La finta semplice

The travellers came back to Salzburg early in 1769.

The trip had not been a financial profit, but Wolfgang was undoubtedly richer in experience and had added to his creative store the archbishop delighted them by ordering a performance of la finta semplice though he had no genuine opera buffa personnel at his disposal The leading soprano part of Rosina was sung by Maria Anna Haydn, Michael Haydn's wife.

The year was largely devoted to further study and composition, chiefly of Masses and other church music written at the command of the friendly Archbishop, and in addition of symphonies and other forms of entertainment music for garden parties, festivities and social functions of the high-placed and well-to-do and wolfgang was appointed concertmaster in the archiepiscopal orchestra italy and mozart's early operas leopold realized that the hour had now struck for that long-projected trip to italy which he wished to take before wolfgangerl reached the age and stature which would deprive his accomplishments of all that was marvellous plainly it would not do to let the boy outgrow his precocity and so on december thirteenth seventeen sixty nine father and son set out on an adventure that was to resolve itself into three separate journeys to what was rightly or wrongly esteemed as the home of music and of art in general the youth was now ripe for italy the language he absorbed by second nature as it were everywhere he made valuable new friendships and came across old acquaintances in milan he was commissioned to write an opera seria and the following october he composed mitridate re di which produced on December 26, 1770, amid cries of Viva il Mastrino, had twenty performances.

In Bologna he greatly impressed the Asian castrato Farinelli and the great Padre Martini, dean of Italian musicians.

At Naples he had to remove a ring from his finger upon playing to convince the superstitious that it was not the real explanation of his magic skill.

It is heartbreaking that Haydn was not able, as he would have loved to be, to secure a post for Mozart in England." Mozart had another encounter of a different sort at this period in Vienna, acquaintance with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Through the Baron von Schweden he had opportunity to know the scores of Bach and Händel, and later even to write for certain Händel oratorios, additional accompaniments for use in performances von Schweden was in the habit of giving on Sundays at the Imperial Library and in some private homes.

and the depth the grandeur and the polyphony of these masters he assimilated to the added greatness of his own mature works hoffner symphony with his concerts teaching clavier playing and miscellaneous composing mozart may well have felt as he remarked on one occasion that people sometimes expected impossibilities of me the hoffner family in salzburg for instance asked leopold to write a symphony for some family festivity to be ready in something like a fortnight wolfgang at that time up to his ears in a quantity of other schemes found the labour shifted to his own shoulders by his father who was otherwise busied somehow or other he contrived to turn out in a trifle over the appointed time it is true the work we now know as the hoffner symphony the excellent salzburg burgomaster siegmund hoffner appears to have been well pleased the composer himself instantly forgot the work and was astonished and delighted when a considerable time afterwards his father sent him the score he worked at several operatic projects but nothing lasting came of them not even of The Goose of Cairo, which contains charming passages, and which now and then people have attempted to revive.

Child prodigies, particularly in the world of classical music, are actually in pretty good supply.

But of even the handful of other child genius composers, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, etc., no one has ever written anything on the scale of La Finta Semplice.

But it really was Mozart who wrote it.

You can go to the University Library of Krakow in Poland and ask to see it.

above all it developed the ensemble where many characters sing at once and the music changes pace as the plot twists and not quite as widespread as opera seria and opera buffa was dramma giocoso in english roughly playful drama It was the Italian playwright Goldoni's term for an opera mixing buffa characters with one or two serious roles sung in a more elevated style.

It ended up working both ways, a drama with some comedy in it or a comedy with some drama in it, and it will come to be at the centre of Mozart's later operas.

But just to add some context, the first overture I played was from an opera buffa, La Finta Semplice.

The second one was loosely an opera seria, Ascanio in Alba.