Mozart and Salieri: Did Mozart Co-write a Song with Salieri?

Mozart Contemporaries / Antonio Salieri

 

 

A post from Norman Lebrecht, dated 16th January 19, 2016, entitled "Did Mozart Co-write a Song with Salieri," should interest fellow Mozart lovers. According to the brief post, a long-lost collaborative effort between rival composers Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri is found at a Czech National Library by a German composer Timo Jouko Hermann.

It's a solo cantata listed in Köchel as K477a, and long believed lost. Written by Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, the score is supposed to have been written for Nancy Storace, the original Susanna in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro). At the time, Salieri was writing the role of Ofelia for her in his opera La Grotta Di Trofonio.

A comment from Michael Lorenz is most insightful.  Here's the link: Did Mozart Co-write A Song With Salieri, by Norman Lebrecht. SLIPPED DISK.  (Accessed January 20, 2016.)



Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia (For the recovered health of Ophelia), K. 477a, is a solo cantata for soprano and fortepiano composed in 1785 by Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amade’ Mozart, and a third, unknown composer, whose cosiddetto is Cornetti. 

The cantata was composed to a libretto written by the Vienna court poet and Mozart colleague, the great Lorenzo Da Ponte.  Scoring: soprano and fortepiano.

“Cornetti" may refer to Alessandro Cornetti, a vocal teacher and composer active in Vienna at the time,or it is a pseudonym of either Salieri or Stephen Storace, a composer who organized the collaborative work to honor his famous sister, soprano Nancy Storace. The music had been considered lost until November 2015, when German musicologist and composer Timo Jouko Herrmann identified the score while searching for music by one of Salieri's ostensible pupils, Antonio Casimir Cartellieri, in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague.

Here is the complete cantata for Nancy Storace that Mozart collaborated on with Salieri and another composer known as Cornetti.  Lyrics by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

https://youtu.be/_knJP8de8qE

I. Lascia la greggia, o Fillide (Antonio Salieri) 0:00
II. Quell' agnelletto candido (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) 1:37
III. Lascia la greggia, o Fillide ("Cornetti") 3:08

(Hiltrud Kuhlmann, Soprano, Christine Rahn, Pianoforte. Edition: Dr. Timo Jouko Herrmann)


(A rare print, until now considered lost, has been discovered in the collection of the Department of Music History in the National Museum‘s Czech Museum of Music. It is a libretto by the court poet in Vienna, Lorenzo Da Ponte, with a score, entitled Per la Ricuperata Salute di Offelia. The libretto was set to music in autumn 1785 by Antonio Salieri - the court composer of Italian origin - Wolfgang Amadeum Mozart, and Cornetti.)  Accessed January 19, 2016.

https://youtu.be/lay8uZt7Y_8.

(a) January 2016. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.