THE STOLEN ORANGE or MOZART TRAVELLING TO PRAGUE
based on the tale by Eduard Mörike
text and narrative voice by Sandro Cappelletto
music premiere by Claudio Scannavini
commission Festival delle Nazioni
Hoffmann Trio
Inesa Baltatescu violin, Giovanni Landini cello, Marta Ceretta piano
Giulia De Blasis soprano
For the great germanist Ladislao Mittner, Eduard Mörike’s novella Mozart travelling to Prague was “without doubt the most beautiful of the German nineteenth century literature.” It was published in 1856 on the first centenary of Mozart’s birth, it “reaches a perfect balance between elegance and anxiety, sociability and interior loneliness, love for life and inexorable omen of death” (Claudio Magris). Wolfgang and Costanze must reach Prague for the Don Giovanni premiere.
In a hot afternoon they stop at a inn, he needs to take a stroll and gets lost in the wood. He is thirsty, sees a tree, stretches his arm to take an orange and drinks its juice. In that same moment a melody comes back to his mind, something he had listened to years before , during a boat excursion in the bay of Naples, during a so festive and so erotic naval battle among teenagers. And later it’s a bliss: a surreal evening and night, suspended, beyond the incumbent passing of time, while glances, passions and premonitions meet. Music and words “you will stop laughing before dawn”: the Commander’s menace glooms. Wolfgang and Costanze must leave, there is no more time. From the terrace of the castle where they lodged everybody is looking at the carriage of the bride and the groom. They all keep on looking until all the dust settles. The bliss is over. Mozart goes towards his fate.
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