by Glover, Jane
Like Rauzzini’s first aria, that for De Amicis, ‘Dalla sponda tenebrosa’ (From the dark shore), defiantly resisting the advances of Lucio Silla, is a highly impressive opener. There is the statutory coloratura, though not yet at its most flashy, and interesting chromatic writing. In the second act, ‘Ah, se il crudel periglio’ (Ah, the cruel danger) describes Giunia’s desperation as she fears for Cecilio’s safety. This phenomenally difficult aria – the real show-stopper of the opera – really shows off Anna De Amicis’s technique, especially her flexible coloratura and extraordinary breath control. Leopold wrote in amazement: ‘Wolfgang has introduced into her principal aria passages which are unusual, quite unique and extremely difficult, and which she sings amazingly well.’23 Her third aria, ‘Parto, m’affretto’ (I leave, I must hurry) is a desperate soliloquy, in which Giunia resolves to die with Cecilio. Her music is vivid, breathless and brave, and there is again real emotional courage in the coloratura. And in her fourth and last aria, after Cecilio has bid her a tender farewell, her accompanied recitative reflects her panic for them both, and takes her to the extremes of emotion. (Wolfgang unusually uses a combination of both flutes and trumpets to accentuate these extremes.) As she sees in her mind’s eye the bloodless corpse of her husband, her horror is reflected in the orchestration too, which is both richer in its divided violas and yet chillier in the manner in which Wolfgang deploys them. In her arias alone, then, De Amicis’s part of Giunia was already a rounded character, with a true emotional journey to travel, and with rich support from Mozart’s ever-original orchestrations. But there was yet another dimension to this role: De Amicis’s partnership with Rauzzini. And if there was the customary competitive edge to the artistic collaboration between two high-profile artists, Mozart brilliantly exploited this as well.
Two sections in Lucio Silla demonstrate both the quality of the De Amicis–Rauzzini double-act and Mozart’s breaking of opera seria rules to bring out the best of it. In the first act, Cecilio is lurking in a burial ground, with its monuments to Roman heroes, and contemplating these dour manifestations of death. Giunia comes in with a group of ‘young ladies and noblemen’ (the chorus), and Cecilio hides. Giunia sings to the tomb of her father. Cecilio cannot remain hidden: he embraces his astonished Giunia, and together they shed tears of joy. This whole scene is framed and supported by the orchestra: a brief introduction leads into Cecilio’s accompanied recitative, and on into the chorus and Giunia’s solemn invocation of her father, with its glorious cantabile line. The chorus immediately supports her, and Cecilio’s emergence from hiding is again in the most dramatic accompanied recitative, before the joyful duet in which Rauzzini and De Amicis alternate their equal lines of coloratura. It is a quite brilliant scene. Both stars have great solo moments, and then come together to share a duet. There is no section of simple recitative, and no opportunity therefore for the audience to be anything other than swept along by Mozart’s pacing.
The trio at the end of the first act is similarly tactful, deft and musico-dramatically alert. In effect it is a duet-plus-one, in that Lucio Silla, set apart from Cecilio and Giunia, observes their tenderness and passion, and is gradually moved by it. His own music, and therefore his tyrannical determination, is softened by the touching spectacle of fidelity. Poor Bassano Morgnoni, the startled church singer from Lodi, brought in at the eleventh hour to take the title role of Lucio Silla, must have been petrified at singing with two of the most celebrated performers in Europe. But Mozart took care of him too, without in any way compromising the dramatic moment. While De Amicis and Rauzzini sang in thirds, and exchanged gentle but not excessive coloratura, Morgnoni’s music was straightforward and dramatically clear. The impact of this trio is by no means diminished, for all its musical inequality.
