PRAGUE (Agency) – Forget for a moment the popular stage play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, Miloš Forman masterfully led to the big screen in 1984. Mozart and Salieri were more friends than enemies. More colleagues rivals. It is well known that shared scene in Schönbrunn in 1786 for the premiere of Der Schauspieldirektor and Prima la musica e poi le parole, they agreed after Frankfurt in the coronation of Leopold II in 1791 and jointly attended a function of Die Zauberflöte in Vienna. The popular and romantic myth that portrays Amadeus came late in 1823, when a sick and demented Salieri poisoned Mozart confessed.
Now we can show that Mozart and Salieri even occasionally collaborated in 1785 together compose the same work. On January 10 the Schwäbische Zeitung made known the find in Prague a copy of the libretto and score of a memorial cantata for voice and accompaniment composed by Mozart with Salieri on verses by Lorenzo da Ponte. The Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the prestigious institution that promotes more than a century ago research on the life and work of the Salzburg composer, just give naturalization to this revealing finding, says El País of Spain.
In June 1785 the famous English soprano Nancy Storace, who later became the first Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart, suddenly lost his voice during the premiere of Gli sposi Malcontenti, his brother Stephan Storace, at the Burgtheater in Vienna. It takes four long months to sing again and forced it to postpone his Ophelia in the new opera by Salieri, La Grotta di Trophonius. The happy news of his recovery was held in October with a short cantata titled in Italian for the recovered health of Ophelia, which contributed three composers: Mozart, Salieri and one “Cornetti” (a pseudonym for being in italics, but perhaps also the Alessandro Cornetti singing teacher). The press of the time he fulfilled news of the composition and even print distribution by Artaria contained in Mozart catalog reference K.477a- 1937, but had never found any example of it.
The composer and musicologist Jouko Herrmann Timo (Heidelberg, Germany, 1978), specialist Salieri, has been responsible for the discovery in the library of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague. Herrmann acknowledges that it has been coincidental: “I was interested by simply consult the catalog of scripts that library Internet to search for works by a pupil of Salieri”. “I was glad to discover the libretto of the cantata lost, but when asked if I wanted the printed score, no I could not believe it,” he adds. The text referred to the cantata, which begins with the verse “Lascia the greggia, or Fillide” contains 30 stanzas and was written by the famous poet of the Viennese imperial court, Lorenzo da Ponte, librettist among other operas Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte by Mozart. Da Ponte tells here the story of the four months that the Storace was sick, though emulating the style of bucolic poetry Italian.
In addition to the script, the printer of the Viennese imperial court, Joseph von Kurzböck, exceptionally added a foldout pages with the music of Mozart, Salieri and Cornetti. This is a reduction in two staves for voice and accompaniment, it is likely that the work were originally written for soprano with various instruments. Specifically, the music of Mozart is limited to a 36-bar Andante which begins with the verse “Quell ‘agnelletto candid”. Already it planned an edition of this cantata in Leipzig publisher Friedrich Hofmeister to be presented at the Musikmesse Frankfurt in April. For its part, the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation announced an initial interpretation of the work next month in proper reconstruction is preparing its discoverer.
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