Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  The three Salzburg ladies were to appear again in Mozart’s theatrical music. In 1769, after the family’s rather unsuccessful fourteen-month stay in Vienna, and the disastrous episode of La finta semplice, Leopold did at least succeed in getting Wolfgang’s unperformed Viennese opera put on back home, at the Archbishop’s Palace. (He also succumbed to another of his little untruths, claiming on the title page of the printed libretto that Wolfgang was twelve, when in fact he was thirteen – a wholly unnecessary practice that he had regularly adopted in London.) Although Wolfgang had written La finta semplice for some excellent Viennese singers, he did not know them personally, and it is likely therefore that in his mind’s ear he retained the talents of his three Salzburg ladies. And sure enough, the music for Rosina, Giacinta and Ninetta, whom they eventually came to perform, exactly follows the course of his earlier writing for Lipp, Brauenhofer and Fesemayr. Again it is that sung by the difficult but gifted Lipp which stands apart from the rest of the score. For her he produced his most original and successful experiments in orchestral accompaniment, writing for solo oboe and two cors d’anglais in the enchant-ing echo aria ‘Senti l’eco’ (Hear the echo), and for the fascinating dark colours of two bassoons and divided violas in ‘Amoretti che ascosi qui siete’ (You Cupids hiding here); and in both these arias the vocal writing is seductive and supremely assured. Wolfgang’s ‘Three Ladies’ are detectable also in the church music that he wrote for Salzburg: there are glorious soprano solos in his three Litany settings, K125, K195 (186d) and K243.

  Finally, in 1775, there is good music too in his little opera, or ‘serenata’, Il re pastore, K208, written for the occasion of the visit of Maria Theresa’s youngest son, the Archduke Maximilian Franz (whom Wolfgang had known since 1762, when they had played together in the corridors of Schönbrunn Palace). The text by Metastasio is a gently symbolic tale of love, duty and magnanimity, set in an agreeable pastoral landscape, and it had already been chosen many times for similar occasions honouring Habsburg princes. But although Mozart (now nineteen) produced some extremely fine and very varied music, as ever challenging his performers and rewarding their skills with arias which would draw them enthusiastic archducal approbation, the virtuoso writing seems somewhat conventional, and not especially characterized. It is as if Wolfgang’s heart was not fully engaged in this project. He had perhaps had his fill of Habsburg condescension, and the subject-matter bored him. And perhaps too he had grown out of his Three Ladies, and they no longer excited him. For by now he had been to Italy.

  IN HIS MID-TEENS, Mozart wrote his three operas for Milan, Mitridate, re di Ponto, K87 (74a), in 1770, Ascanio in Alba, K111, in 1771, and Lucio Silla, K135, in 1772. The glittering surroundings of their performances, the highest Habsburg pedigree of their patrons and the enormous honour for Wolfgang, a fourteen-year-old boy, of being invited at all for these engagements, were still not the most significant challenge for him at this stage. He was now to write operas in the Italian language, for Italian singers and Italian audiences. This was a completely different experience from writing in Vienna for excellent Italian singers, but for audiences for whom Italian – if they understood it at all – was probably their third language, after German and French. It was certainly different from writing for German singers and audiences in Salzburg. But, as he always did when he was newly stimulated, Wolfgang more than rose to the occasion. The three librettos were all chosen for him, and in each case given to him only a few months before their scheduled performances. But they were all excellent examples of the opera seria concept (heroic tales of classical or historical figures, and with a strong focus on the pure and laudable virtues of love, loyalty and duty); and in the case especially of Mitridate, based on Racine’s play, they were extremely well constructed. With all his teenage precocity, Wolfgang seized on their great merits, and, like Handel before him, succeeded in stretching the very format, adding emotional depth and stirring, inner drama to individual characters. And in this he was considerably helped by his singers. For, in the country that had invented the whole art-form of opera, he was now meeting its very best practitioners.

