Bastien und Bastienne
K. 50 (46b)


Singspiel in einem Akt / in one act
Including an appendix with additional verse from the libretto and with prose texts and dialogues by Weiskern and Schachtner.
Vocal Score based on the Urtext of the New Mozart Edition by Eugen Epplée
BA 4590a




PREFACE (shortened)

The subject of Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne, K.50(46b), is closely related to Jean-Jacque Rousseau's intermède Le Devin du village and a parody of that work by Marie-Justine-Benoîte Favart, Charles-Simon Favart and Harny de Guerville entitled Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne. Premièred on 18 October 1752, Rousseau's Devin became one of the most successful operas in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris (the Opéra), where it was given more than 540 times by 1829. The possibility cannot be discounted that Mozart attended a performance of a work which, as far as the plot is concerned, formed the basis of his "German operetta" Bastien und Bastienne.

With this work Rousseau, true to his principles of naturalness, turned against the rhetorical pathos of the tragédie lyrique and the Italian art of opera buffa. His music aspired to and adopted the simple and natural ways of the pastoral life.
In September 1753, by which time Devin had been given thirty-three times at the Académie Royale, the Comédiens Italiens Ordinaires du Roi in Paris (the Comédie Italienne) mounted a parody of it with the title Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne, a joint creation of Monsieur and Madame Favart and Harny de Guerville.
Viennese audiences were familiar with Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne. It was played at Laxenburg on 16 June 1755, in Vienna on 5 July 1755, and went on the boards again in 1757, 1761 and 1763.
One figure active in Vienna during the years of Durazzo's directorship was the actor, translator and topographer Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern (1710-1768). The son of a quartermaster in Saxony, Weiskern had come to Vienna in 1734.
In 1764, probably at Durazzo's "command," Weiskern provided a translation of Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne. The monologues and dialogue are translated almost literally, whereas the arias and ensembles, being closely linked to the music, are handled with greater license. Although Weiskern was fairly accurate in his translation, he did not capture the nuances of the French original. As Weiskern tells us in his translation, all words enclosed in quotation marks are by Johann Müller, this being the actor Johann H. F. Müller (1738-1815) whom Durazzo had engaged in 1763, and who was thus responsible for numbers 11, 12 and 13. The Weiskern-Müller translation remained on the boards in Vienna's commercial theaters for many years.

It may have been Mozart who brought the Weiskern-Müller translation to the attention of the Salzburg court trumpeter Johann Andreas Schachtner (1731-1795), or perhaps vice versa. Schachtner, a close friend of the Mozarts (Leopold had been best man at his wedding), already had a number of literary successes to his credit by 1766. It is uncertain whether he wrote the words for Mozart's funeral music Wo bin ich, bittrer Schmerz (K.42) and the choral finale of Thamos, König in Ägypten (K.345), but he is known to have prepared the first German translation of Idomeneo. He also prepared a new version of Weiskern-Müller's Bastien.
His revision affected the following five areas:
- He versified Weiskern's prose but left untouched the sole passage in rhymed dialogue, no. 14 (see Appendix, p. 91).
- He adopted Weiskern's arias largely verbatim, making occasional improvements to avoid metrical infelicities.
- He expunged several obstacles to the meaning.
- He adapted his libretto to suit the situation on stage.
- He added Colas's magic incantation in no. 10.

All the recitatives that Mozart set to music were put into verse by Schachtner, as were all the dialogues, none of which appears in Mozart's setting. (Mozart may have added the recitatives at a later date, for the lost autograph score has Colas's recitatives in alto clef whereas the rest of the part is written in bass clef.) A comparison of Weiskern's, Müller's and Schachtner's arias and ensembles with Mozart's score reveals that nos. 1, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15 and 16 were taken from Weiskern, nos. 11 and 13 from Müller, and nos. 4 and 12 from Schachtner. Numbers 2, 5, 7 and 10 are a mixture of the Weiskern and Schachtner versions.
A close study of the Weiskern-Müller translation and Schachtner's libretto reveals that the genesis of Mozart's piece passed through the following stages (further information can be found in the critical report to the full score in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe):
1) Mozart began by setting Weiskern-Müller as it stood.
2) While working on the vocal numbers, he turned to Schachtner's revision (note nos. 4 and 12, which are based on Schachtner).
3) Having finished all the vocal numbers, he then reworked nos. 5, 7 and 10 from Weiskern to Schachtner.
4) For whatever reasons, he did not consistently observe Schachtner's alterations: nos. 1, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15 and 16 remained in the Weiskern version, while no. 13 retained Müller.
5) The surviving recitatives were, in all likelihood, composed later on the basis of Schachtner's verse libretto. In the absence of any source material, we have no way of knowing whether Mozart set the rest of Schachtner's versified dialogue. If he only composed those recitatives known today, then only some of Schachtner's dialogues were set to music.
6) Evidently Mozart did not compose the vocal numbers in the order in which they appear in the score, but one at a time. Nos. 4 and 12 seem to have originated after nos. 13 to 16.

Performances that do not wish to make use of the sung recitatives from Schachtner's libretto can avail themselves of Weiskern's spoken dialogue (see Appendix, p. 89). There is no way of knowing whether Weiskern's or Schachtner's dialogue was originally used, as none of the extant sources contains any dialogue. We may safely assume, however, that Weiskern's original, being the more natural of the two, was used in performance. It should also be borne in mind that the Weiskern-Müller translation had appeared in print, while Schachtner's version only existed in manuscript.
The first known performance of Bastien und Bastienne, sponsored by the Society of the Friends of Opera, took place at the Berlin Architects' Building on 2 October 1890, when this "operetta" (as Leopold Mozart called it) was presented alongside Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's Heimkehr aus der Fremde. In 1891 it was supplied with new text and dialogue by Max Kalbeck. Henry Gauthier-Villars and Georges Hartmann produced a French version in 1900, and Rainer Simons arranged the piece for the Vienna Volksoper in 1906. Carlo Rossi translated the Weiskern version for Venice in 1914; Schachtner's libretto was translated into English by Faixá, and into Flemish by Korneel Goosens in 1942. Bernhard Sännerstedt supplied a translation for Stockholm Radio in 1957, while the Weiskern version was given an English translation by Max Leavitt in 1962 and the piece was arranged for a production in Pennsylvania by Basil Swift in 1969.
Not being a full-length piece, Bastien und Bastienne is often presented in conjunction with other short operas. It is also a favorite at marionette theaters and on school stages.
Rudolph Angermüller
(translated by J. Bradford Robinson)