The negroes (opera)
| Work data | |
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| Title: | The negroes |
Title page of the libretto, Vienna 1804 |
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| Shape: | Singspiel in two acts |
| Original language: | German |
| Music: | Antonio Salieri |
| Libretto : | Georg Friedrich Treitschke |
| Premiere: | November 10, 1804 |
| Place of premiere: | Theater an der Wien , Vienna |
| Playing time: | approx. 2 ½ hours |
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Die Neger is a singspiel in two acts by Antonio Salieri based on a text by Georg Friedrich Treitschke . Salieri composed most of the opera in 1802, but it was not premiered until two years later on November 10, 1804 in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna . With this piece Salieri bid farewell to the stage.
The contemporary audience received the work rather coolly, it was canceled in Vienna after four performances. Only in Breslau was there a successful resumption in 1805 under the direction of Carl Maria von Weber . More recently, the overtures to the first and second act have been played several times in concert and have also been recorded on CD by the Mannheim Mozart Orchestra under the direction of Thomas Fey . Some vocal numbers from the opera were played at the Walldorfer Musiktage festival in 2010 with the soprano Caroline Melzer, the bass-baritone Philipp skull and the Karlsruhe Baroque Orchestra under the direction of Timo Jouko Herrmann .
action
The play takes place on an island in the Caribbean that has been colonized by the English. Lord Bedford wants to be governor of this colony. On false accusations, he has forced his rival Lord Falkland to leave the country. Bedford is now vying for Falkland's fiancée Fanny, the daughter of the old governor Lord Dellwill. After a few years, Falkland returns to the country disguised as a black man and enters Bedford's service under the name "Jack", undetected. Governor Dellwill has since discovered evidence of Falkland's innocence and wants to hold Bedford accountable. He sees his plans in danger and gives Jack the order to poison the governor. When this collapses during a party, Bedford sees himself as the winner. But Dellwill survived the attack because Jack replaced the deadly poison with a harmless substance. Jack reveals his true identity. The culprit is convicted and nothing stands in the way of Lord Falkland and Fanny's wedding. Fanny's English maid Betty marries the African American John.
effect
The most popular source about the opera's premiere is a review of the piece in the Allgemeine Musikischen Zeitung (AmZ) on December 12, 1804. Here it is said that the opera was "given without approval". The following is a lecture about the music: "There are indeed several good passages, especially in the first act [...]: but on the whole there was a lack of that power and characteristic that one comes to appreciate more and more here in Mozart's and Cherubine works." Interestingly, Beethoven's original version of Fidelio in January 1806 in the journal Der Freimüthige with almost the same words. There are also two reviews of Salieri's Die Neger in this magazine . As early as December 7, 1804, a review in the general musical newspaper appeared similar in the basic tendency of the review , but in which the "pleasant music" was praised. A week later another review appeared in the same paper, reporting that this opera with the “delicious music by Salieri” had already been “performed with great applause” five times.
To the music
Individual numbers of Salieri's opera - such as the overture - seem to have met with great approval, as various piano reductions show. On closer inspection of the score, contrary to expectations, the work reveals itself to be unusually elaborate; everything is excellently orchestrated. Salieri condenses Fanny's lamentation of love about the loss of her lover, for example, with distinctive solos with two English horns and plucked strings. At the beginning of the second act there is an expressive Picciola Sinfonia for solo clarinet, two bassoons and strings. Salieri only takes the exotic coloring into account by using cymbals and bass drum sparingly. Of greater interest is a melody reminiscent of an English counter dance, which runs as a leitmotif through the entire opera and is used in the overture, after the introduction, in the first finale and in the final chorus of the second act. The melodic invention seems to be extremely inspired and varied throughout the work, a multitude of musical forms is used by Salieri for dramaturgical design, from simple verse songs to the canon to the extended solo scene, he shows the whole range of musical and dramatic possibilities. The above-average number of ensembles is also remarkable.
Relations with Beethoven
At many points in Salieri's score, one seems to hear anticipations of individual passages from Beethoven's Fidelio , which was also premiered in 1805 in the Theater an der Wien . Of particular interest is the role distribution, which often coincides in both works: Salieri's pupil Anna Milder-Hauptmann sang both Lady Anna and Leonore, the tenor Carl Demmer stood on stage as Lord Falkland / Jack and Florestan, the roles of the villains Lord Bedford and Don Pizarro were taken over by the bass-baritone Sebastian Mayer (also: Meier), Betty and Marzelline were played by Louise Müller , John and Jaquino by Joseph Caché . Beethoven, who was taking lessons from Salieri at the time of the composition of the Negroes , certainly knew the work and was certainly inspired by the vocal peculiarities of the respective singers - which Salieri had taken very careful consideration of. The gestures of many Salieri arias can be found in Beethoven's score with above average frequency. The librettist Georg Friedrich Treitschke was one of the collaborators on the final text for Fidelio .
Political tendencies of the piece
Despite the politically incorrect title today, no racist tendencies can be discovered in Treitschke's libretto, on the contrary: the poet places Europeans and blacks almost on an equal footing for the conditions at the time. Right at the beginning, Lord Dellwill explicitly names the workers on his plantation friends or brothers, and at the end of the first act you sit together at a large banquet table in front of the governor's house. Salieri - who had campaigned for the abolition of slavery together with Beaumarchais in Le Couronnement de Tarare as early as 1790 - avoids dressing blacks with "inferior" music, but puts all characters on the same musical level. At the end of the play, the marriage of Betty and John reveals a completely relaxed approach to intercultural marriage , which was forbidden in America at the time , an element of the plot that was likely to have met with great skepticism and incomprehension from the majority of the audience at the time. Salieri's first biographer Ignaz von Mosel justified the failure of the piece with the fact that “The material and music [...] were too much intended for an educated audience to be in the right place on a suburban stage: well sung and played However, this Singspiel cannot fail to have its effect on any stage that has a selected audience. ”The musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann assumes in his dissertation that the progressive basic tendency of the piece contributed to the early cancellation of the opera. As his research showed, Salieri's opera was originally intended to be performed in one of the two court theaters in the city in 1802, but was then rejected for reasons unknown and only premiered two years later in the suburbs at the Theater an der Wien. For the resumption in Breslau - as the libretto printed for the performance there shows - many of the politically objectionable passages were defused and the colored protagonists made a purely decorative element again.
literature
- Werner Bollert: Salieri e l'opera tedesca . In: Musica d'oggi . 20, 1938, ZDB -ID 1138070-6 , pp. 122-125.
- Timo Jouko Herrmann: Antonio Salieri and his German-language works for music theater . Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag, Leipzig 2015, ISBN 978-3-87350-053-2 .
- Ignaz von Mosel : About the life and works of Anton Salieri . Wallishausser, Vienna 1827.
- Ute Sadji: The Mohr on the German stage in the 18th century . Müller-Speiser, Anif / Salzburg 1992, ISBN 3-85145-011-6 ( Word and Music 11).
- Georg Friedrich Treitschke: The negroes . An opera in two acts. Degen, Vienna 1804 ( digitized version of the Munich digitization center ).
- Georg Friedrich Treitschke: The negroes . Opera in two acts. Grass and Barth, Breslau 1805.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Program Walldorfer Musiktage 2010, City of Walldorf, September 2010.
- ↑ Timo Jouko Herrmann: Antonio Salieri and his German-language works for music theater , 2015, pp. 296–302.
- ↑ Timo Jouko Herrmann: Antonio Salieri and his German-language works for music theater , 2015, p. 163.
- ↑ Timo Jouko Herrmann: Antonio Salieri and his German-language works for music theater , 2015, p. 296.