Bastien und Bastienne: The Libretto, Its Derivation, and Mozart's Text-Setting

Abstract

A s the young Mozart crisscrossed Europe in the 176os demonstrating his prodigious performing talents to the European nobility, the text that would become the libretto for his first German opera, Bastien und Bastienne (KV 50/46b), was also following 520 a circuitous route to its eventual setting by the twelve-year-old composer. The text was first written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris for his intermede, Le devin du village. It then found its way into the Comedie Italienne, where it was revised into a parody of Rousseau's original. The parody was then picked up in Vienna, translated and adapted into a German comedy for the Karntnertor Theater. Several years later Mozart set this Viennese version to music, but a final overlay of revision was subsequently applied to the text by the Salzburg trumpeter Johann Andreas Schachtner, with some of the changes adapted by Mozart into his setting.' Conceived of initially as a French intermezzo, reworked by adherents of the Parisian and Viennese comic traditions, and receiving its final contours from a court musician who most likely took suggestions from the Mozarts themselves, the text by the end of its journey was a distinctive interfusion of many operatic traditions. Volume VIII * Number 4 * Fall 1990 The Journal of Musicology ? 1990 by the Regents of the University of California