Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte

Mozart Contemporaries / Librettists

Lorenzo Da Ponte, Italian Librettist of Wolfgang Mozart

Lorenzo Da Ponte's life and times, Italian librettist who wrote three of Mozart's four best operas.

Lorenzo Da Ponte (10 March 1749 – 17 August 1838), born in Céneda, near Treviso, Veneto, Italy, is an important librettist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was a Venetian opera librettist and poet. He wrote the librettos for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.  He was married to Nancy Grahl in Trieste, Italy, had one son.

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.

Franz Krommer

Mozart Contemporaries: Franz Krommer
 

Franz Krommer (František Krommer: born 27 November 1759 – died 8 January 1831), was a Czech composer of classical music and violinist. A contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his 71-year life span began half a year after the death of G. F. Handel and ended nearly four years after that of Beethoven. He died in Vienna.

His life highlights include the following:  From 1773 to 1776, he studied violin and organ with his uncle, Antonín Mattias Kramár. In Turany, he became organist along with his uncle in 1777. In 1785 he was in Vienna as violinist in the orchestra of the duke of Styria (now in Simontornya in Hungary.) In 1790, he  was named Maestro di Cappella at the Cathedral of Pecs, Hungary.  He returned again to Vienna in 1795, becoming Maestro di Cappella for Duke Ignaz Fuchs in 1798. From 1813, until his death, Krommer succeeded Leopold Kozeluch as composer for the Imperial Court of Austria.

Krommer's output was prolific, with at least three hundred published compositions in at least 110 opus numbers including at least 9 symphonies, seventy string quartets and many others for winds and strings, with about 15 string quintets. Today, he is best known for his powerful wind ensemble music.


Video Credit:

Franz Krommer - Concerto for Two Clarinets in E-flat major, Op. 91. Youtube, uploaded by KuhlauDilfeng2. Accessed November 27, 2017

Image Credit:

KrommerFranz. En.wikipedia.org / Public Domain

Resource:

Franz Krommer. en.wikipedia.org.  Accessed November 28, 2015.



(c) November 2015. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.

Anton Raaff

Mozart Contemporaries / Anton Raaff

 

Anton Raaff, Tenor and Friend of Mozart

 

Anton Raaff (also spelt Raaf), German operatic singer (tenor) and a friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is baptized  in Gelsdorf, near Bonn on May 6, 1714. He was a pupil of Bernacchi in Bologna and became a principal operatic tenor in Naples and Florence in the 1760's when the wunderkind Mozart was about 5 years old.

In later years, Anton Raaff served at the courts of Mannheim and Munich. He sang in the first performance of Mozart's opera Idomeneo, 1781, in Munich.

Johann Dussek

Mozart Contemporaries / Johann Dussek

Czech composer, harpist and pianist:  Johann "Jan" Ladislaus Dussek

Jan Ladislav Dussek (more known as Václav Jan Dusík) (Feb 12, 1760 - Mar 20, 1812) was a Czech composer and pianist. He was born at Caslav, Bohemia (now Czech Republic). 

The Dussek family has a long history as professional musicians, starting from Jan Ladislav's grandfather, and lasting into the 1970s. Jan Ladislav is often known as "Dussek the Great". His mother was a harpist, and therefore not surprisingly he composed much music for the harp as well as for the piano.

After early studies, Dussek traveled to the Netherlands and Germany, where he may have studied with C.P.E. Bach. From there, he moved to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he was a favourite of Catherine the Great for a time.
However, he fled St. Petersburg just ahead of Catherine's secret police, who accused him of involvement in a plot to assassinate Catherine. Given Dussek's lifelong royalist sympathies, his well-attested personal good looks, and Catherine's proclivity for beautiful young men, a different explanation seems more probable.

Christoph Willibald von Gluck

Mozart Contemporaries / Christoph W. Gluck

Christoph W. Gluck was an older contemporary of Mozart. In August 1782 a special performance of Mozart's Entfuhrung, which Gluck, an older contemporary of Mozart was anxious to hear, was arranged for. It delighted Gluck immensely and he invited Mozart to dinner. The following year (1783), Gluck went to Mozart's concert (March 23) and Mozart improvised variations on a theme from La Rencontre imprevue.

My primary source about Gluck is one by Alfred Einstein simply titled Gluck published by McGraw-Hill. I like this paragraph from the backcover: "It is not easy to say whether Gluck was international or German, Italian, or French, for he was an opera composer," writes Einstein of this study of the life and music of C. W. Gluck (1714-1787); yet the career of Gluck does epitomize the internationalism prevailing in the arts of his time.

What "Papa" Haydn Taught Mozart

Classical Music / Composers

Wolfgang A. Mozart always said that he had learned how to write string quartets from Joseph Haydn. He found in his older friend's work a strict sense of organisation.  Mozart's scores, on the other hand, are notable for the number and variety of their themes: Haydn taught him economy. Of course, the two shared a common musical language and a great respect for each other and admiration for each other's work.

Haydn's opinion of Mozart is summed up admirably in a letter first published in 1798, in which Haydn wrote, ''. . . scarcely any man can brook comparison with the great Mozart. . . If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music, and on high personages in particular, how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive! (for this is how I understand them, how I feel them) - why then the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers.'' 

Article links:  

MUSIC; WHAT HAYDN TAUGHT MOZART by H.C. Robbins Landon.  New York Times  (Archive, August 14, 1988). Article accessed online, March 31, 2008.  -  H.C. Robbins Landon, American musicologist, journalist, historian and broadcaster, best known for his work in rediscovering the huge body of neglected music by Haydn and in correcting misunderstandings about Mozart. known for his trailblazing work on Haydn and his books on Mozart. Among Mozart lovers and enthusiasts, Landon is famous for his book The Mozart Compendium. (I acquired my own copy few years before Landon passed away.)  In general, he is known for his work in rediscovering neglected music by Joseph Haydn and in correcting misunderstandings about Mozart.  

Related link:
Brief biography of Franz Joseph Haydn.

 

 

(c) March 2009. Tel. Inspired Pen Web.  All rights reserved.  

Mozart Divas

Mozart Contemporaries / Sopranos

 

Sopranos who sang for Mozart in his time

Prominent divas of Mozart's day include Catarina Cavalieri, Adriana Ferraresi, and Nancy Storace. They sang in his operas from 1781 when he moved from Salzburg to Vienna where he eventually died in December 1791.