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7 results

  • 2 - Genesis of an operone

  • Julian Rushton
  • Book:
    W. A. Mozart: Idomeneo
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    10 June 1993, pp 25-47

  • Summary

    Mozart's connections with the Munich court dated back to just before his sixth birthday, when he was taken there to be exhibited: it was his first venture as a musician, probably his first of any kind, outside his native Salzburg. He was there again the following year, at the beginning of the lengthy tour that was to take him to Paris and London, and once more, on the way back, three and a half years later. The fourth visit was in 1774-5, when his opera buff a La finta giardiniera was given at the Salvator Theatre during the carnival season; anxious to make an impression in Munich beyond the opera house, he wrote a number of liturgical works, among them a powerful Misericordias Domini (K. 222/2O5a) in a learned, contrapuntal style.

    The years 1777-8 saw Mozart's crucial journey to Mannheim and Paris, seeking career opportunities away from the provincialism and pettiness of Salzburg and its court. Munich was his first important stop. In a letter home to his father (2 October 1777) he fantasised about staying there and earning a living composing operas:

    I should draw up a contract with Count Seeau [intendant of the court opera] along the following lines: to compose every year four German operas, some buffe, some serie, with a benefit night, as is the custom here … with my help the German national theatre would certainly be a success. When I heard the German Singspiel I was simply itching to compose.

    He added that a German serious opera was in prospect ‘and they are very anxious that I should compose it’.

  • Concert Life in Eighteenth Century England

  • Stanley Sadie
  • Journal:
    Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association / Volume 85 / 1958
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 January 2020, pp. 17-30
    Print publication:
    1958

  • The Period following Purcell's death has long been looked upon as one of the Dark Ages of English music. It is unquestionably true that Britain took a long time to produce her next really great composer, but our readiness to accept a musical back seat and our refusal to make unjustifiable claims on behalf of British music have tended to blind us to the true facts of the musical life of eighteenth-century England. The fact that Handel prospered here, that Haydn wrote some of his finest music for London audiences, and that whole hosts of minor masters settled here—J. C. Bach and Geminiani, for example—surely tells us a good deal about the standards of taste pertaining among London audiences. In fact, concert life in eighteenth-century England as a whole had a variety and vitality to which it would be hard to find a parallel. Not only were concerts held in the fashionable London salons, but in the ‘Great Rooms’ of taverns in villages which today are barely large enough to find a place on a map.