"From eleven years of age, when he wrote his first work for the theatre, until twenty-four, when he received the commission for Idomeneo, Mozart composed a German Singspiel and part of a second one, two Italian opere buffe, five Italian opere serie, a comedy in Latin, an act of a sacred drama in German, and the incidental music for a German play. It is these twelve works, and the musical and social setting in which they were created, which Carolyn Gianturco examines in this study. Dr Gianturco approaches each piece from the several points of view significant to its understanding: biographical, so far as the young Mozart himself was concerned; patronage, without which there could have been no such works; the libretti, the individual singers and the musicians through whom the music was realised; and the music itself, which Dr Gianturco analyses in detail with the help of numerous musical examples. For many years Mozart's early theatrical compositions were thought interesting only as a prelude to the five masterpieces of his maturity. More recently Bastien und Bastienne, Lucio Silla, La finta giardiniera, Il re pastore and Zaide, for instance, have come to be valued for their own sake. Carolyn Gianturco's book has the great merit of showing how Mozart's early experiments in harmony, form, rhythm, instrumentation and counterpart were to give him the technical means to create true dramma in musica. Together with Mozart's participation in it, her study also sheds new light on the world of eighteenth-century opera in general. In order to write this book Carolyn Gianturco worked from original sources in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek (East Berlin), the Staatsbibliothek Preussiche Kulturbesitz (West Berlin), the British Library, the Santa Cecilia Library in Rome, the Göttingen University Library, and the Windsor Castle Library."--Dust jacket.
來源: Google Book