In the course of the writing of Lucio Silla, Anna De Amicis became extremely fond of her young composer. She regularly sent greetings to Maria Anna and Nannerl (whom she had never met) in Salzburg, and Leopold, as ever susceptible to the charms of exceptional women, was thrilled to be spending so much time in her company. ‘De Amicis is our best friend,’ he wrote excitedly on the day of the opening performance, adding, ‘She sings and acts like an angel and is extremely pleased. Wolfgang has served her extremely well. Both you and the whole of Salzburg would be amazed if you could hear her.’24 In the event, that first performance was something of a disaster. It started over three hours late, because the Archduke did not arrive at the appointed time. When at last it did begin, therefore, the performers and waiting audience were already exhausted, and it did not end until two o’clock in the morning. Then the inexperienced Morgnoni, in a crude attempt at acting, made some gesture that caused the audience to laugh. As Leopold reported, ‘Signora De Amicis, carried along by her own enthusiasm, did not realize why they were laughing, and being thus taken aback, did not sing well for the rest of the evening.’25 And the final straw for the dismayed diva was that the Archduchess enthusiastically applauded Rauzzini, because in fact she had been fed the information that he was extremely nervous and really needed encouragement. This was of course Rauzzini’s own ploy to upstage his soprano colleague, and it worked brilliantly. The Mozarts were highly amused by the egotistical posturings of their Italian colleagues, but, as the performances settled down and De Amicis at last gave of her best, they remained on the warmest of terms with her. And so they did with Rauzzini too, for whom in the following month Wolfgang wrote his spectacular motet ‘Exsultate, jubilate’, K165 (158a).
The writing and performance of Lucio Silla was in many ways a traumatic and tense time for Wolfgang, as he had to contend with late arrivals, a last-minute replacement, and high artistic temperament in his singers. But, as was often to be the case in his later life, he thrived on this sort of energy. He wrote to Nannerl, ‘I can think of nothing but my opera, and I am in danger of writing down not words but a whole aria.’26 And the very language of his composition developed immeasurably in the process. Faced with two incomparably distinguished singers, he raised his game accordingly: the brilliance of their execution was the greatest spark to his creative fire. After his Milan experiences he was not to meet such exceptional vocal talent again for several years. But when he did, in the form of Aloysia Weber in Mannheim in 1778, it was De Amicis’s music from Lucio Silla that he immediately gave her. At last he had found someone else who could sing it.
AMONG THE REST of Mozart’s operatic music before that great turning point, Idomeneo, two works were, in passing, significant. La finta giardiniera, composed for Carnival in Munich in 1775, marked another large leap for him, especially in terms of musico-dramatic structure. Following on from his developments in Lucio Silla, he continued to create long chains of drama-developing music whose sections were all accompanied by the orchestra, with no simple recitative at all. Over ten years before the miraculous finales to the second and fourth acts of Le nozze di Figaro, Act II of La finta giardiniera ends with a seamless progression through three arias, several accompanied recitatives, and a multisectional finale for all seven singers, amounting to over twenty-five minutes’ music. And in general his harmonic language and instrumentation also became ever richer and more imaginative. If the individual characterizations are not as strong as in his Italian operas, it was due partly to the poor quality of the libretto (by Giuseppe Petrosellini), and partly to the poor quality of the cast. On 28 December 1774 Leopold reported drily to Maria Anna that ‘The first performance has been postponed until January 5 in order that the singers may learn their parts more thoroughly and thus, knowing the music perfectly, may act with greater confidence and not spoil the opera.’27 In fact the premiere was postponed again – the orchestra too needed more time to prepare it – and Rosa Manservisi, the soprano who sang Sandrina, the ‘pretended gardener’ of the title, was not especially well at the time. But she was possibly not of the greatest distinction anyway. Dr Charles Burney had heard her too, in Munich in 1772, and his approval was somewhat muted: ‘Her figure is agreeable, her voice, though not st
rong, is well-toned, she has nothing vulgar in her manner, sings in tune, and never gives offence.’28 Wolfgang and Leopold, and later Nannerl too, enjoyed their time in Munich, largely because they were not in Salzburg. But Wolfgang would never consider La finta giardiniera to be among his most significant works.
