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Mozart. ...improvise!
Sezione 1
Sezione 2
From Figaro to Joy
PRAGUE, Bretfeld Palace. 1786
PLAY ME
I worked, in collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte,
on one of my most famous operas: The Marriage of Figaro.
Although the first performance of the opera took place in Vienna, it was only in Prague that it experienced its first real triumph. They understood it there! Not like those inept people in Vienna! They staged it in an Italian theatre and I must say that
I liked what they did with it.This time I arrived in the Bohemian capital, accompanied by the bright star that was my wife Constanze. I could see for myself how much my opera was really revered! The music was also played in the ballrooms, as I recounted in
a lively letter to a Viennese friend of mine: <<At six o'clock I went with Count Canal to the so-called Bretfeld ball, where the cream of Prague's beauties usually gather. I did not dance and I did not eat. The first because I was tired and the second because of my innate stupidity. It is certainly a great honour for me >>. And I was happy!
I did, however, watch with great pleasure all these people jumping around me, full of genuine gaiety, to the notes of my Figaro, transformed into contradances and allemande. They talk of nothing else but my opera! Nothing else is played, sung and whistled! There is no other opera to be seen but Figaro, and always Figaro.
Sezione 3
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