Prima la musica e poi le parole

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Work data
Title: Prima la musica e poi le parole
Prima la musica 2007 in the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth

Prima la musica 2007 in the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth

Original language: Italian
Music: Antonio Salieri
Libretto : Giovanni Battista Casti
Premiere: February 7, 1786
Place of premiere: Orangery of Schönbrunn Palace , Vienna
Playing time: Around 1 hour
Place and time of the action: Vienna in the 18th century
people
  • The musician ( bass )
  • The poet (bass)
  • Donna Eleonora ( soprano )
  • Tonina (soprano)

Prima la musica e poi le parole (Eng. First the music and then the words ) is a “Divertimento teatrale” (also “Operetta a quattro voci”) in one act by Antonio Salieri based on a text by Giovanni Battista Casti . The correct title is Prima la musica, poi le parole , one of the manuscripts also says “Prima la musica, dopo le parole”

Emergence

Salieri's one-act opera was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II for a “spring festival on a winter day”. On the same occasion, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the music for the singspiel Der Schauspieldirektor KV 486. However, the two pieces should not - as is often claimed - stir up competition between the two composers with their librettists, but rather the dramaturgies and ensembles of the “German National Singspiel “And let the court operist enter into a piquant competition. The first performance took place on February 7, 1786 in the orangery of Schönbrunn Palace .

Content and form

The piece appears in the guise of a classic theater satire, numerous manners and bad habits of the music theater business of the time are targeted, and some quotes from Giuseppe Sarti's successful opera Giulio Sabino , which 1785 in Vienna with the famous castrato Luigi appear as a parody of the opera seria Marchesi was given the title role. In the final quartet Salieri offers all his compositional sophistication and lets the two rival singers Tonina (soprano) and Donna Eleonora (soprano) rehearse their arias at the same time (!).

Salieri later adopted the overture of the little work in his “Dramma tragicomico”, composed by Lorenzo da Ponte, Il pastor fido , which premiered on February 11, 1789 in the Vienna Burgtheater. There sang: Nancy Storace , Eleonora; Stefano Mandini , Il compositore; Francesco Benucci , Il poeta; Celeste Coltellini , Tonina.

Performance history

The work was Salieri's first opera, published in 1972 by Friedrich Wanek and Josef Heinzelmann and translated by Josef Heinzelmann. As a forerunner of the rehabilitation of Salieri, which was then promoted by Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1979) and the film of the same name, this edition recorded numerous performances, mostly as in the premiere in conjunction with Mozart's drama director : in 1973 in Dubrovnik by the National Theater in Zagreb and in Turin in 1974 Caramoor Festival and the one in Spoleto, and subsequently in Trier, Warsaw, Boston, Lisbon, Rome, Metz, Tokyo, Houston, Amsterdam, Lyon, Graz, Berlin (German State Opera), Frankfurt, Potsdam, Hanoi, Bangkok, Liège , Seoul etc. There were also innumerable productions at conservatories and by small troops.

A concert performance in The Hague under Nikolaus Harnoncourt was only published in fragments on record and CD (with Robert Holl , Thomas Hampson and Roberta Alexander, among others ). Harnoncourt conducted the work again in concert at the Salzburg Mozart Weeks in 2002 and in 2005 in Vienna. These two performances were based on preliminary performance material from a critical new edition of the work edited by the musicologist Thomas Betzwieser. This was officially presented in April 2007 at the 13th Bayreuth Easter Festival and appeared in print in 2013 as the first volume in the Opera series . Spectrum of European music theater in individual editions. The translation of the original Italian text was done by Stefan A. Troßbach.

The title of Salieri's four-person play has meanwhile become a household word. It is not about the priority of the music over the text but rather a nonsensical chronological order, because here a routine composer has a provincial librettist write new texts on existing musical numbers. Salieri had joined - much more strongly than his colleague Mozart - the opera reform of Christoph Willibald Gluck , which preached the primacy of the word over music in the search for dramatic truth.

It is often mentioned that Richard Strauss ' conversation piece in Musik Capriccio should be based largely on Casti's libretto. There it says: “Prima la musica, dopo le parole”. In reality, the plot has no references to Salieri and Casti, but does to the prelude to Ariadne auf Naxos .

literature

  • Edward Elmgren Swenson: "Prima la musica e poi le parole". An Eighteen-Century Satire . In: Friedrich Lippmann (Ed.): Studies on Italian-German music history . Volume 7. Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 1970, ( Analecta musicologica 7 ), pp. 112-129.
  • Josef Heinzelmann, Prima la musica, poi le parole. On Salieri's Viennese opera parody , in: Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (ÖMZ) 28, 1973, ISSN  0029-9316 , pp. 19–28.
  • Josef Heinzelmann: Prima la musica, poi le parole (1786) . In: Sieghart Döhring, Carl Dahlhaus u. a. (Ed.): Piper's Encyclopedia of Music Theater. Opera, operetta, musical, ballet . Volume 5: Works: Piccinni - Spontini . Piper, Munich a. a. 1994, ISBN 3-492-02415-7 , pp. 534-536.
  • Ciambattista Casti, Antonio Salieri: Prima la musica e poi le parole, Music Edition by Thomas Betzwieser, Text Edition by Adrian La Salvia, Editing Supervisor Christine Siegert, Kassel, Basel etc. 2013 (Opera. Spectrum of European Music Theater in Individual Editions, Vol . 1), ISMN 979-0-006-53984-0

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