In 1780 Wolfgang was back in Salzburg, after his disastrous tour of Mannheim, Munich and Paris. He had lost his mother, loved and lost Aloysia, and was now bleakly facing a dull future in the service of his loathed Archbishop. But he did embark on a new theatrical project, and one that might possibly take him in another direction. After the excitements of writing in Italian for Italian audiences, he was now intrigued by the idea of working in the vernacular for his German-speaking Salzburg audiences. In Mannheim he had attended performances of two melodramas by Georg Benda, Medea and Ariadne auf Naxos, with their German dialogue spoken over orchestral accompaniment, rather than being actually sung. It was at this point that he got together with his father’s trumpet-playing friend, the poet Johann Schachtner, and began to work on a singspiel, Zaïde. The project was never finished (or, as Leopold was to say euphemistically, ‘not quite completed’). But Wolfgang did write fifteen numbers, and again his advances are significant. He tried his hand at writing Benda-type accompanied dialogues, and they are strikingly effective, although, interestingly, he was never to repeat the experiment. He developed his abilities to write ensembles in which different emotions are expressed by different people at the same time. Where the trio in Lucio Silla was in effect a duet-plus-one, the quartet here in Zaïde is a duet-plus-one-plus-one, for two lovers are observed by two different commentators. And for Zaïde herself, Wolfgang did write some truly astonishing music, including the dramatic aria ‘Tiger! Wetze nur die Klauen’ (Tiger! Sharpen your claws!) – part of his Salzburg menagerie, perhaps, like Maria Magdalena Lipp’s lion. But the most heart-stopping aria is the lullaby ‘Ruhe sanft’ (Sleep quietly) that Zaïde sings over the sleeping body of the man she loves. The accompaniment of muted strings and divided pizzicato violas supports not only the most gloriously alluring vocal line but also a solo oboe (Mozart’s favourite instrument of seduction), and as such it anticipates the later wonders of his aria ‘Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio’, written for Aloysia in 1783. When he and Schachtner worked on their experimental and ultimately aborted project, they had no performers or performance in mind – a totally rare occurrence for Mozart. But the very nature of this aria, its line, its accompaniment and its emotional content, surely indicate the truth of his vocal longings. For all her cruel rejection of him, his ears were still ringing with the voice of Aloysia Weber.
WHEN MOZART AND his mother spent the winter months of 1777–8 in Mannheim, it was not just the Webers who impressed him so profoundly. Other families too, solid like his own in musical talent, became immensely important to him, both in that trying period and beyond. Christian Cannabich, the composer and violinist who directed the stellar Mannheim orchestra, together with his wife Elisabeth and their gifted children Rosa and Carl, opened their home and their hearts to their young visitor and his mother. Two instrumentalists from the orchestra, the brothers Johann Baptist and Franz Anton Wendling, also became close friends. Johann Baptist was the flautist who, with the oboist Friedrich Ramm, was supposed to accompany Mozart to Paris on the next stage of his journey, but whose morals, religion and general behaviour were then so handily besmirched by Wolfgang, as he tried to concoct for Leopold his reasons for abandoning these arrangements and heading instead for Italy with Aloysia. If Johann Baptist Wendling ever knew of such disloyal and cavalier allegations, his friendship with Mozart survived them, for in Paris in 1778, where the young men did all meet up again, he was a supportive ally in an alien environment. Like Cannabich, he and his brother, both of whom had married superb singers and were also producing talented children, remained at the heart of Wolfgang’s affections. And Wolfgang reciprocated the loving warmth that he received from all these Mannheim families by writing for them: arias for Johann Baptist Wendling’s wife, sonatas for Cannabich’s daughter, little songs for Franz Anton Wendling’s daughter.
But beyond these important individuals, the entire Mannheim orchestra became for Mozart a beacon of musical excellence and achievement. The players who had initially eyed him with suspicion, but came together to play his farewell concert in February 1778, were acknowledged to be the best orchestra in existence, lauded throughout Europe. (In 1772 Burney had described them as ‘an army of generals’.29) Wolfgang measured all other orchestras against the Mannheim yardstick, writing from Paris to his father in 1778:
If only the [Salzburg] orchestra were as organized as they are at Mannheim. Indeed I would like you to see the discipline that prevails there and the authority which Cannabich yields. There everything is done seriously. Cannabich, who is the best conductor I have ever seen, is both beloved and feared by his subordinates. Moreover he is respected by the whole town and so are his soldiers. But they certainly behave quite differently from ours. They have good manners, are well dressed and do not go to the public houses and swill.30
He longed to write something really substantial for these beloved and admired musicians. And in 1780, by which time the Elector Carl Theodor had moved his entire musical establishment from Mannheim to Munich, Mozart at last had his opportunity.
