(The Philosopher's Stone, or The Enchanted Isle)

Singspiel in two acts

Music attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Baptist Henneberg,
Benedikt Schack, Franz Xaver Gerl and Emanuel Schikaneder

Libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder

 First performance:  Theater an der Wieden, Jan. 11, 1790
Modern-day premiere:  Boston Baroque, 1998
First recording:  Boston Baroque (Telarc), 1999

Cast, in order of appearance:
Sadik, ruler of Arcadian land (tenor)
Nadine, his daughter, in love with Nadir (soprano)
Nadir, his step-son, in love with Nadine (tenor)
Lubano, grounds keeper for Sadik, husband of Lubinara (bass)
Lubanara, wife of Lubano (soprano)
Genie, messenger of Astromonte (soprano)
Four maidens (sopranos)
Eutifronte, evil god of the underworld (bass)
Astromonte, beneficent god, brother of Eutifronte (tenor)
Choruses of shepherds and shepherdesses, hunters, and demons

Orchestra:  
2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 
2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, and strings

Program Notes by Martin Pearlman

When the American musicologist David Buch announced in 1997 that he had discovered Mozart's name on portions of an opera manuscript in a Hamburg library, the news made the front page of The New York Times and headlines throughout the musical world.  Any new music by Mozart is an extraordinary gift, but previously unknown music from late in his life--in this case, from his second to last year--is extremely rare and unexpected. 

Scholars had previously known that The Magic Flute was only one of several fairy-tale operas commissioned by Emanuel Schikaneder for his Theater auf der Wieden.  In 1790, one year before The Magic Flute, Schikaneder presented Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosopher's Stone), an opera which many believed contained a duet that was either composed or orchestrated by Mozart.  There is a version of the duet in his handwriting, but the only surviving copies of the complete opera told nothing about the authorship of the duet or any of the other numbers.  Then in 1991, a new manuscript became available, when Russia returned a collection of manuscripts which the Soviet army had taken from Germany at the end of World War II.  It was in this manuscript that Professor Buch discovered that almost every number in the opera bore the name of a composer, written in the hand of one of the copyists.

To everyone's surprise, the words "von Mozart" appeared not only on the one duet, but also on two previously unsuspected sections of the second act finale.  Inevitably this led to discussion and debate in musicological circles about whether Mozart was truly the composer of the three sections attributed to him and, indeed, whether his participation may have extended even beyond them.  Scholarly papers detailing musical and historical arguments, buttressed by handwriting and paper analysis, leave little doubt about his involvement in this opera, but debates about the full extent of his involvement will probably continue for some time.  It is a process which any such discovery must go through.

The importance of The Philosopher's Stone, however, goes well beyond the three sections that bear Mozart's name.  The whole opera is intimately connected with The Magic Flute and sheds a new light on that masterpiece.  Not only do the two belong to the same series of fairy-tale operas, but the musical influence of The Philosopher's Stone on The Magic Flute is a revelation, giving a rare glimpse into Mozart's compositional process.  Beyond purely musical issues, this opera also helps illuminate a part of Mozart's life during his difficult second to last year.  It is fascinating to have a picture of him working in collaboration with a circle of composer friends to put alongside our usual image of the genius working in isolation.   

The Hamburg manuscript tells us that there were as many as five composers involved in the composition of The Philosopher's Stone.  All of them were shortly afterwards connected with the premiere of The Magic Flute:   J. B. Henneberg conducted rehearsals and most of the performances of The Magic Flute; Benedikt Schack premiered the role of Tamino; F. X. Gerl was the first Sarastro; Emanuel Schikaneder was the impresario and librettist for both operas, as well as the first Papageno; and finally, of course, there was Mozart himself.

Why would Mozart collaborate with a "committee" of composers to write The Philosopher's Stone?  Perhaps part of the answer is that he needed the work.  His career was in decline, and he was no longer able to give subscription concerts.  We have pitiful letters from Mozart during that year asking for money, and, despite the premiere of Così fan tutte, the list of his output for 1790 is small, compared to that of the years before and after it.  But there also appears to have been an element of camaraderie.  He had become friendly with members of Schikaneder's circle and had recently been attending their theater.  A tantalizing story is told about one member of this circle, Benedikt Schack, one of the composers of this opera, as well as the first Tamino in The Magic Flute.  According to a biography written ten years after Mozart's death, Mozart would stop by Schack's house, and, while the latter was getting dressed to go out, Mozart would playfully sit down at his desk and write music into an opera Schack was currently composing.  Constanze Mozart evidently knew of this, and years later, she wrote to Schack asking him to identify the passages in his operas which had been written by her late husband.  Unfortunately, it was the year that Schack died and she never received a reply.  We can only wonder, with such a story, whether Mozart could have been involved informally in any other sections of The Philosopher's Stone beyond the ones that actually bear his name. 

