Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756-1791) Scena, “Ch`io mi scordi di te

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756-1791)
Scena, “Ch’io mi scordi di te,” with Rondo, “Non temer, amato bene,”
for soprano and orchestra with piano obbligato, K.505
First performance: February 23, 1787, Vienna, Nancy Storace, soprano. W.A. Mozart, piano (Mozart
having entered the piece into his personal catalogue on December 27, 1786). First BSO (and first
Tanglewood) performance: July 11, 1964, Erich Leinsdorf cond., Helen Boatwright, soprano, Malcolm
Frager, piano. Most recent Tanglewood performance: August 9, 2008, Hans Graf cond., Andrea Rost,
soprano, André Previn, piano.
“Für Mselle Storace und mich” says Mozart’s own catalogue entry. Mselle Storace, baptized Anna Selina
and called Nancy, was an Italian-English soprano nine years younger than Mozart. Her father, born in Torre
Annunziata near Naples, was a bass player who spent most of his working life in Dublin and London,
where he was a good friend of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Nancy studied with the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, for whom the barely seventeen-year-old Mozart had
written his motet Exsultate, jubilate with its famous Alleluia. In her teens, she sang leading roles in
Florence, Parma, and Milan, and from 1783 to 1787 she was prima donna in Vienna. There she was briefly
and disastrously married to John Abraham Fisher, an English composer much her senior, who, according to
the entertaining memoirs of Michael Kelley, the Irish tenor who was the first Don Basilio and Don Curzio
in Figaro, achieved his courtship “by dint of perseverance...and drinking tea with her mother.” Emperor
Joseph II, who may have had designs of his own on Nancy, saw to it that Fisher was run out of town.
Nancy, too, was in the original Figaro cast, as Susanna. By all accounts she was wonderful, and a lot of the
stage shenanigans must have had a familiar ring for her.
Otto Jahn suggested in his groundbreaking Mozart biography of 1856-59 that the composer was in love
with his Susanna, an idea given renewed currency ninety years later in Alfred Einstein’s still much read
Mozart. There is nothing positive to tell us that this was so, certainly nothing to point toward the romantic
and the sexual, though the friendship, which included Nancy’s composer brother Stephen, was very warm.
At the same time, I do not doubt that Mozart loved her in another sense. Susanna, a young woman
fabulously endowed with brains, heart, humor, and sexuality, is the richest operatic role Mozart ever
created, and he cannot have been emotionally unaffected by an artist who realized it to perfection.
Nancy Storace was not a beautiful woman, neither did she have a notably beautiful voice. What she had,
along with perfect command over her resources, was brains, heart, humor, sexuality, also that quality the
Italians call “prontezza,” literally “readiness,” alertness, quickness of response. She had imagination, she
was alive. This scene and aria was Mozart’s contribution to her farewell concert from Vienna, the farewell
of an artist who had touched him deeply and to whom he wanted to offer a testimonial. It is in every way a
special piece, most obviously by being in fact a duet or double concerto, with one of the roles being
designed for the composer-pianist himself. His choice of text—“I, forget you?”—was not haphazard.
Storace is usually referred to as a soprano; Susanna, her role, is most often sung by sopranos. But the
writing both here and in Figaro suggests that she was more what we might call a very light mezzo-soprano.
Neither assignment takes the singer very high (it was discovered years ago that some of the soprano lines in
the Act II finale of Figaro were reversed in the printed scores, and the high C’s really belong to the
Countess); both ask for a low range with considerable flesh on it.
Mozart had already set the aria—but not the poignant recitative—earlier in 1786, more coolly and with
violin obbligato, for insertion in a private performance of Idomeneo: the Köchel number is 490. The
situation is this: Idamante, son of Idomeneo, King of Crete, and Ilia, daughter of King Priam of Troy and a
captive of Idomeneo, are in love. Idamante is also loved by the Princess Elektra, and Ilia mistakenly
believes this feeling to be returned. The recitative and aria are Idamante’s response to Ilia’s offer to
renounce him.
MICHAEL STEINBERG
Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after
that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published
three compilation volumes of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for
chorus and orchestra.
“Ch’io mi scordi di te...Non temer, amato bene,” K.505
Ch’io mi scordi di te?
You want me to forget you?
Che a lui mi doni puoi
You can counsel me to give myself
consigliarmi?
to her?
E puoi voler che in vita...
And can you wish that, while I live—
Ah no.
Ah, no.
Sarebbe il viver mio di morte assai
peggior.
Venga la morte, intrepida l’attendo.
Ma, ch’io possa struggermi ad altra
face,
ad altr’oggetto donar gl’affetti miei,
come tentarlo?
Ah! di dolor morrei.
My life would then be far worse than
death.
Let death come, boldly I’ll await it.
But that I might melt at another
flame,
lavish my affection on another,
how could I do such a thing?
Ah! I’d die of grief.
Non temer, amato bene,
per te sempre il cor sarà.
Più non reggo a tante pene,
l’alma mia mancando va.
Tu sospiri? o duol funesto!
Pensa almen, che istante è questo!
Non mi posso, oh Dio! spiegar.
Stelle barbare, stelle spietate!
Perchè mai tanto rigor?
Alme belle, che vedete
le mie pene in tal momento,
dite voi, s’egual tormento
puó soffrir un fido cor?
ANONYMOUS
Fear not, my beloved,
My heart will always be yours.
No longer can I bear such pains,
My spirit is failing.
You sigh? oh, mournful sorrow!
Think, at least, what moment this is!
Oh my God, I cannot express myself.
Barbarous, pitiless stars!
Why such harshness?
Fair spirits that behold
my pains at such a moment,
tell me if a faithful heart
can suffer such torment?
tr. STEVEN LEDBETTER