Sing­spiel in two acts K. 344 resp. 336b (1779/2005), frag­ment "Zaide";
the "Adama" part is com­posed by Chaya Czernow­in
Lib­retto: Jo­hann An­dreas Schacht­ner & Chaya Czernow­in

The frag­ment­ary nature and splen­did mu­sic of "Zaide" have long stim­u­lated en­ter­pris­ing artists to at­tempt com­ple­tions or col­lages to make the work per­form­able. For the Moz­art 22 pro­ject, Salzburg Fest­iv­al dir­ect­or Peter Ru­zicka com­mis­sioned the Is­raeli com­poser Chaya Czernow­in to pro­duce a new work that stage dir­ect­or Claus Guth would then in­terveave with the "Zaide" frag­ment. Czernow­in ap­proached her task with great rev­er­ence for Moz­art’s work. "Adama es­tab­lishes a coun­ter­point to Zaide’s plot," she says. "My con­tri­bu­tions to this new ‘com­plete work’ are not tra­di­tion­al arias, but of­ten frag­ments, mu­sic­al pieces that are cut in the middle. [...] Moz­art’s ex­cerpts al­tern­ate with ele­ments from Adama and some­times over­lap as well: then the two scores are al­most syn­chron­ized. In that sense, Adama is a mir­ror of Moz­art’s Zaide."

In "Zaide" we have two lov­ers, Zaide and Go­matz, held pris­on­er in a har­em in an ima­gin­ary past, some­where in the Middle East. In "Adama" we have two lov­ers, a Wo­man and a Man, caught in the ir­rec-on­cil­able re­li­gious and polit­ic­al con­flicts of today’s Middle East. Moz­art’s themes are im­pris­on­ment, doomed love, cul­ture clash and des­pot­ism; Czernow­in’s are the same, but trans­por­ted in­to our time. She tells of the love between an Is­raeli wo­man and a Palestrini­an man, a part­ner­ship doomed to faill in a world torn by vi­ol­ence.

Mo­jca Erd­mann, Zaide
Topi Le­htipuu, Go­matz
Jo­han Re­u­ter, Allazim
John Mark Ains­ley, Soli­man
Ren­ato Gir­o­lami, Os­min
Noa Fren­kel, Wo­man
Yaron Windmüller, Man
An­dreas Fisc­her, Fath­er
Paul Lorenger, Dan­cer
Bernd Grawert, Act­or

Ivor Bol­don, con­duct­or
Jo­hannes Kal­itzke, con­duct­or
Claus Guth, stage dir­ect­or
An­dreas Mo­rell, video dir­ect­or

Moz­ar­teum Or­ches­tra Salzburg
Aus­tri­an En­semble for New Mu­sic (OENM)
Ex­per­i­ment­al Stu­dio of the SWR Hein­rich Strobel Found­a­tion
Basle Mad­rig­al­ists

Re­cord­ing dates: 15.08.| 17.08.| 19.08.2006
Ven­ue: Salzbur­ger Landestheat­er.