Cabals and Satires: Mozart's Comic Operas in Vienna by Ian Woodfield (review)

In Cabals and Satires, Ian Woodfield accomplishes the equivalent of transforming a pencil sketch of a familiar character into a richly colored tableau with finely rendered secondary characters and myriad background details. As the subtitle suggests, Woodfield places Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's late operas, particularly Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, within the complex network of theater cabals and political deployments of musical forces that roiled through Vienna between 1786 and 1791. Partisan interests of the Italian and German opera factions and the way that the fortunes of the performers and composers associated with the government-subsidized troupes intersected and interfered with each other were remarkably fluid, and it took remarkable skills to navigate this scene with both reputation and pocketbook intact. The main characters in this tableau turn out to be Holy Roman Emperor (and Italian opera aficionado) Joseph II (1741–1790) and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799), a composer of German opera and canny satirist who convincingly replaces Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) as Mozart's main Viennese rival in this reading of events. Mozart and his chief collaborator, librettist and impresario Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), are upstage; with Figaro and Giovanni also at the fore, Così fan tutte (pp. 217–29, 238–39) and Die Zauberflöte (pp. 231–33) are cast in supporting and walk-on roles, respectively.

The prefatory section on sources provides a remarkable list of eighteenth-century journals referenced in the book (pp. xiii–xv) and informs, to the benefit of all Mozart scholars and those engaged in reception-history research, that all but a few of these have been digitized and can be accessed online. Considering the current state of affairs with social distancing and the necessary turn toward digital content and resources, this section is an incredibly timely (and generous) resource in itself. Throughout, we are offered extensive and varied contemporaneous periodical coverage of the Viennese opera scene, especially from cities outside the empire, where the focus was more on the fortunes and portents of organizational shuffling, than in the Viennese journals, primarily interested in the star performers.

The first chapter, "Intertroupe Rivalries: The Reception of Figaro," contextualizes the initially mixed reception that Mozart's beloved comic opera received. Mozart, a "German" composer with the popular Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail already a staple on stages, was, with Figaro, taking up the fight in the "Italian" corner and going head to head with Dittersdorf and his Doktor und Apotheker, performed by the German opera company. This 1786 contest, which we are encouraged to regard as the initiating incident in an ongoing rivalry, unfolds against the background of Joseph II alternately granting and revoking his support of the two companies, depending on which political factions he most needed to placate and which military campaigns the imperial coffers were called upon to fund.

"Dynastic Alliances: The Genesis of Don Giovanni" explores the extent to which various productions were dependent on royal patronage. The fortune of a new opera could be made if it were associated with marriage festivities, name-day celebrations, or other official occasions with the power to grant it special status and assure its repetition. Habsburg Court attendance (or non-attendance) at the theater could signal approval and success or disinterest and failure, and calculated preference for subject matter or language was a well-established method of turning cultural production into political capital.

Arguably the most entertaining chapter of the book, "Operatic Satire: Dittersdorf's Figaro" introduces a German-language version of the story that Mozart and Da Ponte had just launched through the Italian company. Although the music is lost, Woodfield makes good use of the extant libretto in explaining how this opera's parodic elements curried favor with Joseph II and poked fun at the original cast of Le nozze di Figaro and its composer. In this sendup, Michael...