  Three singers in particular were of momentous importance to Wolfgang in Italy. They were truly international performers, who busily traversed the whole of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, and had enormous reputations and followings. Two of them were sopranos, Anna De Amicis and Antonia Bernasconi; the third was the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini. Wolfgang and his father knew of all three before they arrived in Italy. They had met Anna De Amicis in Mainz in 1763, when the thirty-year-old singer was at the height of her career. She had then been on her way back to her native Italy; they were just at the start of their Grand Tour. And they would have assuredly taken notice of each other, for in their own ways both she and the seven-year-old Wolfgang were extremely newsworthy. Four years later, when the Mozarts were in Vienna and Wolfgang was writing his ill-fated La finta semplice, they heard both Rauzzini, in Hasse’s Partenope, and Bernasconi, creating the magnificent title role in Gluck’s Alceste. And indeed, had La finta semplice been performed in Vienna, it is likely that Bernasconi would have taken the role of Ninetta (performed eventually in Salzburg by Fesemayr).

  As Wolfgang waited with his father in Rome, in April 1770, for news of the first opera that he was to write, he was excited to learn that Anna De Amicis might be among the cast. He wrote to Nannerl, ‘Some say that De Amicis will sing. We are to meet her in Naples. I should like her and Manzuoli to take the parts: then we should have two good acquaintances and friends.’14 A month later, he and Leopold did indeed catch up with her in Naples, where she was now living with her husband and baby daughter. They heard her sing at the Teatro San Carlo and were greatly impressed. But it was not yet she whose great art would inspire Mozart in Milan. When the libretto of Mitridate was chosen, in July of that year, and sent to Wolfgang in Bologna, the cast list was sent too. The part of Aspasia was to be sung by Antonia Bernasconi; and the Mozarts were not disappointed.

  In the mid-eighteenth century, the formal conventions of opera seria were potentially stifling to coherent narrative. Single-emotion arias in da capo form (whereby the first section is sung again after a middle section, but this time with much vocal decoration and ornament) temporarily arrested any dramatic thrust, for momentum was literally turned back on itself. Meanwhile the linking sections of simple, syllabic recitative, accompanied only by continuo instruments, propelled the action forward in ungainly bursts. In most cases the attraction of these operas was the opportunity that the arias gave for the singers to display their technical prowess: admiration of vocal pyrotechnics was a recognized practice, enjoyed equally by performers and worshippers. Frequently nobody paid any attention at all to the linking recitatives, nor, therefore, to any aspect of narrative. (In Metastasio’s play La cantante e l’impresario, one character says to another: ‘In the recitative you can sing in whatever language you like, for then, as you know, the audience generally has a good gossip.’) But the greatest composers could make sense of this most uncomfortable of formats. For over thirty years in the first half of the century, Handel had burst through the straitjacket, sometimes simply breaking the rules, but most often finding ways to soften their edges. He developed the dramatically powerful accompanied recitative (recitativo accompagnato) as a musical bridge between simple recitative and aria, and as a vehicle for real development of dramatic thought. And in Vienna Gluck too had jettisoned the rigid structural conventions, and returned to a true balance between music and poetry, where the narrative purity was unsoiled by ‘the mistaken vanity of singers’ (as he rather cruelly wrote in his preface to Alceste). The young Mozart may well have heard operas in the style of Handel in London (for the great composer had been dead only five years), and had certainly heard operas by Gluck in Vienna; and like them he pursued paths of musico-dramatic truth. His orchestrally accompanied recitatives, and his richly varied arias, where the orchestra begins to reflect the emotional content of the moment, were devices which, even
at this early stage, put his operas on a plane higher than those of his contemporaries.

  Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi’s libretto of Mitridate, re di Ponto is a very competent reworking of Racine’s great play. Although the story is ostensibly that of Mitridate’s ultimate magnanimity in a huge gesture of forgiveness (that all-important Enlightenment passion), it is the role of Aspasia whose interaction with all the other characters propels the drama forward. Aspasia is betrothed to Mitridate, King of Pontus, but loves his younger son Sifare, and is also wooed by his treacherous older son Farnace. She is torn therefore between her love for Sifare and her duty to Mitridate, and dismayed by the advances of Farnace. When Mitridate discovers her true love for his son and condemns her to death, she resolves to take poison. But, in keeping with the Enlightenment desire for happy endings, Mitridate reprieves everyone when Farnace and Sifare unite to save his kingdom.

