"Ruhe sanft," from Zaide, K. 344
For soprano with solo oboe, solo bassoon, and strings
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
Eight years after Mozart's death, his widow Constanze came across a mysterious manuscript written in Mozart's hand. It bore no title, but it appeared to be a sizable fragment of a work for the theater. Eventually, she sold it along with a number of other Mozart autograph manuscripts to the publisher Johann Anton André, who published the fragment in 1838, naming it Zaide after a principal character.
We now know that the incomplete work known as Zaide was written in the years 1779 to 1780. With the emperor Joseph II establishing a German-language opera company in Vienna, Mozart and his father saw an opportunity for the young composer to make an impression at court. They found a story about a Turkish harem, a seraglio -- Turkish stories and music then being all the rage in Vienna -- and asked a friend, Johann Andreas Schachtner, to adapt it as a German libretto. Mozart had completed about 80% of the opera -- approximately 70 minutes of music -- when he received a genuine commission from the court for a German opera. The emperor was, for unknown reasons, not interested in Zaide but commissioned a new libretto on more or less the same subject. Mozart accordingly abandoned his work on Zaide and wrote his well-known opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) on the new libretto.
Although he had completed the greater part of the music for Zaide, the manuscript had no overture, no finale and significantly, none of the spoken dialogue that is characteristic of German opera. Without dialogue between the arias, it is difficult to reconstruct the details of the story. Sadly the dialogue has been lost, but the beautiful music that survives shows Mozart as a mature artist, one who has grown beyond the level of his previous opera, Il re pastore. Had it been completed, it would in all likelihood have been a superb work on the level of Die Entführung.
The sublime aria "Ruhe sanft" is sung by the sultan's European slave Zaide, who, having fallen in love with the slave Gomatz, leaves her portrait on his lap while he is sleeping.
Boston Baroque Performances
"Ruhe sanft," from Zaide, K. 344
October 25 & 27, 2019
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloist:
Amanda Forsythe, soprano