Books, Arts & Manners: Mozart, Mahler, and Others

The Italians of Mozart’s time made a sharp distinction between opera buffa and opera séria. Mozart, in his two greatest operas, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, rose above both— though if they are comedy, it is only in Balzac’s sense of comédie humaine. Le Nozze was roughly based on Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro, but from this Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, created what Stendhal described as a “sublime blend of wit and melancholy.” The blend is such that it is sometimes hard to tell whether the music flowed from the libretto or vice versa.

In what Virgil Thomson has called the most touching pictures of eighteenth-century life, Le Nozze places masters and servants on the same level of human experience and folly. The stagecraft is artificial, but from it emerges great art and great commentary. Now a three-disc CD recording (L’Oiseau Lyre 421 333-2) by the Drottningholm Court Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, playing the instruments of the time and directed by Arnold Ostman, proves a point I have made in the past: that in Mozart’s operas, good voices that meet in ensemble and good vocal acting make better music than one or two great show-off stars.

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Ralph de Toledano

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The Italians of Mozart’s time made a sharp distinction between opera buffa and opera séria. Mozart, in his two greatest operas, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, rose above both— though if they are comedy, it is only in Balzac’s sense of comédie humaine. Le Nozze was roughly based on Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro, but from this Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, created what Stendhal described as a “sublime blend of wit and melancholy.” The blend is such that it is sometimes hard to tell whether the music flowed from the libretto or vice versa.

In what Virgil Thomson has called the most touching pictures of eighteenth-century life, Le Nozze places masters and servants on the same level of human experience and folly. The stagecraft is artificial, but from it emerges great art and great commentary. Now a three-disc CD recording (L’Oiseau Lyre 421 333-2) by the Drottningholm Court Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, playing the instruments of the time and directed by Arnold Ostman, proves a point I have made in the past: that in Mozart’s operas, good voices that meet in ensemble and good vocal acting make better music than one or two great show-off stars.