  Antonia Bernasconi was evidently bowled over by the music that Mozart wrote for her as Aspasia. Leopold wrote to Maria Anna on 17 November 1770, ‘The prima donna is infinitely pleased with her arias.’15 And well she might have been. In her opening ‘Al destin che la minaccia’ (Save me from this cruel fate), where Aspasia longs to be free of Farnace, she could show off her energetic coloratura and acrobatic leaps, very much in the manner of Maria Magdalena Lipp’s lion. But then the character of Aspasia gradually deepened and grew. Her second aria, ‘Nel sen mi palpita’ (My heart is pounding) calls for greater variety of singing, with sobbing interruptions to her text, and anxious chromatic lyricism. The central point of her role is the soliloquy in Act II, at the centre indeed of the whole opera. First in accompanied recitative and then in the aria ‘Nel grave tormento’ (In profound suffering) she expresses her deep torment as love and duty tear her apart. Two different tempos, adagio and allegro, alternate, as do her feelings; and the lyrical addition of flutes to the instrumental texture gives this section a sheen all its own. The second act ends with a duet for Aspasia and Sifare (the castrato Pietro Benedetti), ‘Se viver non degg’io’ (If I am not to survive), in which both singers, in equal vocal range, parry vocal virtuosity in a manner both alluring and thrilling. (Benedetti was absolutely delighted with this duet, and jokingly told Leopold that he would ‘let himself be castrated again’16 if it did not go well.)

  But the most memorable music of all is Aspasia’s third-act soliloquy, in which she contemplates suicide by poison. There is no place here for virtuosity. Mozart gave Bernasconi a slow and low-lying sustained line of unbearable emotional intensity, and then collapsed his aria’s formal structure into an accompanied recitative as Aspasia raises the cup of poison to her lips. As her hand trembles, so too do the accompanying strings; as her fear breaks into panic, so too does the orchestra, in contrasts of pace, dynamic and gesture. An icy calm descends on her as she builds her final resolve, and the string chords surrounding her vocal line also assume a frozen stasis – before of course Sifare rushes in to knock the cup from her hand. For a fourteen-year-old boy to have grasped the concepts of love and duty with such success was already remarkable. For him to have begun to understand the unthinkable turmoil of a suicidal moment is almost frightening; and his interpreter, the creator of Gluck’s Alceste, with performing attributes much greater than mere technical proficiency, had played her part in inspiring this step towards maturity.

  Mitridate, re di Ponto was an enormous success for Mozart and a personal triumph too for Antonia Bernasconi: at the first performance her arias were all encored, and the running time of the opera was stretched to more than six hours. Like his son, Leopold remembered for ever the dramatic impact of this impressive and professional woman. And when, eight years later, Wolfgang fell for Aloysia Weber in Mannheim and proposed to take her to Italy where he was convinced she could have a great career, Leopold drew Bernasconi into his fierce condemnation of his son’s scheme: ‘Tell me, do you know of any prima donna who, without having first appeared many times in Germany, has walked on to the stage in Italy as a prima donna? In how many operas did not Signora Bernasconi sing in Vienna, and operas too of the most passionate type, produced under the very severe criticism and direction of Gluck and Calzabigi?’17 Leopold knew that his argument would hit home, for although Bernasconi may not have been their first choice for Aspasia, she had created her role with the greatest distinction.

