Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  Suddenly the Pasha Selim appears, and in a brief exchange of dialogue the temperature is changed again, for the Pasha, finally exasperated by her constantly refusing him, now threatens her with torture. And this releases the other side of Constanze, and of Cavalieri. Her defiant response is dazzling, as she throws the Pasha’s threats back at him in determined, almost military explosions of eloquence: ‘Martern aller Arten’ (Torture of every kind). And, just as Mozart had done, in very different circumstances, for Ilia’s aria ‘Se il padre perdei’ in Idomeneo, he adds four solo instruments to the swirls of virtuosity: Constanze is flanked by a flute, an oboe, a violin and a cello, which weave their own lines with both energy and poetry. At just twenty-seven, Caterina Cavalieri clearly had remarkable stamina, in addition to her phenomenal technique, as she delivered these two exacting arias one after the other. And, as before, as he honoured this stamina, Mozart included his respect for Vienna’s instrumental soloists.

  Constanze’s next appearance is in the quartet which closes the second act. She and Belmonte finally meet again, share their joy with Blonde and Pedrillo, and then both couples experience grave doubts about each other, before slowly overcoming these and returning to a state of shared happiness. It is an ensemble where a great deal happens, as the characters move from happy reunion, through dismay and reconciliation, back to a new joy, informed now by those moments of mistrust. And again, Mozart’s musico-dramatic skills take him another step beyond his achievements in the Idomeneo quartet. There he portrayed four people expressing different emotions at the same time. Here four individuals are very clearly characterized, while they pair up in continually differing combinations. The opening joy is expressed first by Constanze and Belmonte, and then by Blonde and Pedrillo before all four sing together. But when Belmonte confesses his nagging doubt, the shared ecstasy dissolves suddenly, without warning, into the troubled hurt of a frowning andante. As both he and Pedrillo accuse their women of faithlessness, the joy collapses completely. The women’s responses are entirely characteristic: Constanze weeps; Blonde hits Pedrillo across the face. Both men have had their reassurance, and there is a steady recovery towards reconciliation, which is sweet, resolving eventually, and literally, into pure harmony. And this is entirely an interpretation of Mozart’s, for the women and men have different texts. The women sing of the injustice of the men’s suspicious doubts, and the men of their realization that the women are beyond reproach; and Mozart unites these statements in an almost chorale-like moment of freeze-frame repose. As the men beg to be forgiven, the pace resumes, as does the shared joy, and the act ends in renewed hope. This quartet has somehow encapsulated so much of human relationships, of their understandings and misunderstandings, of their frailties and their strengths, of the calm of trust and the fervour of passion. With it, Mozart again took a step further towards the perfection of his later operas.

  In the final act, after the rescue attempt has been thwarted by Osmin, both Constanze and Belmonte are condemned to die, and as they wait for death they sing a ravishing duet. Most fascinatingly, it is Constanze who is the stronger character of the two. Belmonte apologizes constantly, but she sustains him with an expression of true fearlessness of death (‘Was ist der Tod? Ein Übergang zur Ruh!’ – What is death? A passage to peace!) which Mozart surely shared. Like Ilia, Constanze is calmly prepared to die with the man she loves, and this confidence brings her true bliss (‘Wonne ist mir dies Gebot’). And so she takes Belmonte into their allegro, and he too is strong. ‘Ich will alles gerne leiden’ (I will happily bear anything), he claims, and she replies that she will meet death in peace and joy. This most extraordinary duet, which had begun as a scene of condemned misery, ends as, together now in thirds and sixths, Constanze and Belmonte sing of their true rapture. It is little wonder that the Pasha Selim forgives them.

  Where Idomeneo had been for Mozart a great step forward in the world of opera seria, here in Die Entführung aus dem Serail he took another, but now in the context of German singspiel, and again created a masterpiece of enormous emotional verisimilitude. However much there are moments of high comedy, the fundamental seriousness of the story’s Enlightenment subject-matter imbues Mozart’s whole score with a miraculous gravity. That Wolfgang was ‘rescuing’ his own Constanze at the precise moment of the creation of Die Entführung almost certainly contributed to the intensification of his own emotions, and therefore of the emotions expressed in his opera.

