Mozart on the Stage (review)

"The stage held up to the audience a kind of mirror" (p. 29): on page 170 of John A. Rice's Mozart on the Stage is a reproduction of a longitudinal cross-section of the Cuvilliés Theater in Munich that shows the seating of various classes, the placement of an actor onstage, the slope of parterre, and below it all, the mechanical devices (winches and levers) that could raise or level the floor. Also a cross section of society, this illustration could be a synecdoche of the world of Mozart's operas that Rice depicts in his book, as well as the manner in which he does so.

A volume in the Cambridge series "Composers on the Stage," the mission of which is to introduce readers to operas within their social contexts, Mozart on the Stage shows us the structure of this world from many varied perspectives: we witness what the mirror of the stage would have reflected, as well as what happened behind the scenery, in the financial office, in the royal box, in the orchestra, in the rehearsal rooms and more.

The organization of the book, like the image of the theater in cross section, gives us a new way to view and connect many of the details of this period that have already been presented in the numerous works available on Mozart's life and works. As the author writes,

I propose what anthropologists might call a "synchronic" study of Mozart as a composer of operas: a book organized not chronologically or by individual operas, but by topics as relevant to the early operas as to the late ones. . . . This book shows how Mozart—whether he was thirteen or thirty, in Milan or Vienna, writing a Singspiel or an opera buffa—put an opera together in a series of interactions with a libretto (and sometimes—but not always—a poet who wrote or revised the libretto), singers, a stage designer, an orchestra, and an audience.

(p. xiii)

By taking this fresh perspective and examining even familiar material within new non-traditional categories, some surprising information jumps to the foreground about Mozart himself and the society in which he lived and worked. For instance, many educated opera lovers would not know that Carnival balls often took place in the theaters, with dancing on stage as well as in the auditoria, whose floors could often be raised (p. 23), or that the audience members who came to operas given during Carnival were costumed, masked and even cross-dressed just like the opera seria performers on the stage itself (p. 27). It too may have escaped attention that the composition of recitatives was sometimes relegated to assistants (p. 96), or that an avid operagoer could spend most of his time in the theater in amorous pursuits or trading gossip while the opera was on stage (pp. 205–12).

We are told as well that Mozart was so imbued with the operatic spirit that he liked to "speak" in recitative to friends, even in public (p. 2), and that he performed a commedia dell'arte sketch during a Carnival ball in Vienna in 1783 (p. 3). Other surprises may include Mozart's composing in a less than supernatural manner by using the keyboard, writing sketches, etc. (pp. 92– 94), requesting the dinner scene in Don Giovanni to be performed "parlando and almost improvised" (according to the first Giovanni, Luigi Bassi, p. 156), being sent an unsolicited libretto by novelist and playwright Isabelle de Charrière (p. 39), and getting the idea for the start of the "Pa-pa-pa" duet in Die Zauberflöte from librettist Emanuel Schikaneder (p. 152).

None of this information derives from original research, but the novel presentation by topic reveals it in a new way. Another effect of this organization is the problematization of traditional modes of sorting Mozart's oeuvre. Rice sees opera seria and opera buffa as points along...