I enjoyed Austin Glatthorn's article ‘The Imperial Coronation of Leopold II and Mozart, Frankfurt am Main, 1790’ in Eighteenth-Century Music 14/1 (2017), 89–110. It is very informative in documenting the musical events surrounding Leopold II's coronation in October 1790, and such an article has been long overdue in Mozart scholarship. However, I must take issue with one paragraph on page 98, in which the author states ‘an additional piece was probably performed to mark the emperor's presence in Frankfurt’. The aria that he cites, ‘Wenn das Silber deiner Haare’, was sung by the bass Ludwig Fischer in Ignaz Holzbauer's opera Günther von Schwarzburg, as Fischer recounts in his autobiography. (Glatthorn cites my book The Autobiography of Ludwig Fischer: Mozart's First Osmin (Malden, MA: Mozart Society of America, 2011); the book includes the text and translation of this aria on page 63, and a piano-vocal score on pages 81–89, arranged by John A. Rice.) Fischer's text clearly refers to the Mannheim production, designed by Lorenzo Quaglio, in which there is a procession of ‘Ritter’ (knights) in Act 2 to celebrate the coronation of Günther as Holy Roman Emperor (the historical Günther lived in the mid-fourteenth century, but the coronation ceremony had changed little in the intervening period).
Fischer writes in his typically blunt style (36): ‘Der Zug der Kayser Krönung der Römer mit all denen Fürsten. ich sang dem Kaiser den Glückwunsch. Diese arie war für Raaff eine Favorite. Die Asberta hätte keine andere so geben können’. (I translate it (37) as: ‘The procession of the Holy Roman Emperor's coronation, with all the princes; I sang the greeting to the Emperor. This aria was a favorite of Raaff's. Asberta had nothing as good as this’.) Anton Raaff sang the role of Günther, and Barbara Strasser (later Fischer's wife) sang Asberta. I also discuss this scene in my earlier ‘Opera at Mannheim, 1770–1778’ (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1992), 290–298. Glatthorn is correct to point out the patriotic and nationalistic tendencies in the opera, but there is no evidence that Fischer attended the coronation of Leopold II in Frankfurt, or that this aria from Günther von Schwarzburg was performed at that time.
I am grateful to Paul Corneilson for his attention to my article and would like to thank him for his suggestion about the probable whereabouts of Ludwig Fischer during the coronation. Indeed, there is little doubt that Fischer begins and ends his paragraph concerning Günther von Schwarzburg by discussing the Mannheim production generally. But Fischer also writes in the middle of the paragraph: ‘Es spielte in Frankfurt am M. welches zuletzt gestürmt wurde’ (translated by Corneilson as ‘[Günther von Schwarzburg] was produced for the last time in Frankfurt am Main, which has also been besieged of late’; Corneilson, The Autobiography of Ludwig Fischer: Mozart's First Osmin, second edition (Malden, MA: Mozart Society of America, 2016), 38 (original) and 39 (translation); Frankfurt fell to French Republican forces in October 1792). As Corneilson writes, ‘it is often a little difficult to reconstruct the exact chronology of the events in his narrative’ (16), so we cannot be sure that this ‘last’ production did not take place at the coronation of Leopold II or Franz II, especially considering the association Fischer made with the invasion of the Rhineland. And because the autobiography ends abruptly around 1790, we also cannot be certain that Fischer was not at the coronation either – one wonders what pressing business he could have had elsewhere, given that the Holy Roman Empire's elite was assembled in Frankfurt in such great numbers. In any case, it is certainly to be hoped that more research can be devoted to this important event.
