Zaide - completing Mozart's unfinished opera
May to July 2009
Sadler's Wells and on national tour
The Classical Opera Company’s eagerly-awaited production of Mozart’s Zaide will be performed at Sadler’s Wells (5-9 May 2009; dates and number of performances to be confirmed), at the 2009 Buxton Festival and on tour during Spring and Summer 2009. This will be the world premiere of our new completed version.
Zaide is Mozart’s ‘lost’ operatic masterpiece. The composer began to write it in 1779, when he was a young man of twenty-three and desperate to escape the constraints of his life in Salzburg, but he put the work aside once he received the commission for Idomeneo. He subsequently asked for the manuscript of Zaide to be sent to him in Vienna, but he evidently feared that the work was too serious for Viennese tastes, and the score was left to gather dust. Although some 70 minutes of superb music survive, including the celebrated “Ruhe sanft”, both score and story are clearly incomplete; furthermore, although we know that the musical numbers were linked by spoken text rather than sung recitative, none of this text survives.
The Classical Opera Company has attracted widespread acclaim for the high quality of its casting, and the cast for Zaide will feature a characteristically exciting line-up of world-class young artists. The vibrant period instruments of the Orchestra of the Classical Opera Company will be conducted by the company’s artistic director, Ian Page.
The opera’s themes – tyranny, imprisonment, abuse of power and the power of love – are eternal ones, and we aim to create a piece of and for today which at the same time remains true to the spirit and legacy of Mozart. So much of contemporary art offers a ‘critique’ of humanity without proposing a more positive alternative; but Mozart, as Shakespeare did before him, was able to create a world which, despite the depth and acuteness of its pain and suffering, ultimately offers a compassionate, forgiving and uplifting vision of hope. The Classical Opera Company’s completion of Zaide promises to be one of the most exciting and innovative operatic highlights of 2009.
When love is just possession,
And lust becomes obsession,
The fruit dies on its vine,
And no-one drinks the wine.
(from Michael Symmons Roberts’ libretto for Zaide)