  AFTER DIE ENTFÜHRUNG, Mozart produced no more opera for nearly four years. One reason for this was that he was preoccupied with other genres: piano concertos, string quartets, piano sonatas, arias, and of course his C minor Mass in Salzburg. But there was another reason too. The whole world of opera in Vienna was undergoing change, and again partly at the personal whim of the Emperor, who clearly saw himself as something of an impresario. He loved to have companies of singers staying at the palace of Schönbrunn, where he treated them royally in return for their entertaining him. He delighted in their acquaintance, and took trouble to get to know them personally. On his own frequent journeys to Italy he would often become a talent-spotter, selecting singers to be sent back to Vienna and employed by Salieri. He also had his spies in all the major Italian cities, performing the same function. And in Venice he was represented by the Austrian Ambassador and former director of theatre productions in Vienna, Count Durazzo. It was Durazzo who, in 1783, hired a handful of extremely talented singers for the Emperor. These singers would change the flavour not only of opera in Vienna, but, most significantly, of Mozart’s operatic creations too.

  Durazzo’s haul included three Italian bass-baritones, Stefano Mandini, Francesco Benucci and Francesco Bussani, all in their mid-thirties; one eighteen-year-old half-Italian, half-English soprano, Nancy Storace; and a young Irish tenor, Michael Kelly. According to Kelly, whose hilariously engaging Reminiscences provide rich anecdotal information about their activities, Count Durazzo had been instructed to recruit some Italians because Joseph II had recently fired a group of French singers from Schönbrunn: apparently they had complained about his wine. Although this social faux pas may indeed have been some final contributory factor to the Emperor’s changing his mind, it is more likely that he was influenced by Salieri, whose own operas were having great success in both Italy and Vienna. And sure enough, when the new influx of singers arrived in the summer of 1783, they all performed in Salieri’s La scuola di gelosia, to great public acclaim. Again according to Kelly, they were made to feel extremely welcome and given lavish accommodation: ‘the apartments . . . consisted of an excellent first and second floor, elegantly furnished, in the most delightful part of Vienna. I was found, as usual, in fuel and wax candles, and a carriage to take me to rehearsals and to and from the theatre, whenever I performed.’41 (It is not surprising that Wolfgang felt obliged to move into the expensive apartment in the Domgasse, if the Court’s artistic personnel were living in such splendour.)

  As Mozart, together with Aloysia and their German colleagues, witnessed this Italian invasion, there was a certain amount of consternation. Aloysia was particularly unsettled by young Nancy Storace, who, five years her junior, already had a glittering career behind her. Wolfgang, though, was excited, and longed to climb on to this bandwagon too: he had, after all, his own very impressive track record of Italian opera. He searched hard for a suitable libretto, but by now he was extremely choosy, and nothing that he saw appealed to him. He wrote to Leopold: ‘I have looked through at least a hundred libretti and more, but I have hardly found a single one with which I am satisfied; that is to say, so many alterations would have to be made here and there, that even if a poet would undertake to make them, it would be easier for him to write a completely new text, which indeed it is always best to do.’42 He was particularly intrigued by the arrival of ‘a certain Abbate Da Ponte’, whose rakish reputation and charismatic personality had caused quite a stir. Naturally Wolfgang was keen to collaborate with him, even if he still entertained residual (inherited) doubts a
bout the trustworthiness of the Italian race as a whole. But for the moment Lorenzo Da Ponte was fully occupied with writing for Salieri and others, and Wolfgang knew he should wait his turn.

