Brophy Mozart the Dramatist

The Value of His Operas to Him, to His Age and to Us
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ISBN: 978-0-571-30472-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Brigid Brophy first published her passionate, profoundly original Mozart the Dramatist in 1964, revisiting it subsequently in 1988. Organised by theme, the text offers brilliant readings of Mozart's five most famous operas - Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte - while a 1988 preface reconsiders Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito. Brophy's analysis is richly informed by her readings and interests in psychoanalysis, myth, and relations between the sexes, but her stress above all is on Mozart's 'unique excellence', his 'double supremacy' both as a 'classical' and 'psychological' artist. 'An illuminating, invigorating, thought-provoking and profoundly human book, of immense value to any lover of Mozart.' Jane Glover

Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was a prize-winning British novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism, prison reform and Public Lending Right. Her celebrated debut novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, was published in 1953. It was followed by many other acclaimed novels including The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball (which Faber are reissuing with a new foreword by Eley Williams), as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. Brophy's marriage to art historian Michael Levey encompassed a thirteen-year relationship with Iris Murdoch. She died in 1995.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brophy, Brigid

Leseproben

In this new edition of a book originally published in 1964 I have expanded and amended several passages. I have made reference to books published after 1964, some of which I reviewed in periodicals. A tolerably detailed note about one such book appears at the back of this volume. When I want to mention Die Entführung aus dem Serail by a shorter title, I call it Il Seraglio. That I have not altered, because it is correct. In English-speaking countries Il Seraglio is the title of countless performances and of the standard British vocal score. I do not know why an opera composed to sung and spoken words in German was given an English title consisting of two words of Italian, especially when to call it ‘The Seraglio’ would accord with eighteenth-century English idiom and with present-day comprehension.

Were I now writing a book about Mozart and his operas, my design would incorporate a section in praise of Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito. In 1964 I knew both operas to be musical masterpieces, but at that time it was rare for a performance, even in the theatre, to allow the music to point up the drama. The drama had probably been frightened into hiding by musicologists, who put it about that anything couched in the form of opera seria (in Italian, with sung recitative and with a plot taken from the mythology or the history of ancient Greece or Rome) was ‘unfeeling’. From that notion, which is as senseless and as destructive of delight as it would be to write of Shakespeare’s tragedies as unfeeling in comparison with his comedies or the other way about, audiences have now been rescued by performers, notably Charles Mackerras, who have moved them to joy and tears by placing before them the masterpieces in the opera seria form which Handel created towards the beginning and Mozart towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Mozart was commissioned in autumn 1780 to compose an opera for the carnival season at Munich. The Bavarian court, besides appointing as librettist Giambattista Varesco, Mozart’s fellow-resident of Salzburg and fellow-employee of the ecclesiastical court, chose the subject of Idomeneus. His story is one of those about the return of the Greek heroes from the Trojan War. King of Crete, Idomeneus is on the voyage home when his ship is beset by a storm. He vows that, should he succeed in setting foot on land, he will sacrifice the first living entity he sees. The vow saves his life but impales him on a moral dilemma. The first live being he sees turns out to be his son, grown up while his father was away at the long, indeed the Homeric war. Cast safe on the coast of Crete, out of the sea, he sings in Mozart’s opera; he has a sea in his breast.

Whether Idomeneus is more obliged to fulfil his oath, for his tardiness in discharging which he is magically and monstrously punished, though most of the actual affliction falls on the population of Crete, than he is obliged to love his son is a dilemma of the type by which ancient Greek tragedy regularly splits its heroes and heroines. Greek mythology is uncertain whether Idomeneus kills his son or only tries to, but his action or attempt revolts the people of Crete and they expel him from his kingdom. Fitting though the theme was for ancient Greek tragedy, no surviving Greek tragedy, so far as I know, took it up. It was left to eighteenth-century opera. It was treated in French in an opera I do not know, Idomenée, by André Campra, performed in 1712. Varesco may have borrowed from that his softened but dramatically cogent ending, where the dilemma is resolved not by the sacrifice of the son but by the voluntary quasi-sacrifice of the father, who abdicates his throne in his son’s favour.