For the Carnival season in Munich, in early 1781, Mozart was commissioned to write his opera Idomeneo, re di Creta. The libretto chosen by the Munich Court was an old text by Danchet, originally set to music by Campra in Paris in 1712. Wolfgang turned to the Salzburg Court chaplain, Abbate Varesco, and invited him to make an Italian version of it. But he too was intrinsically involved in the project: throughout the summer of 1780 he and Varesco worked together on the structure, dramaturgy and poetry. This process continued long after Wolfgang had travelled to Munich in November 1780, for, as ever, it was only after he had met his cast and assessed their strengths that he began to write for them, and often the libretto was tweaked accordingly. Leopold, and to an extent Nannerl too, became intermediaries in the dialogue between Wolfgang and his librettist in Salzburg; and indeed the correspondence between father and son over the period of Idomeneo’s composition is enormously revealing of Wolfgang’s methods, sensitivities and adaptability. His aim was not merely to produce a score of ravishing music, exceptional both in its complexity and its simplicity, but through this music to illuminate the dramatic narrative and the psychological conflicts abundant in it. And as he shared his experiences with his father, Leopold gave him his utmost support, offering advice that was practical, informed and scholarly. Between them they were tireless in preparing the libretto for publication, accommodating all alterations as they occurred in the process of composition and rehearsal. While not without tension and anxiety, the letters exchanged between Wolfgang and Leopold in this Idomeneo period are some of the most positive and most productive of their entire correspondence. And for Wolfgang, the whole process of Idomeneo’s creation and rehearsal in Munich was similarly happy. He was working with the best musicians in Europe, surrounded by close and loving friends whose support sustained him admirably through any problems. ‘I went to that rehearsal’, he wrote to Leopold, describing the orchestra’s first reading, ‘with as easy a mind as if I were going to a lunch party somewhere.’31
The plot of Idomeneo concerns the eponymous King of Crete, who is shipwrecked as he returns home from the Trojan wars. He begs the gods to spare his life, vowing to sacrifice the first person he meets if he is saved. That person turns out to be his own son, Idamante. Idomeneo tries to circumvent his vow by sending his son away, but Neptune produces another storm, together with a monster who ravages the island. Idamante kills the monster, and offers himself for sacrifice in proper fulfilment of his father’s vow. But Neptune spares him, decreeing that Idomeneo should abdicate, and Idamante reign in his place.
This tough story of a classic conflict between paternal love and regal duty, laden with Enlightenment passion for loyalty, sacrific
e and retribution, is enriched too by the important presence of two women. Ilia, daughter of King Priam of Troy, and therefore the enemy, has been sent as prisoner by Idomeneo to Crete, but has fallen in love with Idamante, and he with her. At the point of Idamante’s sacrifice, she interrupts the ceremony, offering to die instead of him. The mollified Neptune decrees that she should marry Idamante and reign beside him as his queen. And then there is Elettra, the disturbed daughter of Agamemnon. She is also in love with Idamante. When Idomeneo tries to avoid killing his son by sending him away, it is to accompany Elettra back to Argos, and she is overjoyed. But Neptune’s ultimate decree and resolution have no place for her, and she finally goes mad.
Idomeneo would therefore provide four singers with dramatically splendid roles, and Mozart was keen to discover who they would be. In the event, he was both delighted and dismayed, and, in the case of the protagonist of his title role, simultaneously. Idomeneo was to be sung by none other than his old friend Anton Raaff, who had enjoyed a successful international career throughout Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal for several decades. In 1770, at the age of fifty-six, he had been engaged at Mannheim (where Wolfgang and his mother had first met him in 1777), and was thus high in seniority in the casting of operas for the Elector Carl Theodor’s musical establishment in Munich. Now, at sixty-six, he was well past his prime; and his diminished capabilities were a cause of great anxiety to Wolfgang, who was torn between genuine affection for his friend and frustration at his level of performance. Not only were his vocal stamina and dexterity not up to the demands of the music that Wolfgang imagined for this tortured, central role; Raaff’s acting abilities too were clichéd and shallow (‘like a statue’,32 as Wolfgang protested in a letter to his father), and almost certainly failed to match up to the veritably Shakespearean demands of Idomeneo’s conflicts and complexities. But Wolfgang was infinitely patient with him. He adjusted his own musical conception of the role, writing for Raaff a simpler version of the massive central aria ‘Fuor del mar’; transferring the dramatic energy of the other arias from the voice to the orchestral accompaniment, thus making it an almost equal partner in the carrying of emotion; and presenting his final abdication speech as a monumental passage of accompanied recitative – in which Wolfgang himself spent hours coaching his friend. Throughout the rehearsal process Wolfgang dealt with Raaff with the sweetest tact and the kindest delicacy; their friendship endured, and Idomeneo was a triumph for both of them. But they were each no doubt sadly aware that by far the best role Raaff had ever been given had come several years too late.