  With these new Italian singers in mind, Mozart did however actually begin two separate projects, neither of which was ever completed. First he started work on L’Oca del Cairo, K422, a rather bizarre story of another rescue, this time from a castle and with the help of a large mechanical goose, into which the captives could be smuggled (a variation, perhaps, on the theme of the Trojan horse). If Wolfgang entertained hopes that Da Ponte would agree to write his libretto, he had to abandon them, and, since he was in any case about to go to Salzburg with Constanze, he turned instead to his old colleague from Idomeneo, Giovanni Battista Varesco, who did indeed produce a text. Wolfgang began work on it in the summer of 1783 in Salzburg, and continued to tinker with it after his return to Vienna. But he only sketched parts of seven numbers (three arias, two duets, a quartet, and a finale to Act I, involving all seven characters). Like all Mozart’s unfinished fragments, these are full of glorious though unrealized promise. But their most striking aspect is the almost total lack of demanding coloratura singing. The new influx of Italian singers had many alluring attributes and no doubt fine technical abilities too. But the pyrotechnics that Aloysia Lange, Caterina Cavalieri and Therese Teiber all displayed so brilliantly were simply not part of their musical language, and so Wolfgang, realizing this, tactfully avoided them.

  After abandoning L’Oca del Cairo, Mozart began another Italian comic opera, Lo sposo deluso, K424a, whose unattributed libretto might perhaps have been the work of Da Ponte. Mozart’s own copy of the text indicates that he had very specific singers in mind for the six roles, for the names Storace, Cavalieri, Teiber, Benucci, Bussani and Mandini all appear in it: intriguingly, then, this was to be an amalgam of both the Italian and German factions. But this project too was abandoned.

  In the course of the next two seasons, there was a certain amount of movement between the Italian and German opera companies. By 1785, Cavalieri, Adamberger and Teiber (‘all Germans of whom Germany may be proud’, Mozart reported patriotically to Professor Anton Klein in Mannheim) transferred to the thriving Italian company, leaving Aloysia as the stalwart of the German one. Wolfgang was clearly in two minds about these developments. On the one hand he was anxious to create opportunities to work with the Italians, but on the other, he was alarmed too at the potential loss of working in the vernacular. He continued his letter to Klein in a spirit of morose irony:

  The idea at present is to carry on the German opera with actors and actresses, who only sing when they must . . . Were there but one good patriot in charge, things would take a different turn. But then, perhaps, the German national theatre which is sprouting so vigorously would actually begin to flower; and of course that would be an everlasting blot on Germany, if we Germans were seriously to begin to think as Germans, to act as Germans, to speak German, and, Heaven help us, to sing in German!43

  And perhaps Joseph II himself was cannily aware of these conflicts and tensions in his musicians, and found a mischievous way to exploit them. He devised his evening of lavish entertainment for his sister and brother-in-law, the Governors-General of the Netherlands, in Schönbrunn on 7 February 1786, in such a way as actually to pit the opposing factions against each other, on separate stages at either end of the long Orangery. Perhaps deliberately aiming to provoke his employees into producing performances sharpened with a wholly competitive edge, the Emperor first asked Salieri to write an opera, with an Italian text, about the whole business of putting on an opera. Salieri and his librettist Casti produced the cumbersomely titled Prima la musica e poi le parole (First the Music, then the Words). He then asked Mozart to provide a vorspiel, but in German. (His guests, it seems, were to be greeted in their own tongue, and then entertained in the current language of high culture.) Mozart called on his old colleague from Die Entführung, Johann Gottlieb Stephanie, and their resulting curtain-raiser was Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), K486.

  The plot of Der Schauspieldirektor concerns the attempts of an impresario (Frank) and a comedian (Buff) to establish a theatre in Salzburg. After lengthy discussions between them on the repertoire they will present and the type of actors they are therefore seeking, they begin to view potential company members. Various artists are hired. But two sopranos quarrel over who is to be the ‘prima’ donna, and cannot be pacified. In the end, everyone agrees that all artists should do their very best, and that ultimately it is the audience who decides on the quality of the performance.

  Caterina Cavalieri and Aloysia Lange, long-standing rivals at the German opera, but united now against the usurping incomers, sportingly agreed to play the two sopranos, portraying themselves and their very rivalry in high caricature. Adamberger was brought in as a potential (but fairly ineffectual) peacemaker, and the character actor Joseph Weidmann (whose long and successful career – of thirty-seven years – was entirely based at the Burgtheater) played the role of Buff, contributing as a singer too to a quartet. The other acting roles were taken by Stephanie himself and his wife, by Aloysia’s husband Joseph Lange, by Adamberger’s wife Maria Anna, and two others; and the spirit of family solidarity was dazzling.