A collaborative opera can easily suffer from disunity and uneven quality.  But this was a group of talented collaborators who knew each other well and, with the exception of Mozart, regularly worked together in the theater.  We find musical ideas by one composer picked up and adapted in movements by other composers, and we find lengthy, developed finales written jointly by more than one person.  The result is an opera that is enjoyable to listen to on its own merits and a drama full of magical effects and humor.  While not all sections of the opera may be on an equal level, the portions attributed to Mozart do not stand out from the work as a whole, but rather show a composer who is collaborating as one of the company in Schikaneder's workshop.  It is impossible to tell at this point to what extent his music in this opera was original and to what extent he was revising music by others.  He may well have been helping out his friends, without any expectation of having his name on the score.

The Philosopher's Stone and The Magic Flute

Both The Philosopher's Stone and The Magic Flute are Singspiels, relatively light-hearted entertainments for the popular theater; as such, they are in the vernacular German and have spoken dialogue between their musical numbers.  Both were produced for the same suburban Viennese theater, Emanuel Schikaneder's Theater auf der Wieden, and were performed by the same company of singers.  Both are full of magical effects and even their story lines show similarities.  Their libretti, written by Schikaneder, are adapted from the same book of quasi-oriental tales, Christoph Martin Wieland's collection, Dschinnistan.  As a result, most of the characters and voice types in one have their counterparts in the other:  Lubano with Papageno, Lubanara with Papagena, Nadine with Pamina, Nadir with Tamino, Eutifronte with Sarastro--and, in most cases, the corresponding characters in the two operas were sung by the same singer. 

Surprisingly there are many musical parallels between the non-Mozart portions of The Philosopher's Stone and Mozart's The Magic Flute.   Some of the figurations in Lubano's music turn up later in parallel situations for Papageno.  (Both characters were played by Schikaneder.)  One aria that is missing from the Hamburg manuscript but which is in the Frankfurt copy is  Lubano's aria near the end of Act II, Die Lieb ist wohl ein närrisch Ding; its folk character, multiple verses and key all recall Papageno's Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, which occurs in the same position near the end of Act II of The Magic Flute.  The famous scene in The Magic Flute in which the three ladies argue over who can stay to guard the handsome Tamino is prefigured here when four maidens compete to be the beloved of Astromonte.   There is also some extraordinarily virtuosic music in The Philosopher's Stone, particularly for the two tenors, the coloratura in Nadir's Act II aria climbing to a dizzying high "D." 

The tenor aria with horn solo, "Welch fremde Stimme," was written by Benedikt Schack for himself to sing in The Philosopher's Stone, and Mozart must certainly have been well aware of it, when he wrote "Dies Bildnis" for him to sing as Tamino in The Magic Flute a year later. Not only are both arias in the same key (Eb major), in similar tempos and affects, and for heroes thinking of their lovers, but some of the vocal lines have striking similarities. Near the end of both arias, the hero is twice about to cadence but, overcome with emotion, jumps up to a high G before settling again toward a cadence. Whether or not it was a conscious borrowing on Mozart's part, he had no doubt experienced how effective it was in the aria that Schack wrote for his own voice.

There are many other musical parallels, but one of the most astonishing is between Astromonte's virtuosic aria in the middle of the first act finale (not written by Mozart) and the celebrated first aria for the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute.  Both arias begin with syncopations in the key of Bb, as the gods descend and reassure their trembling subjects.  In both, a slower opening section is followed by faster music with virtuosic coloratura, in which there is a good deal of similar figuration.  One conspicuous difference between the two arias is that Astromonte is a tenor, while, of course, the Queen of the Night is a soprano.  It seems, however, that the original Queen of the Night, Mozart's sister-in-law Josepha Hofer, was on maternity leave from Schikaneder's company at the time of The Philosopher's Stone.  Had she been available, would the part have been written for soprano, as it was in The Magic Flute?

All these similarities can be no mere coincidence.  One year after having helped develop The Philosopher's Stone, Mozart found himself working on his own Singspiel based on a similar story, produced by the same theater company, with more or less the same cast of singers, and for essentially the same audience.  As he was writing The Magic Flute, he must have been well aware of what had worked in the earlier opera and would no doubt have had a repertoire of ideas from that laboratory.  The Magic Flute is often viewed as an isolated work of genius, but we can see it as the glorious culmination of the series of fairy-tale operas commissioned by Schikaneder for his Theater auf der Wieden.  While its symbolism is generally interpreted--with good reason--as being Masonic, The Philosopher's Stone and other works in this series suggest that some of that symbolism also comes from the related worlds of the fairy tale and of alchemy. 

