Prima la musica e poi le parole & Der Schauspieldirektor

Prima la musica e poi le parole

divertimento in one Act
Composer Antonio Salieri | libretto Giovanni Battista Casti

Der Schauspieldirektor

singspiel in one Act kv 486
Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | libretto Gottlieb Stephanie

Emperor Joseph II was partial to musical contests. In 1786 he decided to treat his court to a doublebill show intended to poke fun at the then most popular forms of stage music in Vienna: Italian opera and the German Singspiel. Mozart’s brief one-acter Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario) featured just five numbers, yet the brilliant overture, the contrapuntal and vocal virtuosity of the whole, were enough to reveal the mark of an operatic genius in the making. No less successful was Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole (First the Music, then the Words), which included both a caricature of Lorenzo Da Ponte as a shabby librettist and the show-stopping imitation of the starry castrato Luigi Marchesi by Nancy Storace, Mozart’s first Susanna soon later.

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