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A Mozart opera ‘not yet seen on any stage’

On recording La ﬁnta giardiniera

in its ‘posthumous’ Prague version (1796)

René Jacobs

I. Metamorphoses of a ‘work in progress’

After only three performances at the Salvatortheater in Munich – the second of them

substantially shortened – Mozart’s opera La finta giardiniera was prematurely taken off and

was never staged again in the composer’s lifetime in its original version (1775). Although

both Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart give gushing accounts of the opera’s success, these

should probably be treated with some scepticism. More than three years after the premiere,

Wolfgang wrote to his father from Mannheim on the subject of the Intendant of the Munich

court theatre, Count von Seeau, who was also staying in Mannheim at the time: ‘Do you

know what that confounded rascal Seeau has been saying here? That my opera buffa was

hissed off the boards in Munich!’ The limited success of the opera is probably a sign that the

public had difficulty coping with the novelty of the work. Pasquale Anfossi’s setting of the

same libretto (Rome, 1774) enjoyed much greater popularity.

From 1779 onwards, Mozart’s opera, transformed into a singspiel, found its way into the

repertory of the company run by his friend Johann Heinrich Böhm. The work was shortened

and translated into German, Belfiore’s ‘family tree’ aria (no.8) was assigned to the Podestà,

and the recitative was replaced by spoken dialogue. This version, Die verstellte Gärtnerin

(‘The disguised gardener’, as it is called in the text printed in Augsburg in 1780) continued

to be played in many German cities until the late 1780s, including Frankfurt in 1789. But it

was only after Mozart’s death that his favourite city, Prague, decided to take care of this

neglected offspring of its beloved composer. Three days before its premiere at the ‘Patriotic

Theatre’ (17 March 1796), a ‘theatrical news item’ in the Prager Neue Zeitung announced the

opera as a new work, ‘not yet seen on any stage’. This was not so much an outright lie for

advertising purposes as a calculated half-truth. For the work was played in an entirely new

edition: the original orchestration of Mozart’s autograph had been expanded in almost every

number, and a considerable proportion of those numbers had been drastically shortened.

There are two extant contemporary copies of this version: the ‘Náměšť’ score is today

conserved in Brno, and the ‘Oels’ score, named after the Silesian town where the same

version was revived in 1797,

is now in Dresden. Whereas the Brno manuscript contains

the complete Italian text with a German translation that was added later, the Dresden one

presents only the German text. More details concerning these two sources may be found in

the accompanying article by the Czech musicologist Milada Jonášová.

It is this ‘posthumous’ Prague version, the last in a series of metamorphoses of La finta

giardiniera, and not the original version printed in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA), that is

adopted in the present recording, with its complete instrumental parts, which represent a

link with Mozart’s late style, but without observing the majority of the cuts that feature in

both manuscripts. We were able to consult a facsimile of the Brno MS and a modern edition

11. Now OleNow Olešnica in Poland. (Translator’s note)

of its Dresden counterpart,

for which we would like to express our warm thanks to the

Moravské zemské muzeum in Brno (Ph. D. Irena Veselá) and the Internationale Stiftung

Mozarteum in Salzburg (Dr Ulrich Leisinger). In the Náměšť score the opera is entitled ‘La

finta giardiniera per Amore / Drama giocoso / in / Tre Atti Del Signore Wolfgango Mozart’.

II. The arranger: if not Mozart, then who?

It was the great Mozart authority Hermann Abert who was the first to direct the attention of

the musical world to the Prague Giardiniera, in the first volume of his study of the composer

(1919-21). He knew only the Dresden MS, and was unaware of any connection with Prague.

He praised the ‘advanced use of the orchestral forces, both the strings (the violas and cellos

in particular) and, especially, the wind instruments. The latter are employed, in a style

entirely in keeping with that of late Mozart, to bridge the gap between the cadences of the

individual thematic sections by means of short expressive phrases, but are also assigned

coloristic functions; above all, they combine with the strings in that new style initiated by the

Mannheimers, which makes use of them not merely for specific passages, but throughout

the work. Almost all the episodes for strings are punctuated with wind sonorities, but the

solo passages too have much greater impact [than in the original version]’. Abert carefully

avoided speculation about the identity of the arranger. But in his view one certainly recognises

here ‘a thoroughly distinctive method and an extremely skilful hand’. He concluded that this

‘substantial improvement in every respect on the original conception’ could only have been

produced by ‘either Mozart himself or someone with an excellent knowledge of Mozart, an

artist of exceptionally discerning and sure taste’.

After the Second World War, this positive judgment encouraged Karl Schleifer to publish the

manuscript, which had miraculously survived the bombardment of Dresden. In the ‘critical

report’ to this edition published in 1956 with a modernised German text, the adapter of the

libretto Hans Henny Jahnn, deputising for the editor who had died in the meantime, became

mired in speculation about the possible authorship of Mozart himself, who had, as was well

known, defended his work ‘against explicit and implicit attacks’ (did he mean from Count von

Seeau?) and then, ‘in his first uncertain years in Vienna’, had supposedly acknowledged the

‘defects, especially in terms of instrumentation and sonority’ of the original version. Jahnn

surmised that the new version came into being ‘progressively’ between 1782 and 1789 and

was given in Frankfurt in the latter year . . .

In 1965 Robert Münster was the first to establish that the newly discovered Brno manuscript

was the source for the Dresden one. He thought it ‘for the moment, probable’ that this version,

which in the meantime had been increasingly associated with performances in Prague, did

not stem from Mozart himself. Rudolph Angermüller and Dietrich Berke, who edited La finta

giardiniera for the NMA (1978), described the expanded Prague scoring, ‘however skilful

it may be in detail’ as of ‘extremely dubious’ authenticity. But Stefan Kunze cautioned

against drawing overhasty conclusions: ‘The expanded orchestral scoring, in particular, still

demands meticulous examination and should not be too quickly dismissed as inauthentic’

(Mozarts Opern, 1984). What we need now is not so much further source criticism, but rather

stylistic investigation of the Prague arrangement, on the lines pioneered by Hermann Abert.

12. W. A. Mozart. Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe . . . herausgegeben nach einer in Dresden aufbewahrten Handschrift aus der Bibliothek zu Oels von Karl

Schleifer (Hamburg and Berlin: 1956).

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