The dialogue

At the time David Buch first announced his discovery of Mozart's name in the manuscript of The Philosopher's Stone, the spoken dialogue to this opera was thought to be lost.  The surviving manuscripts of the opera contained only the musical portions, leaving many of the details in the story unclear.  Subsequently, however, Mr. Buch found and identified the missing dialogue, and it was included in Boston Baroque's premiere recording of the work.

***

The discovery of Mozart's name in this score has brought it suddenly into the limelight and given modern audiences an unusual glimpse into popular eighteenth-century musical theater.  Whatever the true extent of Mozart's involvement may prove to be -- if, indeed, we can ever really know -- we  must be grateful for the discovery.  With its theatrical and complex story line, with a great deal of magic, and with music that is surprisingly inspired for lesser-known composers, The Philosopher's Stone is well worth hearing in its own right.  With the light it sheds on Mozart and his circle, and particularly on The Magic Flute, The Philosopher's Stone is an illuminating experience.

Contents

Synopsis by Laurence Senelick

ACT ONE

In an Arcadian landscape dominated by a pyramid, shepherds and shepherdesses gather to render tribute to Astromonte, the protective spirit of their land  (Introduction). After the priest and leader of the community Sadik strews incense on the altar, he expresses his alarm that his foster son Nadir and daughter Nadine are not among the worshippers.

Nadir and Nadine, along with the forester Lubano and his lover Lubanara are heard singing . When the two couples approach the temple with their offerings, the people declare that they have desecrated it.  Only virgins may offer sacrifice, and it turns out that Lubano and Lubanara were recently married.  Everyone runs from them in horror.

The newlyweds quarrel: Lubano is jealous of his wife's friends, while the sprightly Lubanara is tired of being cooped up all day in the house. When he tries to frighten her by mentioning the evil spirit Eutifronte, she laughs and wishes she could go for a ride in Astromonte's aerial chariot. Lubano is appalled and sings of the frivolity of women (aria).

Sadik questions the sincerity of Lubanara's love for Lubano, since, by bringing him to the temple, she has put him in mortal danger. Astromonte may be angered by their audacity. Lubanara retorts that Astromonte is a wise god who knows how to appreciate her devotion and expresses contempt for graybeards like Sadik (aria).  The priest orders that Lubano be stripped of his hunting rights and equipment. Lubanara is warned that she is now susceptible to punishment from Astromonte and attack by his brother, the evil demon Eutifronte.

Sadik then reproaches Nadir and Nadine for not telling him of Lubano's marriage. Just as Sadik expresses a vague apprehension that Astromonte may abduct Nadine, a genie arrives in a cloud chariot, carrying a bird in a cage (chorus with solo). It announces that Astromonte plans to attend a competition at which the bird will sing only to the most virtuous virgin in the vicinity. The cage is hung on the pyramid, as each virgin imagines herself the winner.

While Lubano sleeps in his cabin in a forest glade, Lubanara plans to present herself as a virgin in the hope that Astromonte will carry her off in his cloud chariot. Lubano overhears this and orders her to return to the cabin, but once he leaves, she lets herself out again. She is revelling in her freedom, when Lubano dances her back into the cabin, padlocking the door (duet).

In solitary confinement, the exasperated Lubanara wishes for an evil spirit like Eutifronte to come to her aid. At these words, he springs up from the underworld and enters the cabin (recitative and aria).  Lubano returns and orders his wife to leave this strange man, but the demon transports her beneath the earth. Lubano looks into the abyss and when he lifts his head, it is crowned with antlers, the traditional sign of a cuckold. Two dwarfs show him his reflection in a mirror, as hunters and hounds are heard in the distance.  They take Lubano for a stag and give chase (chorus and solo).

Nadir fears that if the bird chooses Nadine as purest of them all, Astromonte will carry her off.  She reassures him that in that case, the two lovers will run away together (aria).  Left alone, however, Nadir hears the voice of Astromonte, warning him not to run away (recitative). Moved to the core, Nadir prays the god to bestow Nadine upon him (aria).

As the finale begins, Sadik reproaches Nadine: her plan of evasion is breaking his heart.  But Nadine wants Sadik's blessing. The genie arrives to conduct the trial by bird.  The virgins are chagrined to find that, as it is passed from hand to hand, it fails to sing; their swains are troubled by this silence. Only when.touched by Nadine does the bird break into song.

Lubano, still with horns on his head, and pursued by huntsmen, hides inside the pyramid.

At that moment, Astromonte descends in his cloud chariot to accept the burnt offering of the people.  As he is about to leave, the magic bird sings again, reminding him of the contest of the virgins.  Nadine is presented to him and, charmed by her beauty, he leads her to his chariot.  She faints as it carries her away.  As Nadir and Sadik lament her loss, Lubano demands the return of his wife.  The entire community decides to embark on a quest to recover Nadine. 

