The Jewel Box

An opera in two acts and an epilogue

Music by W.A. Mozart
Libretto by Paul Griffiths

Cast

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The story

An opera buffa begins with a quartet … and ends. The music stops, the characters disintegrate. Colombina, Pantalone, Pedrolino and the cynical Dottore, four characters from commedia dell’arte, no longer have the music which provides them with rôles and with life. The arrival of a young Composer might save them from this limbo, if he could be persuaded to write them a new opera, but his work is disrupted by a mounting passion for Colombina, to the dismay of the melancholic Pedrolino as much as the assertive and lustful Pantalone. And there is another woman in the Composer’s life, the mysterious Singer of Italian opera seria, his tragic muse. He is given a choice of books containing libretti for his new work: comic versus tragic. He must also choose between staying or leaving. Lingering, he begins composing, manipulating the desires and jealousies of the comedians, but this new opera is interrupted by the arrival of his Father, loving but overbearing, who clearly believes that the buffa world is unsuitable for his son’s talents and aspirations. Dottore claims the Composer for his own purposes. The Act ends with a stalemate of conflicting wills: “we must find how to go on”.

At the start of the second act, Pantalone tries to seize control and plans a new opera without the Composer’s help. The Composer refuses to obey his Father’s renewed commands to leave, as Pantalone moves in to impress Colombina, causing Pedrolino to kill himself. The reappearance of the Singer and the growing instability in this comic world persuade the Composer that it is indeed best to leave: his departure breaks Colombina’s heart and she also takes her life. Dottore sarcastically congratulates Pantalone on the outcome of his ‘opera’, but Pantalone’s heartfelt remorse enables the suicides to be resurrected. In a strange and embryonic new world, personalities and rôles are magically transformed: the Composer is reconciled with his Father, and is sent out by the Singer into a life of creative independence. Only Dottore is unable to be reborn….

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Musical sources

The Jewel Box has been compiled entirely from numbers completed by Mozart - pieces for operas he failed to finish (Lo sposo deluso and L'oca del Cairo), and also arias and ensembles he wrote for insertion in other people's operas. It is a comedy for seven characters: a quartet of stock comic types (Colombina - soprano, Pedrolino - lyric tenor, Dottore - character tenor, Pantalone - baritone) joined by the Composer (mezzo-soprano), the Singer (coloratura soprano) and the Father (bass)

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These the gems of Heav'n

The Jewel Box, a casket with many openings, has a whole history of beginnings, one of which can be precisely dated to March 12th, 1783. That was when Mozart wrote a letter telling his father about a pantomime, in which he had taken part as Harlequin, with his sister-in-law Aloysia Lange (a formidable singer and his first great love) as Columbine, her husband Joseph as Pierrot, a painter as the Doctor and ‘an old dancing master’ as Pantaloon. The music, which has long been lost, was his own—but not the words: ‘The verses’, he wrote, ‘might have been done better; I had nothing to do with them.’

That disclaimer, in as much as it applies to The Jewel Box, goes too far, for though Mozart died almost two centuries before this piece reached the stage, its libretto was guided and governed by what the music had to say. Indeed, its whole purpose was to restore to the theatre music that was written for the theatre: arias and ensembles Mozart composed either for Italian comedies he failed to finish or, following a common practice of the time, for insertion in such operas alongside music by other composers.

The first comic insert arias date from 1775-6, when Mozart was approaching twenty and living in Salzburg as one of the archbishop’s musicians. There was then a gap in his operatic output; meanwhile, he went on a long journey, staying in Mannheim during the winter of 1777-8. It was there that he fell in love with Aloysia Weber (as she then was) and rashly wrote to his father that he would travel penniless to Italy to write operas for her, to which his father’s response was that he should first make some money in Paris. Then in 1781 he left his family home and his Salzburg appointment to settle in Vienna. Idomeneo had recently been presented in Munich; The Abduction from the Seraglio, the next year, was his first Viennese opera.

Another year later, in 1783, he wrote three insert arias for The Indiscreet Inquirer by the popular composer Pasquale Anfossi: two for Lange, the other for the tenor Valentin Adamberger, who had starred in The Abduction. Probably also in that year Mozart began - but soon dropped - two Italian comedies of his own: The Deluded Husband and The Cairo Goose. Then, in the autumn of 1785, he set out on The Marriage of Figaro and also composed two ensembles for a local performance of Francesco Bianchi’s The Village Girl Ravished. During the next two years came the triumphs of Figaro and its successor, Don Giovanni, after which he made an aria for Francesco Albertarelli, who had created the title role in the latter opera in Vienna, to sing in another Anfossi piece, The Lucky Jealous Women. The last three insert arias came in 1789, for performances of operas by Domenico Cimarosa (The Two Barons of Rocca Azzurra) and Vicente Martín y Soler (The Goodhearted Grouch), the singer in each case being Louise Villeneuve, who was soon to be the first Dorabella in Così fan tutte.

So here were sixteen musical numbers whose contexts were either missing, where the unfinished operas are concerned, or filled with music by the also-rans much favoured at the Viennese court (Anfossi, Cimarosa, Martín y Soler). Many of these pieces do not work as concert items. The arias Mozart wrote specifically for concert performance are substantial movements, nearly always with an opening recitative in which the singer can both warm up and establish a reason for the outburst of feeling to come. Most of the insert arias are shorter and start straight off without musical and dramatic justification, which would have come from the original opera. The ensembles are even unlikelier concert repertory, besides which, this is all music written to be heard from the stage, sung not only by singers but by characters.

Hence The Jewel Box. There is good eighteenth-century precedent for assembling diverse arias into a new whole in the tradition of the pasticcio, defined in The New Grove as ‘a dramatic or sacred vocal work whose parts have been wholly or partly borrowed from existing works by various composers’. The same dictionary goes on to quote the librettist of an eighteenth-century pasticcio, saying that his aim has been to ‘combine in a certain scenic harmony and in an appropriate order those arias which were created and performed at other times, in other places and under different conditions, and which have been reintroduced with the sole purpose of renewing the pleasure which is to be had from them’. Here the other times are the whole of Mozart’s adult life, and the pleasure to be renewed is that of his music.

It was from the music that the cast of seven arose. Four male singers - two tenors, baritone and bass - were required for the two quartets, from The Deluded Husband and The Village Girl Ravished, while the tenor arias indicated contrasting types: a character singer and a lyric artist. Similarly, three different women were implied by the music: two for the very different arias Mozart wrote for Aloysia Lange (a coloratura soprano) and Louise Villeneuve (a high mezzo), together with a lyric soprano for the ensembles. In the interests of evenhandedness a couple more pieces were needed—especially for the bass, who otherwise would have had no arias.

The music partly defined the characters as well. The ensembles, which would have to involve all the men plus the lyric soprano, suggested comic archetypes - the very figures Mozart and his friends had enacted in that 1783 pantomime: the agile young lovers Harlequin and Colombine, the scheming Doctor and the foolish Pantaloon. Two singers - the ‘Aloysia soprano’ and the ‘Louise mezzo’ - stand apart from the ensembles, and so they stand apart on the dramatic plane, belonging to what we might call the ‘real world’. The coloratura soprano, singing arias written for Aloysia Lange, becomes the young composer’s erotico-musical dream, The Singer, while the mezzo is The Composer himself, recalling the cross-dressed Composer of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. On this same level of reality the bass - who is drawn into only one of the ensembles, and whose arias are serious - takes his place as The Father, intervening to recall The Composer to his higher mission. Some of the characters even gain some solidity from the music they have: besides the two whose repertory is that of particular singers, the Doctor, or Dottore, belongs in his two arias to Mozart’s earliest adult years, his lack of sophistication according with his cynical nature.

For practical reasons each singer’s arias would have to be well separated: this is challenging and often spectacular music, and one could not ask a singer to produce two tornados in quick succession. Then the ensembles - rather few for a Mozart comedy - would have to be spaced out in the interests of variety. A further constraint on the sequence came from the example of Figaro, where the keys of adjacent numbers are related by thirds or fifths. It was also Mozart’s practice to end an opera in the key of the overture: D major in this case, since an overture in D was part of the inheritance from The Deluded Husband.

Not much, then, needed to be invented. The overture leads into a quartet for the buffo characters, whereupon the music stops. To get it going again, the four comedians need to summon The Composer, and that is where the trouble starts.

Because the musical pieces are being placed in new situations, the words had to be changed, which provided some justification for the use of English. Some of the arias are translated pretty straightforwardly, but others, and all the ensembles, are more substantially transformed—though, again, always in response to the music. Exceptionally, because her arias suggest the ‘higher’ world of serious opera - the world Mozart as a young man had wanted to enter with Aloysia Lange - The Singer performs in an alien language, the original Italian. There were also practical reasons for this: coloratura lines fit Italian much better than they do English, and they virtually obliterate the words anyway.

Originally written as a jeu d’esprit, The Jewel Box was taken on by Nicholas Payne for performance by Opera North in the last Mozart year, 1991, and gained a lot from its director at that time, Francisco Negrin. For example, he wanted the buffo quartet on stage throughout, which meant that two of these characters, having sung arias of intense despondency, would have no recourse but to commit suicide in full view, and would then have to be resurrected. This seemingly bizarre turn of events, however, provided an excellent justification for the trio from The Deluded Husband, a wonderful piece on which the whole opera now turns. And there even came a kind of posthumous benediction. In that 1783 pantomime, according to Daniel Heartz in his book of essays on Mozart’s operas, ‘it may be presumed...that Harlequin comes back to life, after having been killed’. Mozart, himself resurrected after a fashion in The Jewel Box, might have found this new world not so strange.

Paul Griffiths

Cast - Synopsis - Musical sources
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