Lo sposo deluso

• 1. Introduction

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  Lo sposo deluso sits in Mozart's catalogue as K. 430, a ghost of an opera. Mozart composed it in 1783 as a two-act comic work. Only a 20-minute fragment from the first act survives today. The full title announces its dramatic premise with considerable flair: The Deluded Bridegroom, or The Rivalry of Three Women for One Lover. Mozart had planned the opera for a seven-member Italian troupe performing in Vienna. What caused him to set it aside and never return?

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• 2. The Borrowed Libretto

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  Alessandra Campana's scholarship revealed a surprising origin for the libretto. Lorenzo Da Ponte had once been thought the likely author. Da Ponte was the poet who would later collaborate with Mozart on Le nozze di Figaro. Campana established that the text had in fact been written for a different composer entirely: Domenico Cimarosa. Cimarosa's opera using this libretto, Le donne rivali, premiered during the Rome carnival season of 1780.

  Neal Zaslaw identified a probable author for that original Italian text: Giuseppe Petrosellini, the house poet of Rome's Teatro Valle. The Teatro Valle was the theatre where Le donne rivali first appeared. Petrosellini had very likely also written the libretto for Mozart's earlier opera La finta giardiniera. For Lo sposo deluso, Mozart took the existing text and expanded its cast from five characters to seven, renaming all five of the original roles. The dramatic setting he placed in the adapted work was a seaside villa near Livorno.

  Before writing a note of music, Mozart fixed in place the precise cast of singers he intended for the work.

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• 3. The Figaro Cast

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  Francesco Benucci, a bass, was assigned the comic lead: Bocconio Papparelli, the rich but dim-witted bridegroom. Nancy Storace, a soprano, would play Eugenia, the young Roman noblewoman at the story's center. Stefano Mandini took the role of Don Asdrubale, the Tuscan army officer desired by all three women. The soprano Katherina Cavalieri was cast as Bettina, Papparelli's vain young niece. Francesco Bussani played Pulcherio, the misogynist friend of the bridegroom. Therese Teyber, a soprano, was assigned Metilde, a virtuoso singer and dancer and the third rival for Don Asdrubale's affections. The bass Signore Pugnetti took the role of Gervasio, Eugenia's tutor, who is himself in love with Metilde.

  Benucci became the first Figaro when Le nozze di Figaro premièred. Storace was the first Susanna. Mandini became the first Count Almaviva. Bussani became the first Bartolo. Both Mandini and Bussani had started their careers as tenors. By the time Le nozze di Figaro premièred, Mandini had transitioned to baritone and Bussani to bass. The singers Mozart gathered for an opera that never reached the stage would all appear together at the premiere of one that did.

  What music Mozart had sketched for these performers was left permanently incomplete.

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• 4. Composition in Fragments

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  Mozart sketched the musical numbers of Lo sposo deluso from the first act in no particular order. Only one number, a final trio, was fully orchestrated. The remaining pieces were worked out in concept but not brought to completion. The surviving fragment offers some sense of the opera Mozart had in mind.

  Five pieces remain. The overture begins in an upbeat, presto character before shifting into a more languid, pensive mood. The quartet, titled "Ah, ah che ridere," is sung by Pulcherio, Papparelli, Bettina, and Don Asdrubale. Two arias exist as fragments: "Nacqui all'aria trionfale," assigned to Eugenia, and "Dove mai trovar quel ciglio?" assigned to Pulcherio. The terzetto "Che accidenti" brings together Papparelli, Don Asdrubale, and Eugenia.

  The full draft went unpublished until November 1882, when it appeared as part of the Alte Mozart-Ausgabe. Gerhard Allroggen later edited and revised it for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, published in 1988. The question of why Mozart stopped where he did has no definitive answer.

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• 5. Why It Stopped

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  The difficulty of reworking the libretto for Viennese audiences was one factor Zaslaw identified. In 1785, Lorenzo Da Ponte finally delivered the libretto Mozart had been waiting for: Le nozze di Figaro. With that commissioned work now in hand, continuing to struggle with an adapted text may have lost its urgency.

  Musicologist Rudolph Angermüller has offered a second line of explanation. Lo sposo deluso had not been commissioned. Mozart had chosen the libretto himself, and no theatre was obligated to stage the result. Angermüller has proposed that Mozart eventually recognised the opera stood a slim chance of ever being performed.

  The score's first public airing, six years after Mozart's death, would fall to his widow to arrange.

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• 6. Prague, 1797

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  On the 15th of November 1797, the Estates Theatre in Prague held a concert with an unusual purpose at its center. Constanze Mozart, the composer's widow, had arranged for two numbers from Lo sposo deluso to be performed. Her aim was to mark the musical debut of Franz Xaver Mozart, the couple's youngest son. She selected the overture and the opening quartet for the occasion.

  Zaslaw proposes that one of Mozart's pupils, or another "member of his circle," handled the orchestration for these two pieces. The identity of the arrangers remains unknown. The Prague concert gave audiences their first known encounter with any part of the opera.

  Nearly two centuries after that evening in Prague, Lo sposo deluso would be reassembled into an entirely new theatrical frame.

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• 7. Reimagined for the Stage

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  In 1991, the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death, Opera North premièred a work called The Jewel Box. Paul Griffiths had devised it as a pasticcio opera. The production blended surviving pieces from Lo sposo deluso with music from another unfinished Mozart work, L'oca del Cairo. It also incorporated arias Mozart had written for insertion into operas by Anfossi, Piccini, and Cimarosa, among others. The frame presented the whole as an imagined reconstruction of a 1783 pantomime in which Mozart and Aloysia Weber are said to have taken part.

  The 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, in 2006, brought the fragment to multiple stages. Bampton Classical Opera revived The Jewel Box that year. The Salzburg Festival presented a double bill pairing Lo sposo deluso with L'oca del Cairo, under the title Rex tremendus. Joachim Schlöme conceived and staged the Salzburg production, with Michael Hofstetter conducting the Camerata Salzburg. That performance was preserved on DVD and released by Deutsche Grammophon.

  A studio recording made in 1975 features Ileana Cotrubaș as Bettina, with Sir Colin Davis conducting the London Symphony Orchestra for Philips Classics. A later recording by Raphaël Pichon conducting Pygmalion, released on Harmonia mundi, omits "Nacqui all'aria trionfale" entirely. Pierre-Henri Dutron arranged two of the remaining numbers for that production.

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