are.  All of them are worth a listen if you are interested in opera, in Mozart or simply are willing to be gob-smacked by the unmitigated precocity of the young Mozart.

If you want to dig deeper into these early operas, you can check out this interesting timeline approach to Mozart's work.