The great Italian composer Gioachino Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and presented eight different operas in the space of just a few weeks. The audience went wild for his Italian opera buffa, comic presentations that feature characters from everyday life. His Barber of Seville is one of the finest examples of the style.
wo years before, Franz Schubert had made a foray into the world of full-blown musical drama. He had staged two of his own, without any great success.
Rossini’s reception convinced him he should try again. Schubert’s large-scale orchestral compositions weren’t getting any kind of a look in because of the popularity of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Writing for the theatre, he thought, might prove the pathway to increased fame and, more importantly, fortune.
Now, of all that Schubert wrote — symphonies, songs, chamber music, church music — you won’t find an opera, and there’s a very good reason why. He was most unfortunate in his choice of collaborators. The dramatic action — the book — that was teamed with his score never lived up to its quality.
Take the case of Rosamunde, not an opera, but a play for which he wrote the incidental music. The writer was a lady by the name of Helmina von Chézy.
Schubert should have known better. She had already had one significant disaster when the weak storyline she provided for Euryanthe, an opera by Carl Maria von Weber, led to its closure after only 20 performances.
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Rosamunde was worse. This crackpot tale of a Cypriot princess, that veered off into all manner of unlikely flights of fancy, was up against it from the start, with audiences demanding more of the down-to-earth comedy that Rossini had provided when he came calling. It was pulled after only two shows.
But the music has lived on. Much like Georges Bizet’s L’Arlésienne suite half a century later which is still a much-loved staple of the repertoire while the play that it adorned has long been forgotten, Schubert’s music for Rosamunde is as fresh today as it must have sounded when first heard.
There is an overture and 10 individual pieces — three interludes, three choruses, two ballets, a solo for soprano and a sextet for woodwind and brass.
It’s mostly the overture that’s heard these days. Ironically enough, it wasn’t written for Rosamunde at all. Under pressure to get his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin finished between bouts of illness, he had only three weeks to complete the score, which wasn’t enough to work on the complexities of an overture.
So he borrowed something he’d written earlier, for an opera called Alfonso and Estrella (no, I’d never heard of it either), and later replaced it with the piece that’s now known as the Rosamunde Overture which originally featured in a theatrical fantasy with the title, The Magic Harp.
Snatches of the Rosamunde music appear elsewhere — in the slow movement of the String Quartet in A minor, for example, and a set of piano variations. Once he found a good tune, Schubert was happy to use it again and again.
George Hamilton presents ‘The Hamilton Scores’ on RTÉ lyric fm from 10am each Saturday and Sunday.