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Friday and Saturday, June 19 and 20, 2015
OVERTURE TO
THE MAGIC FLUTE
, K. 620
(1791)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Mozart’s Overture to
The Magic Flute
is scored for pairs
of woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones,
timpani and strings. The performance time is 7 minutes. The
Grant Park Orchestra first performed this overture on July 21,
1936, with Richard Czerwonky conducting.
Early in 1791 Mozart was deeply in debt, troubled by the disinclination of
the Viennese public to embrace his recent music and concert appearances, and
suffering seriously from the kidney failure that would take his life before the year was
out, so when Emanuel Schikaneder, a slightly shady actor and theater entrepreneur,
suggested in May that they collaborate on a new opera that was sure to be a hit,
the composer jumped at the chance. Mozart had first met Schikaneder a decade
earlier in Salzburg, when the latter’s touring company performed a season of plays,
musicals and ballets to which Wolfgang’s family was given free admission. (In
appreciation Mozart wrote for him the incidental music to
Thamos, King of Egypt
and a
Singspiel
titled
Zaïde
.) After arriving in Vienna in 1789, Schikaneder took over
the management of the Theater-auf-der-Wieden, a well-equipped 800-seat house
just outside the city walls that specialized in presenting popular, German-language
musical entertainment. The Viennese public was especially fond at that time of
comic pieces with Oriental or fantastic settings, and Schikaneder had achieved a
fine success with the “magic opera”
Oberon
by Paul Wranitzky. For a sequel he
proposed to write the libretto for a
Singspiel
called
Die Zauberflöte — The Magic
Flute
— a comic musical with spoken dialogue based on Liebeskind’s story
Lulu
from Wieland’s 1786 collection of Oriental fairy-tales called
Dschinnistan
, for which
Mozart would provide the music. Schikaneder could offer no money immediately,
but promised Mozart he would get all the rental fees for subsequent productions
after the premiere. (Schikaneder reneged, however, and Mozart’s widow fought
creditors for years while
The Magic Flute
made money all over Europe.)
Mozart threw himself into composing the music for
The Magic Flute
in May and
June. Early in June he sent his wife, Constanze, to the suburban spa town of Baden to
ease the last months of her current pregnancy, and he visited her whenever he could.
(On one of those trips he wrote the sublime motet
Ave verum corpus
for Anton Stoll,
the choirmaster of the church at Baden.) Schikaneder, however, was eager to finish
the new production, and he encouraged Mozart to stay in Vienna and finish the score
by providing him with a little hut on the grounds of the Theater-auf-der-Wieden in
which to work, and then plied him with oysters and wine and arranged encouraging
visits frommembers of the troupe. (This “Magic Flute House” was moved to Salzburg
in the mid-19th century, and may be seen today in the garden of the Mozarteum.)
Most of the composition was completed by July, when Mozart received two more
commissions —one for an
opera seria
on Metastasio’s old text
La Clemenza di Tito
,
to commemorate the coronation in Prague of the new Emperor, Leopold II, as King
of Bohemia; the other, a mysterious order for a Requiem Mass, the work that was
to cast such an ominous pall over Mozart’s last months. As
Tito
was needed for
performance on September 6th, he had to begin the music immediately, and was
still composing the score when he and Constanze left for Prague in mid August, only
three weeks after she had given birth to Franz Xaver. When they returned to Vienna
a month later, Mozart began the final preparations for the premiere of
The Magic
Flute
, which included composing the Overture, always the last part of his operas to
be written. The full score was finished on September 28th.
