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Contemporary Prague copies of

La ﬁnta giardiniera

Milada Jonášová

It is well known that Prague has always displayed exceptional understanding of Mozart’s

output, from the composer’s own lifetime onwards. After the success of the singspiel Die

Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro provoked wild enthusiasm in the Bohemian

capital. The orchestra of the Prague opera house (the Estates Theatre) invited Mozart to visit

the city. He had never experienced anything like this before. So he duly travelled there in

January 1787 to conduct performances of Le nozze di Figaro and came back to Vienna with a

commission for a new opera, Don Giovanni, which he subsequently premiered in the city in

October 1787. Four years then elapsed before his next commission for Prague, La clemenza

di Tito, written for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia. This, the second of his

‘Prague operas’, was given its first performance, under his direction, in 1791.

But recent research has shown that the Bohemian capital also played a major role in the

diffusion of his works throughout Europe. So much is demonstrated not only by early copies

from Prague of such operatic scores as Don Giovanni (now held in Karlsruhe and Hamburg),

Idomeneo (Florence), Le nozze di Figaro (Berlin), Così fan tutte (Dresden), and La clemenza

di Tito (Zurich), but also by the case of La finta giardiniera. On 10 March 1796 this became

the eighth opera by Mozart that the Prague public had had a chance to discover, after earlier

local productions of Die Enführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così

fan tutte, La clemenza di Tito, Die Zauberflöte, and Der Schauspieldirektor.

Credit for this new initiative was essentially due to the leading double bass player Anton

Grams (1752-1820), a longstanding member of the orchestra of the Nostitz Theatre and

organiser of the most important copyists’ workshop in Prague. From 1795 until March 1797,

he was also at the head of the Czech ‘Patriotic Theatre’ known as ‘U Hybernů’ (‘Bei den

Hibernen’ in German), so called because it was located on the site of a former monastery of

Irish monks, where, as an experienced manager, he had earlier done much to arrange the

first Bohemian performance of Der Schauspieldirektor (27 April 1794).

Before the Prague premiere of La finta giardiniera, advertised as a ‘Mozartsche Novität’

(Mozartian novelty), the Prager Neue Zeitung announced that the Patriotic Theatre would

‘perform for the first time, on Thursday 10 March, a splendid opera by the immortal Herr

Wolfgang Amade Mozart, entitled Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe, which is bound to appeal to

every esteemed music-lover for its novelty and its rarity alike, since this masterpiece by the

unforgettable composer is the only one of his celebrated works that has never yet appeared

on any stage since it was written. One can therefore confidently predict the warmest welcome

for this previously unseen opera.’ It was doubtless for promotional reasons that the report

wrongly asserted that the work had never before been staged.

Because performances at the U Hybernů Theatre were sung in either German or Czech, but

not Italian, it follows from the passage quoted above that this Prague production of La finta

giardiniera was given in its German version, under the title Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe. As to

the printed libretto, the theatre posters, information on the interpreters, on subsequent

performances or critical reaction – nothing of that has survived, just as was the case for the

opera’s world premiere in Munich in 1775.

The first Prague production of this early Mozart opera buffa soon found significant echoes in

Moravia and Silesia. For a score of La finta giardiniera from Anton Grams’s copy shop came

into the hands of an enthusiastic music-lover, Count Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz (1770-1842),

and thus to the private theatre of his castle at Náměšť nad Oslavou in Moravia. Ever since

the Count, himself a good amateur violinist, had taken over the Náměšť estate in 1794,

his private musical productions had been his governing passion; his resident musicians

had already performed several works by Gluck before the Mozart opera. In later years it

would appear that the music of Handel enjoyed his greatest favour. The castle’s musical

establishment around 1830 was reportedly more than sixty strong. Mention should also be

made, among the rare pieces in Haugwitz’s impressive music library, of the autograph score

of Antonio Salieri’s Requiem, dedicated to the Moravian count and given its first performance

in the chapel of Náměšť Castle.

It was in this collection of 1400 works that a contemporary copy of the score of La finta

giardiniera was discovered in 1965, thanks to the research of the Munich musicologist Dr

Robert Münster. This is still the only known source that contains the original Italian text of all

three acts of the opera, including the secco recitatives of the first act, the autograph of which

has not come down to us. It was on the basis of this Náměšť source that the Neue Mozart

Ausgabe was able to publish the complete Italian version of the opera, the first edition to

contain its first act, in 1978. The editors wrote of the Náměšť score: ‘Its relationship to

the autograph manuscript is uncertain. We can be sure that this score, written towards the

end of the eighteenth century, was not copied directly from the autograph, which by that

time was already incomplete.’ Moreover, several numbers in the score include a German

text different from the translation used by Mozart for his singspiel version. This manuscript

is also of interest for its numerous variants in the music. Among the most obvious are the

frequent cuts in the arias. These cuts principally concern the instrumental introductions.

But surprisingly enough – and this is the most interesting feature of this copy of La finta

giardiniera – in many cases the orchestral accompaniment to the arias has been enriched by

newly composed wind parts for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and horns. Unfortunately,

the Náměšť material does not permit us to identify the composer of these additional parts,

despite painstaking comparisons with other local sources, the most important of which are

the surviving performance parts copied by anonymous local scribes and a copy of the Italian

libretto.

However, new information is provided by another Prague copy of the Giardiniera score,

originating from the musical archives of the castle of Oels in Silesia and today conserved

in the Landesbibliothek in Dresden. This is a singspiel version of the opera, with the text

in German only and without the recitatives; nevertheless, this score presents the same

modifications in the musical structure as its counterpart from Náměšť, that is, the same

cuts in certain arias and the same additional wind parts. Study of the paper type used and

of the copyist’s hand has demonstrated that the Oels score shares its provenance with the

Náměšť copy: both were produced in Prague, and more precisely in Grams’s copy shop. It

may be added that the new German translation of the libretto was also made in Prague. There

remains the question, for the moment still unanswered, of who among the many Prague

musicians was the composer of the added instrumental parts; but it may be assumed, in

view of their elegance and sensitivity, that he was a genuine connoisseur of Mozart’s style.

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