ACT TWO

Off a rocky coast, the shepherds and shepherdesses, in two storm-tossed ships, pray to Astromonte to save them; but the masts are struck by lightning and the ships go down. As the storm subsides, Eutifronte appears and boasts of his power in raising the storm, but the genie exhorts him to be reconciled with Astromonte (chorus and recitative). Each unaware that the other has survived, Nadir and Lubano crawl on to the rocks. Nadir faints in exhaustion, as Lubano complains that women lead men by the nose (aria).

In his sleep, Nadir curses Astromonte.  Overhearing this, Eutifronte decides to forge the youth into a tool of his revenge. He explains to Nadir that he and Astromonte were both sons of a famous wise man, the most powerful of all magicians. When Eutifronte cursed his elder brother for being heir to the Philosopher's Stone, greatest of all magic powers, their father denied it to both of them.  He had an eagle carry it off and decreed it would be bestowed one day on the son of one of them.  Nadir also learns that both brothers once loved the same princess, but she wed Astromonte.  When she gave birth to a child, Eutifronte sent henchmen to suffocate the baby, and the princess died of grief.  Then, to comfort Astromonte, their father gave him the magic bird. After relating this history, Eutifronte tells Nadir that the only way to rescue Nadine is to kill Astromonte.

Meanwhile, Lubano, hungry and alone, is bemoaning his fate, when the genie brings a large fruit.  To his disappointment, there is a book inside the fruit, containing words of wisdom.  Eight dancing dwarfs beckon (march), but, as he is about to follow them, Lubanara suddenly appears. Claiming to have resisted Eutifronte's charms, she tells him how the demon has persuaded Nadir to do his bidding. She plans to reveal the truth to Nadir, but Eutifronte prevents this by casting a spell over her. Now Lubanara can only meow like a cat (duet).  Lubano decides to appeal to Eutifronte to remove the spell.

Deep underground, Eutifronte tells Nadir to await seven hammer blows that summon the spirits to lead him to the Vault of Terror where the magic sword of revenge is being forged (aria). Left alone, Nadir pray for divine guidance and the return of his past happiness with Nadine (aria).  As soon as he is reunited with Lubano and Lubanara, Eutifronte's dwarfs arrive to lead them to the forge.

The companions are led into a rockbound smithy by the dwarfs, but Lubanara is ordered to leave, for the ceremony must be witnessed by men alone. The genie appears and steals Lubanara from the dwarfs who follow in hot pursuit.  Eutifronte conjures up eight spirits which forge the magic sword and predict Astromonte's excruciating death (chorus). Nadir accepts the sword, but warns Eutifronte of the consequences if Nadine is not returned to him.

In a wooded glade the dwarfs pursuing Lubanara are thrown down an abyss by the genie.

Eutifronte leads in Nadir and Lubano, explaining Nadir now has the power to fly out of reach of the armed warriors who protect Astromonte. He presents him with a magic arrow which can kill whatever it strikes, including Astromonte's magic bird. After Eutifronte sinks back into the earth, Nadir hears the bird and runs off to find it, leaving Lubano to comment on the mad things people do for love (aria).

Nadir has penetrated Astromonte's palace, unbeknownst to Nadine who reaffirms her love for the youth (aria).  Arriving at the palace after Nadir, Lubano vents his anger at Eutifronte but is overheard by the evil god. 

As the finale begins, he hears his wife's meows and sighs, "My wife is still a cat."  Suddenly he is grabbed by Eutifronte and dragged into the abyss. 

Inside the palace, Nadir, first supplicating and then threatening Astromonte, shoots the magic arrow at the bird. Nadine cries out that she is mortally wounded, and her body is borne in by armed men and mourning women, as Nadir curses Eutifronte.  Astromonte's genie, however, rescues Nadir from despair and hurries him away.

Back in the glade, Eutifronte imprisons Lubano in a bird-cage in the hope that the illusion will lead Nadir to kill his friend. Just as the youth draws his sword to slay what he thinks is the bird, Astromonte, disguised as an old man, appears with the real bird.  He tells Nadir that if he gives up the sword, Nadine and all his drowned companions will be recalled to life. The old man reveals Nadir's secret identity: he is Astromonte's son, rescued from the waves when Eutifronte's henchmen, loath to smother him, threw his cradle into the sea.

Eutifronte and his demons are confounded by this news, especially when Nadir hands over the sword to Astromonte. Now that Nadir is acknowledged to be Astromonte's heir, the eagle flies in and presents him with the all-powerful Philosopher's Stone.

Restored to life, Nadine reappears. Astromonte throws off his disguise and orders Eutifronte to reform so that they can live in peace as brothers, but the demon and his spirits plunge back down into the abyss. With Eutifronte's defeat, Lubano's cage vanishes and Lubanara's voice is restored.

The scene changes to a magnificent temple. The pastoral folk give thanks to Astromonte and hail the marriage of Nadir and Nadine, with a pledge to repeat the sacred rites every year.

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