  Stephanie’s almost slapstick text was perhaps a little overlong: Count Zinzendorf – whose diaries do admittedly reveal distinct philistine tendencies – pronounced it to be ‘fort mediocre’. But Mozart’s musical numbers show how greatly he relished the truly glittering occasion, the passing patronage of the Emperor, the superb talents of his favourite singers, and his straightforward desire to outshine the team at the other end of the Orangery. The overture already is of a fiery brilliance, with high contrasts and arresting gestures. The next two numbers are effectively audition pieces for the rival sopranos, as first Madame Herz (Aloysia) and then Madame Silberklang (Cavalieri) show the impresario what they can do. And of course nobody knew what they could do better than Mozart, who wrote cheerfully to their great strengths. Madame Herz’s ‘Du schlägt die Abschiedsstunde’ (The hour of parting is upon us) begins with a gentle larghetto in G minor, in which Aloysia’s tender, sustained singing was shown to great advantage, followed by an allegro section in G major where her coloratura is at last allowed to fly. Madame Silberklang’s rondo, ‘Bester Jüngling’ is similarly structured (though differently coloured – where Aloysia’s accompanying wind group had bright oboes, Cavalieri’s has warmer clarinets), and in her allegro section she too is given some brisk pyrotechnics. Neither Aloysia nor Caterina Cavalieri would have been overtaxed by these arias: compared to the music Wolfgang had already written for both of them, these were relatively undemanding. Perhaps by entering into the party atmosphere of the occasion, he was letting his divas relax and enjoy their showing off. But perhaps too he had taken to heart Joseph II’s now legendary comment on Die Entführung (‘too many notes’ – a criticism surely of the prolonged passages of coloratura for both Cavalieri and Adamberger, which contrasted so strongly with the less florid technique of the new Italian singers), and modified his virtuosity accordingly.

  The fun starts in the trio. Like the men’s trio in Die Entführung, which Mozart had proudly claimed was good counterpoint as well as good theatre, this is extremely well crafted. But the text is hilarious, as the two divas now childishly exchange claims as to their status (‘Ich bin die erste Sängerin!’ – I am the foremost singer!). Wolfgang’s music positively chuckles with the delight he must have felt as he wrote this, and the women themselves would have relished the opportunity perhaps to say what they really felt. They hiss vituperative asides to each other, and they each try again to show off their superior talents. Aloysia has a slow section, to the very word, ‘Adagio’, where Mozart takes her up to her top E flat and immediately down two octaves – the Weber trademark. Cavalieri’s contrasting ‘Allegro, allegrissimo’ is a more flashy demonstration of her coloratura, after the manner of her triplets in ‘Martern aller arten’ in D
ie Entführung. And beneath all this, the equally game Adamberger, as the tenor Vogelsang, tries to calm them down, literally soothing the trio at its end with the words ‘Calando! Mancando! Diminuendo! Decrescendo! Pianissimo!’ It is tempting to imagine that this is just the sort of joke that Joseph II would have loved, and that Imperial shoulders were heaving at this point. The concluding quartet, in which Joseph Weidmann as Buff was allowed his little moment of glory, explaining that he only needed to add an ‘o’ to his name, and he’d become the first Buffo actor, drew its egalitarian theatrical moral; and Mozart’s curtain-raiser was over. And the Schönbrunn audience turned its chairs to watch Prima la musica e poi le parole at the other end of the building.

  Salieri’s piece was longer, was the main feature of the double-bill, and presented the current stars of the Italian opera. Inevitably it got the greater part of attention. But it is unlikely that Mozart was unduly worried. He and his friends had put together their Schauspieldirektor in just two weeks, and they had had the most wonderful time at one of the society events of the year. He cannot any longer have felt threatened by the Italians, for by now he was writing music for all of them. On his desk, briefly put aside for the composition of Der Schauspieldirektor, was Le nozze di Figaro. Mozart had just embarked on the most thrilling, the most perfect, artistic partnership of his entire life.