Zaide / Adama

Composer: Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

Composer: Czernowin, Chaya

Librettist/Text Author: Schachtner, J.A.

Librettist/Text Author: Czernowin, Chaya

Conductor: Bolton, Ivor

Conductor: Kalitzke, Johannes

Orchestra: Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra

Ensemble: Austrian Ensemble for Contemporary Music

Chorus: Basler Madrigalisten

Chorus Master: Naf, Fritz

Actor: Grawert, Bernd

Allazim: Reuter, Johan

Dancer: Lorenger, Paul

Father: Fischer, Andreas

Gomatz: Lehtipuu, Topi

Man: Windmuller, Yaron

Osmin: Girolami, Renato

Soliman: Ainsley, John Mark

Woman: Frenkel, Noa

Zaide: Erdmann, Mojca

Set Designer: Schmidt, Christian

Costume Designer: Schmidt, Christian

Lighting Designer: Gobbel, Wolfgang

Stage Director: Guth, Claus

Television Director: Morell, Andreas

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Date of Production: 2006

Festival: Salzburg Festival

Venue: Salzburger Landestheater

Playing Time: 02:09:00

Catalogue Number: A04001459

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An abducted beauty in a harem, a noble rescuer from Europe, a merciless Muslim ruler - aren't these the ingredients for Mozart's Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail? Yes, but not only. They are also found in the fragment of a Turkish opera that Mozart wrote shortly before the Entfuhrung, a work that was later given the title Zaide. 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 interweave with the Zaide fragment.

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 irreconcilable 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 Palestinian man, a partnership doomed to fail in a world torn by violence.

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."