  Two years after Mitridate, re di Ponto, the woman Wolfgang and Leopold had first wanted as Aspasia did at last come into their orbit. At the time of Lucio Silla, Wolfgang’s third opera for Milan, Anna De Amicis was nearly forty, an age when most of her contemporaries had long since ceased to appear on stage. But this hugely charismatic performer, of quite astonishing technique and with a warm personality, was still very much in demand. She had sung all over Europe, in Paris, Brussels, Dublin and London as well as throughout Germany and her native Italy. Leopold and Wolfgang heard her (singing ‘marvellously well’18) in Naples before Mitridate, re di Ponto, and again in Venice just after it. They got to know her better during the period of Wolfgang’s second Milan opera, Ascanio in Alba, for Archduke Ferdinand’s spectacular wedding festivities in 1771. The principal soprano role in the other opera (Hasse’s Ruggiero) was initially taken by the English singer Cecilia Davies; but on its opening night she was hissed and booed so cruelly by the Milanese audiences (whose practices have not changed much over the centuries) that she was ‘banished for ever from the Italian stage’,19 and Anna De Amicis was rushed in to replace her. (This incident was to provide yet more ammunition for Leopold, as he argued against the likelihood of Aloysia succeeding in Italy.) So when the Mozarts returned to Milan for Wolfgang’s third opera at the end of 1772, they would have been thrilled to learn that De Amicis was cast in the prima donna role of Giunia. Equally exciting was the news that Venanzio Rauzzini would play the part of Cecilio. The twenty-six-year-old castrato was also at the height of his performing career – which would stabilize just two years later when he moved to London and indeed became teacher to some of Mozart’s later distinguished colleagues.

  Wolfgang and his father arrived back in Milan in mid-November 1772. None of the principal singers was yet in residence, and, as ever, Wolfgang was reluctant to begin writing for them until he had met them, heard them and worked with them. But he could get started on writing the choruses and recitatives of Lucio Silla, and this he did in collaboration with the librettist, Giovanni de Gamerra, poet to the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan. The story concerned the tyrannical Roman dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who had had a change of heart and bestowed prosperity on those who had suffered under him, and was therefore a perfect model for an Enlightenment spectacle. But, again, the opera’s title role was not the most important. The fortunes of a banished senator, Cecilio (to be played by Rauzzini) and his wife Giunia (Anna De Amicis) propel the drama and provide all its emotional complexity. In Cecilio’s absence Lucio Silla has taken Giunia into his household and plans to make her his wife. Giunia herself believes Cecilio to be dead, and is advised to marry Lucio Silla and then kill him. Lucio Silla publicly demands her hand as a way to end civil strife. Cecilio steals back to rescue his wife, but is seized and condemned to death. Giunia resolves to die with him, but Lucio Silla forgives everyone and abdicates.

  There was in fact a major crisis about the casting of the title role of Lucio Silla. The tenor originally engaged, a Signor Cordoni, had to withdraw because of illness, and messengers were sent urgently to Turin and Bologna in search of someone who could ‘not only sing well, but be a first-rate actor and have a handsome presence’,20 as Leopold nervously reported. In the end, one Bassano Morgnoni, a church singer from nearby Lodi, was hired, only eight days before the premiere. He was completely out of his depth, and Mozart had to adjust his ideas for Lucio Silla’s music, which is therefore rather bland. But Rauzzini and De Amicis would have had no objection to all the dramatic and now musical emphasis too thus being trained upon them.

  Rauzzini was the first to arrive in Milan. Wolfgang would have been greatly imp
ressed again by his all-round musicianship and his striking dramatic presence: in that same year, the English music historian Dr Charles Burney had met him in Munich, and described him as ‘not only a charming singer, a pleasing figure and a good actor; but a more excellent . . . performer on the harpsichord, than a singer is usually allowed to be.’21 Wolfgang immediately wrote him his first aria, ‘Il tenero momento’ (The tender moment), full of exultant anticipation of the joy of seeing Giunia again; and he exploited his primo uomo’s deft coloratura and wide range. As Leopold reported back to Salzburg, ‘it is superlatively beautiful and he sings it like an angel.’22 When Anna De Amicis arrived two weeks later (she had been performing in Venice, and was then delayed on her journey to Milan by appalling weather conditions and bad roads), Wolfgang could at last begin her music too. And, as with the role of Aspasia in Mitridate, that of Giunia was central to Lucio Silla. Torn between her love for her banished husband and the pressures to marry a tyrant in the interests of civil peace, she similarly has many opportunities for the noble contemplation of duty. And again, it is in the occasions where Mozart breaks away from the formal conventions of opera seria that he creates her most striking music.