Page 168 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

FiguRe 9.9
The man who wrote the librettos for Mozart’s most important operas of the 1780s, including Don Giovanni, was Lo- renzo da Ponte. Da Ponte was an Italian priest who, after the death of Mozart and a stay in London, immigrated to America
in 1805. Once there, he ran a dry goods store in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, and worked as a trader, distiller, and occasional gunrunner during the War of 1812. Eventually, he moved to New York City, becoming the first professor of Italian litera- ture at Columbia Univer- sity in 1825. In 1826 he sponsored a performance of Don Giovanni, the first opera by Mozart to be performed in America. >
each character to sing in turn, three or more characters can express their own particular emotions simultaneously, singing together. One might sing of her love, another of his fear, another of her outrage, while a fourth pokes fun at the other three. If an author attempted this in a spoken play (everyone talking at once), an incomprehensible jumble would result. In opera, however, the end product can sound both harmonious and dramatically compelling if the composer creates harmonious music. Composers often placed vocal ensembles at the ends of acts to help spark a rousing conclusion, one in which all the principals might appear together on stage. The vocal ensemble typifies the more democratic spirit, and better dramatic pacing, of the late eighteenth century.
Mozart and Opera
The master of Classical opera, and of the vocal ensemble in particular, was Wolf- gang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). While Haydn wrote more than a dozen op- eras and conducted others (see Figure 9.2), he lacked Mozart’s instinct for what was effective in the theater and what was not. Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio, and he labored mightily on it, working through several revisions over the course of nearly ten years. Neither Haydn nor Beethoven had Mozart’s talent for giving each character a distinctly personal set of musical attributes and for lightning-quick changes in mood. Mozart’s music is inherently dramatic and, like human emotions, can change in an instant.
Mozart—the most universal of all composers—wrote all types of opera: Baroque-style opera seria, more modern opera buffa (comic opera), and a spe- cial style of German comic opera called Singspiel. Like a Broadway musical, a
Singspiel is made up of spoken dialogue (instead of recita- tive) and songs. Mozart’s best work of this type is Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791). But more impor- tant, Mozart created a new kind of opera that mixed serious and comic elements to powerful effect. His Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) is a domestic comedy that nonetheless examines be- trayal, adultery, love, and, ultimately, forgiveness; his Don Giovanni (1787) sets hilarious moments of comic buffoonery within a story of rape, mur- der, and, ultimately, damnation. In these two mas- terpieces, both set to texts (libretti) by Lorenzo da Ponte (Figure 9.9), Mozart’s quickly changing music
evokes laughter and tears in almost equal measure. Don Giovanni has been called not only Mozart’s greatest opera but also the greatest opera ever written. It tells the tale of an amoral philanderer, a Don Juan (Juan is Spanish, Giovanni Italian), who seduces and murders his way across Europe before being pursued and finally dragged down to Hell by the ghost of a man whom he has killed. Because the seducer and mocker of public law and morality is a nobleman, Don Giovanni is implicitly critical of the ar- istocracy, and Mozart and da Ponte danced quickly to stay one step ahead of the imperial censor before production. Mozart’s opera was first performed on
146 chapter nine classical genres
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