K. 588 Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (Thus Do They All, or The School for Lovers),

An Italian-language opera buffa in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed on 26 January 1790, at the Wiener Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who also wrote Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Although it is commonly held that Così fan tutte was written and composed at the suggestion of the Emperor Joseph II, recent research does not support this idea. There is evidence that Mozart's contemporary Antonio Salieri tried to set the libretto but left it unfinished. In 1994, John Rice uncovered two terzetti by Salieri in the Austrian National Library. The title, Così fan tutte, literally means "Thus do all [women]" and is popularly used to mean "Women are like that". The words are sung by the three men in act 2, scene 13, just before the finale. Da Ponte had used the line "Così fan tutte le belle" earlier in Le nozze di Figaro (in act 1, scene 7)

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VIDEO: Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte will be performed by The Atlanta Opera in April, 2011 at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. The will be the third and final production of The Atlanta Opera's 2010-2011 season.

 

K 344 Zaide (originally, Das Serail) is an unfinished opera, written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1780.

Emperor Joseph II, in 1778, was in the process of setting up an opera company for the purpose of performing German opera. One condition required of the composer to join this company was that he should write a comic opera. At Salzburg in 1779 Mozart began work on a new opera (now known as Zaide although Mozart did not give it such a title). It contains spoken dialogue, which also classifies it as a Singspiel (literally, "singing play"). Only the arias and ensembles from the first two acts were composed. Missing are an overture and third act. It was popular at the time for operas to depict the rescue of enslaved Westerners from Muslim courts, since Muslim pirates were preying on Mediterranean shipping, particularly to obtain slaves for various purposes. This story portrays Zaide's effort to save her beloved, Gomatz. Mozart was composing for a German libretto by Johann Andreas Schachtner, set in Turkey, which was the scene of his next, completed rescue Singspiel (Die Entführung aus dem Serail). He soon abandoned Zaide, to work on Idomeneo, and never returned to the project. The work was lost until after his death, when Constanze Mozart, his wife, found it in his scattered manuscripts in 1799. The fragments wouldn't be published until 1838, and its first performance was held in Frankfurt on January 27, 1866, the 110th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Zaide has since been said to be the foundations of a masterpiece, and received critical acclaim. The tender soprano air, "Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben" is the only number that might be called moderately familiar. WIKIPEDIA



VIDEO: Queen City Chamber Opera (QueenCityChamberOpera.org) Recorded January 26, 2013