2024-09-12 15:12:38
America has not invented everything that helps create happiness. Singspiel was performed in Vienna in 1790. Performance on September 11th Freihaustheatre on Wieden, a comedy stage in the middle of what today would be called a social project, on what was then the outskirts of the city.
“The Philosopher’s Stone or the Magic Island”. A fantasy story that is very popular in middle-class circles. With a dangerous and evil tiger and good spirits, on a magical island far away from Arcadia, with love and enemy brother gods.
The author’s name is on the poster. Like Peter Jackson and Roland Emmerich today – Emanuel Schikaneder, impresario, singer, actor, producer, actor, jack-of-all-trades of the theater. One was found for the producer’s name. What surprised everyone when the American composer David J. Buch saw the score of the piece in Hamburg in 1996.
“The Philosopher’s Stone” owes its existence – a way of working that was not rare then and was created long before the production of multi-part films for the hungry streaming industry – to the collaboration of creative people in a writer’s room . Five producers were sitting in the back of the room Schikaneders Theater with wine and coffee, wrote Arias for each other and have to do it.
Johann Baptisti Henneberg, Franz Xaver Gerl, Benedikt Schack, Emanuel Schikaneder. The musician of the review, which ended up being a good two hours, the one who is considered responsible for making the “Philosopher’s Stone” sound as if a composer had been honed, is already famous, whose name is Someone the only one that is more than three numbers of the score by David J. Buch is a man who has a hard time in the market for musicians, which is now free and free from feudal labor relations. – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
What they don’t know is that the group met in this writer’s room and returned to the Schikaneder stage a year later and entered the music history books with the most successful opera of all time. After the success of “Magic Island”, Schikaneder immediately put together a libretto based on reasons from Christoph Martin Wieland’s recently published magical fairy tales “Dschinnistan” – a book with an almost Tolkienesque influence on the fantasy culture of the time the first classic.
Why a snake, not a tiger?
Equally abstruse, less silly, more enlightening, more surprising even. One thing that may not have existed without success and beauty warming is the Writer’s Room. And that is full of secret strings attached to the “Philosopher’s Stone”. And because Schikaneder had previously released the tiger that was actually intended in Wieland’s “Lulu or The Magic Flute” on their magical island, Prince Tamino now has to protect a large snake in “The Magic Flute”, which impresses even the biggest on the musical theater people who were hungry for the spectacle.
On September 30, 1791, Schikaneder was the first Papageno, Schack first Tamino, Gerl first Sarastro, Henneberg led the rehearsals and performed when Mozart did not. Two months later he died, Schikaneder died poor and destitute in Vienna in 1812.
The “Magic Flute” has been played frequently and internationally since its debut. “Magic Island” disappeared from the schedules around 1814 after a career with a very good distinction. Mozart’s cat duet survived from two hours of music until David J. Buch was discovered and the records and works that followed quickly (where the funniest meow in the history of music has come to not be noticed at all).
Since Buch’s publication, another score has been published that was taken to Russia after the Second World War and thanks to which we know who wrote such numbers. The conversation ended. What Rüdiger Lotter, the Court Orchestra of Munich and a concert, the orchestra has now recorded for the German Harmonia Mundi is very close to the original version.
The uniform tone of the amazing music makes you suspect – as the brochure points out – but also. If this tune is due to the brilliant showrunner Mozart’s script editing, couldn’t it be that the help of the writers’ roommates was not limited to the music at the beginning of The Magic Flute? Is The Magic Flute still a compilation? What we know is the end of Lotter’s virtuoso theater: “The Philosopher’s Stone” is a lot of fun.
#Magical #operas #Mozart #philosophers #stone #Vienna