Mozart. Bizet – Shchedrin

At the age of eleven, Wolfgang composed his religious singspiel Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebotes – essentially a sacred drama. The young musician composed better than he could write: the text under the notes was written in the hand of his father Leopold Mozart. A few months later the intermezzo Apollo et Hyacinthus was performed at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Mozart was initially unsuccessful with his librettists, and the production of La finta semplice at the Imperial Theatre in Vienna had to be cancelled because of a certain intrigue induced by Gluck himself (!) – the great operatic reformer could not accept that an opera-buffa by some young lad would be performed along with his Alceste! But it must be admitted that if, by the age of twelve, the composer’s “portfolio” included three operas which were augmented one year later by the singspiel (opera with spoken dialogue) Bastien und Bastienne the composer was at the very least interested in the genre.
At the age of fourteen Mozart was commissioned to compose the opera-seria (meaning a serious opera) Mitridate, re di Ponto for ... Milan! And 26 December 1770, when Wolfgang Amadeus conducted the premiere, may be considered the great opera composer’s birthday. Two dozen performances to packed houses and with considerable takings was an unheard-of and indisputable success! Mitridate paved the way for a series of operas to libretti in Italian. One after another, Mozart composed theatre serenatas, of which but Il re pastore is memorable (with the subtitle of “dramatic pastorale”) to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. The composer was haunted by his unsuccessful libretti, yet he so desired the operatic stage. It is amazing, taking all of this into view, how Mozart approached his masterpieces with such vision. There is the opera-seria Lucio Silla with its tragic pages and there are traces of the future Don Giovanni, while in La finta giardiniera to a totally meaningless plot and a hapless libretto we can hear the composer of such masterpieces as Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte.
The German singspiel (basically an operetta) Zaide was a prototype of the Italian Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In Die Entführung the composer takes an active role as a dramatist, which naturally had its effect on the theatrical and musical unity of the work.
From that time onwards, Mozart himself chose his own plots and opera librettists. Mozart’s demanding nature was rewarded: the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was a true co-creator of his three great operatic opuses, able to submit his own ambitions to those of the brilliant musician and dramatist. There was a long path to be trod from the simplistic singspiels of the wunderkind composer to Mozart’s philosophical masterpiece Die Zauberflöte to a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder.
Overtures from Mozart’s operas, his dramatic monologues, lyrical cantilenas and virtuoso buffo arias, duets, tercets and other ensembles as well as the magnificent choruses... all of this has long lived a life of its own on the concert stage and has been adored by the public.

Rodion Shchedrin’s one-act ballet Carmen-Suite was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 20 April 1967. The ballet was conceived and staged by the Cuban choreographer for Maya Plisetskaya. The tragic destiny of Carmen and José, the rival of the young Torero in his love for the gypsy woman, is foreseen by Fate itself. The plot is compact and, devoid of everyday and ethnographic details, is presented symbolically.
Rodion Shchedrin, revelling in the “competition” with Georges Bizet, made the choreographer take a different path. The music of the opera is significantly reduced and restructured. But the most important thing is that the composer found a particular key by which he could unlock Bizet’s music for ballet. His arrangement is far from typical arrangements of opera scores, whatever their aims might be.
First and foremost, Shchedrin has chosen a very unusual instrumental ensemble: strings and percussion. At the same time, he deliberately accentuates the melodic and rhythmic richness of Bizet’s score. Shchedrin gives the dramatic and passionate cantilenas of the arias (such as José’s “aria with the flower”) to the strings. The dance rhythms are syncopated and punctured naturally – here the percussion instruments are used with incredible inventiveness. The laconic and yet philosophically generalised ballet version of Carmen has won great acclaim throughout the world. Carmen-Suite is just as popular on the concert stage.

On the way to Vienna from Salzburg in October 1783, Mozart rested for a few days in Linz. The composer was entreated to perform an “academy” (as composers’ concerts were referred to in those days). At that time, it was common practice to introduce the audience to each new work being performed at every concert. In a letter to his father dated 31 October, Mozart wrote that “On Tuesday 4 November I will be performing an academy at the theatre here. And as I have brought not a single symphony with me I am sketching out a new one that must be ready for the day in question.”
The immense – simply grandiose in terms of the age! – symphony (it lasts some forty minutes) was composed by Mozart in three (!) days. It is not so much the composer’s undoubted gift or the divine source of his melodic charm that captivates so much as the power and dramatic integrity of the symphony’s concept.
Three years after the Linz Symphony in C Major (No 36, K. 425), Mozart wrote his Prague symphony, first performed in January 1787 in the city that bears its name. In the summer of 1788, again in an amazingly brief period, he composed his immortal final three symphonies (all three in two months!) – in E Flat Major, G Minor and C Major (Jupiter).
To a great extent following in the footsteps of Haydn and inspired by the polyphony of the great Bach, Mozart looked “across the horizon” of the gallant era, foretelling Beethoven’s heroic music and Schubert’s romantic symphonism... In this sense, the Linz symphony may be compared with Mozart’s final masterpieces. As Alfred Einstein once delicately noted, “here the gallant and academic style is blended into one – a timeless instant in the history of music. The symphony, once an ‘official’ genre the purpose of which was to make opera audiences fall silent before an act began or to open or close a concert, will now be performed as the focal point of an evening of concert music.”
Iosif Raiskin