Klarinet Archive - Posting 000192.txt from 2001/03

From: Daniel Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Some really esoteric research!!
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 21:18:35 -0500

The things you find out when you are not even looking for them.

Dexter Edge, who is one of America's most important Mozart scholars and
whose specialty is the things you can find out by an examination of the
performance parts used by the orchestra players in the late 18th
century. A while back, Dexter found the very performance parts used
during the 1789 revision of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, in which all
changes to the opera were supposedly done by Mozart himself and he was
alive during this production of the opera.

>>From the clarinetist's point of view, the biggest change Mozart made to
the 1789 production came by way of him adding a remarkable aria, one for
which he requested two basset horns. The title of the aria is "Al
desio" and it is sung by the character Susanna.

It's not played very often though in last season's Metropolitan Opera
production of the work, they incorporated the aria especially for
Cecilia Bartoli. It got quite a bit of play in the press because it
had never been done at the Met as part of the opera, ever!

I had played the work several times but never in the context of the
opera itself, only as a stand alone aria in concert form. As for the
writing for the basset horns, the first part is interesting, but the 2nd
b.h. is absolutely dynamite! In my opinion, the 2nd b.h. part is
infinitely more interesting and far more difficult than the first part.
It quite something!!

Even Johannes Brahms commented on this aria when he heard the work for
the first and only time in his life, remarking that he finally had been
able to hear real basset horns (which were almost like the do-do bird at
that juncture of musical history).

The important thing that I'm going to talk about here is not that aria,
as smashing as it is. It's that Mozart may have written for basset
horns elsewhere in the 1789 production of Marriage of Figaro and, as far
as I know, this is absolutely NEW news.

What Edge mentioned to me was that the presence of basset horns for the
"Al Desio" aria, may have prompted Mozart to use the instruments
elsewhere since the players to execute any additional parts were present
anyway. And what is more, both "Al Desio" and the other aria both
appear in the same act.

The evidence for this assertion is found in those same 1789
performance parts. For that production, the 4th act aria sung by Figaro
and entitled, "Aprite un po," appears to have undergone a change from
the original 1784 production in terms of its instrumentation. In the
1784 production the parts included 2 clarinets. In the 1789 production
a pair of basset horns replace the clarinets!!

Now, as far as I know, this is absolutely revelatory information; i.e.,
that an attitude of "as long as I'm using basset horns for 'Al desio' in
the 4th act, I might as well use them elsewhere in the opera" is a very
new possibility.

Of course, in in the absence of material in Mozart's hand (the 1789
parts are in the hand of a professional copyist), one could argue that
it was someone else who changed the clarinets to basset horns for
"Aprite un po," though that's a stretch. We just don't know. But there
is also a problem with the use of basset horns at that juncture of the
opera.

The 1789 performance parts incorrectly specify the instruments as
being clarinets in B-flat, though the music only makes musical sense if
one presumes that the instruments playing those two musical lines are in
F!

I have no resolution to this matter and am acting only in a reporterial
capacity for the moment. It's all too new.

But the bottom line is this: in the 1784 production of Figaro, clarinets
are used in the aria "Aprite un po," (and that is confirmed in Mozart's
manuscript), whereas in the 1789 productions, basset horns are
implicitly indicated for the same aria (but without confirmation of this
in anything from Mozart's hand).

It's a real enigma. But it is also very exciting. It is the kind of
discovery that can take 10 years to establish anything firm.
--
***************************
** Dan Leeson **
** leeson0@-----.net **
***************************

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