Late in the autumn of 1780 Mozart went to stay, alone, in Munich in order to compose the bulk of his opera in acquaintance with the orchestra and the singers who were to perform it. Leopold Mozart and the librettist were tethered, by their employment at the ecclesiastical court there, in Salzburg. Mozart wanted Varesco to alter the text, chiefly by cutting it, into accordance with Mozart’s sense of drama and the abilities and disabilities he perceived in the singers. The negotiation was conducted by letter. Mozart wrote to his father and his father negotiated with Varesco. Mozart’s letters bridging the turn of the year (1780 to 1781) are a casement opening uniquely on not only his dramatic method but the crucial relationship of his life. Mozart conducts a double negotiation: by argument and by tellingly applying the lessons taught him, he persuades his father, his earliest tutor in music, drama and worldly wisdom, to persuade Varesco.

Like Idomeneo’s son, Mozart had matured unseen by his father. He reports that the dress rehearsal is scheduled for 27 January 1781 and adds ‘my birthday, mark you’. It was the birthday on which he became twenty-five. Yet the Munich court had set him a theme through which he could also and did also express his compunction and his sympathy with the man who is worked on by magical and elemental forces into resigning his mastery to his son. The moral dilemma of Mozart the son was that the better he pleased his father, and obeyed his teaching, the more would posterity be bound to read the name Mozart as meaning not the father but the son.

Just conceivably, Leopold Mozart recognised that the son who shared his surname was adult and destined to eclipse him. Leopold Mozart’s letters to his wife and his children are habitually signed ‘Mozart’ or ‘MZT’. On 11 January 1781 he signed a letter to W. A. Mozart ‘L. Mozart’. Mozart was meanwhile treating his father as business manager, negotiator and housekeeper, requesting the despatch by mail coach of everything from trumpet mutes to the black suit which Mozart needed in Munich because of an imperial death and which Leopold Mozart reported that he had to have mended before he sent it. After correspondence where Mozart played housekeeper on the subject of stoves and sleeping accommodation, his father and his sister managed to be in Munich for the first performance of Idomeneo on 29 January 1781.

During the composition of the opera, Mozart quoted, in a letter to his father, an aria by Metastasio as a model for an aria he wanted Varesco to write in to the text of Idomeneo; and to Metastasio my opera seria extension should include a shrine. His is one of the geat names which have dropped through the slats of fashion. So devalued is he that, about the time of this book’s original publication, Michael Levey and I (who are married to one another) were able to buy in London for ten shillings (half a pound sterling) his complete works contained in ten small (roughly five by three inches) volumes published in Venice in 1800 and 1801, by virtue of which we became two of the rather, I suspect, rare twentieth-century people to have read him before commenting on him.

Metastasio’s career and perhaps some of his literary personality were formed by the most derided of political fictions, the claim that there was a continuity between the empire of ancient Rome and the Holy (in the sense of Catholic) Roman Empire. Several basically German-speaking states were electorates and their rulers Electors with the right to choose the Holy Roman Emperor from among themselves, a right they exercised to choose with tolerable regularity the head of the royal house of Austria. Ludicrous the fiction indeed was but it did vital work to preserve the culture of ancient Rome and, through the prism of Rome and the prism of the renaissance, the culture of ancient Greece.

Thanks to the Austrian territorial possessions in Italy, Italian was one of the languages of the Empire. The establishment of an Italian opera company at Vienna came, wobbled and went according to fashion and resources, but the capital of any monarchy or principality within the Empire was likely to commission an Italian opera in the way that Munich commissioned Idomeneo from Mozart. The language was not foreign; it was hung about with prestige; slowed down by singing and amplified by the repetition of words and phrases in arias, it was apprehensible to the ear—or at least to the eye in the libretto, which was usually available to opera audiences. As Mozart’s life demonstrates, the route was open for an Austrian citizen to study musical composition under an Italian master in Italy; and the route was open back to the cities of the constituent states of the Empire for Italian composers, performers and librettists.

In pursuit of its holy fiction the imperial court at Vienna called its laureate the Poeta Cesario. The job of the Cesarian poet was to provide Italian libretti. Metastasio was appointed to the office in 1729 and held it until his death in 1782.

He was born in Rome in 1698 and, to begin with, had the name Pietro Trapassi. Pietro continued to be his first name but Trapassi, which as an ordinary Italian word means ‘crossings over’, was translated into the ancient Greek word ‘metastasis’ and then given an italianate form again. The name he made famous throughout Europe was a pun. The component that begins it, ‘meta’, often has in Greek the significance of a change of state and is the same component that introduces ‘metaphor’ and ‘metamorphosis’. The simplest meaning of ‘metastasis’ is ‘removal from one place to another’, which Metastasio fulfilled in his shift from Rome to...