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A newly discovered accompanied recitative to Mozart's ‘Vado, ma dove’, K.583

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2001

Abstract

The recitative is found in the original conducting score of Martin y Soler’s opera Il burbero di buon cuore, held by the Austrian National Library. While no autograph of the accompagnato survives that would unequivocably identify it as Mozart’s composition, the evidence strongly points to that conclusion. Motivically tight and well-crafted, the accompagnato continues the process of reworking borrowed material observable in K.583 as well as its companion aria ‘Chi sa, chi sa qual sia’ K.582. In the conducting score, the accompagnato is written on the same inserted gathering as K.583 and in the same hand. Even more compellingly, the aria begins on the reverse side of the page on which the accompagnato ends. The aria is labelled by the copyist as ‘del sigr. Mozart’; the recitative, not surprisingly, is not separately identified.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Editorial Note. The authorship of the accompanied recitative preceding Mozart's substitution aria ‘Vado, ma dove’ is not definitively resolvable in the absence of authentic materials. It has also received more public attention than musicological matters normally do. In the next two issues of COJ we present several views of this matter. Below, we include an essay by Dorothea Link and a response by Laurel Zeiss. A future issue will include an essay by Dexter Edge, putting this recitative and Mozart's insertions in Guglielmi's La quacquera spirituosa in the context of both Mozart's compositional procedures and the practices of the Burgtheater's copying establishment. The editor thanks all three scholars for participating in this discussion.