THE HISTORICALLY INSPIRED IMPROVISATION WORKSHOP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Since January 2009, the workshop has focussed on 18th-century opera buffa. We were intrigued by the notion of improvising music and dramatic action, and by exploring how the two interacted. A great improvisatory tradition lies at the heart of opera buffa: the commedia dell’arte, a form of unscripted theatre that was hugely popular throughout Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Many commedia dell’arte troupes consisted of itinerant families, each member of which would play a number of the stock character roles: Pantalone, Il dottore, Arlecchino, Pierò, and so on. These stock roles are easily discernible in the characterization and plots of opere buffe, particularly in those based on the plays of Carlo Goldoni, and their outlines are clear in all of Mozart’s comic operas.

It is suggestive that opera buffa was born in Naples, where there was not only a strong commedia dell’arte tradition but also an emphasis on musical improvisation through the realization of unfigured bass lines—or partimenti—throughout the orphanages where musical training was concentrated. As a confluence of music and stage action, then, opera buffa offers much potential for musical and theatrical improvisation.

To get started, we were looking for an “open” text, a piece of evidence that would serve both to orient and to disorient us, to give us something that we could get our teeth into and that in turn could get its teeth into us. In 1783, Mozart had planned to write a German opera based on Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni which featured the stock commedia dell’arte characters, but unfortunately his plans came to nothing. However, at around the same time he composed the music and devised the plot for a commedia dell’arte pantomime, to be performed by himself and his friends during Vienna’s 1783 Carnival season. The five-strong cast consisted of Mozart, who played Arlecchino (Harlequin), his sister-in-law Aloysia Lange (a soprano with whom Mozart had fallen in love before marrying her sister, Constanze) as Colombine, Aloysia’s husband Joseph Lange (who painted the famous portrait of Mozart above) as Pierò, the painter Josef Grassi as Il dottore, and an old dancing master, Merk, who played Pantalone and coached the ensemble.

The music was written for string quartet, but only the first violin part of Mozart’s score survives, along with the sketchiest outline of his scenario. (The remnants can be found in the Neue Mozart Ausgabe as Musik zu einer Faschingspantomime, K. 446 (416d).) We thought that these materials offered us the perfect basis for devising and improvising our own version of the pantomime.

What remains of Mozart’s music makes it clear that the pantomime, which was performed during the intermission of a public ball, was popular in tone, staying close to the bawdy origins of commedia dell’arte, so we tried to improvise in this spirit. (The results are sometimes reminiscent of Papageno’s character and music in Die Zauberflöte.) Majel Connery devised our dramatic realization and directed the workshop members in acting and movement, just as the dancing master Merk had done in Mozart’s case.

The photos on this page were taken during a performance of the pantomime in April 2009. It is forever a work and a play in progress that emerges differently every time; perhaps it’s fair to say that rather than trying to complete Mozart’s score, as others have done, we try to re-open its incompleteness. You can read the thoughts of Brian Dickie, general director of Chicago Opera Theatre, here and see Majel Connery’s perspective here.

In October 2009, our newly-christened performance ensemble Impromptu presented the pantomime in a new form at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and in November we will perform it once more at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia.