Vivat Mozart!

Mozart wrote twenty-two operas, ten of them as a teenager. Thanks to the phenomenon of their extraordinary freshness and topicality, which continues to this day, he is hailed as the best opera composer of all time. The natural ease of writing music full of charm and affection allowed him to crush the competition literally.

He wrote his first opera – ‘Bastien and Bastienne’ – at the age of eleven. Musicologists still believe that if it hadn't been not for the overbearing father, who decided to boast of a prodigy child for all of Europe, young Wolfgang would have liked to stay at home and would compose mainly operas in peace. His creativity in this field really flourished after he moved to Vienna. Having trouble finding a permanent job, Mozart earned his living composing operas. Most of them commented on the social life of that time.

Mozart had an extraordinary gift for selecting texts correctly, which he turned into operas. One of the most successful decisions was to tackle Pierre de Beaumarchais' play ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ – a hilarious and controversial panorama of society in which the characters are guided by extremely realistic motivations previously not shown on stage.

A year after its premiere, the Prague opera commissioned from Mozart a piece on the occasion of the wedding of Archduchess Maria Theresa, niece of Emperor Joseph II. As a story worthy of a sacred union, the composer chose the fate of the worst sex maniac in history – Don Juan. It is how the opera ‘Don Giovanni’ was created, which immediately turned out to be a tremendous success in Prague.

In the last year of his life, Mozart composed ‘The Magic Flute’ for a story about good and evil, redemption through virtue and the Queen of the Night. It would be difficult for us to convincingly summarize the intricate fates of all the fantastic heroes (and their even more fantastic behaviour), but in the end, light, goodness, wisdom, beauty and love triumph (it is infrequent in operas), which in addition to the famous arias contributed to becoming the most popular opera in history.

So you see for yourself, everything is the best in Mozart, and his operas are wonderful music and a review of interesting topics. Aleksandra Olczyk, who will make her debut in 2021 as the Queen of the Night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, will take us on an adventure with the most perfect arias of Mozart's operas. She has already performed this role with great success at the Teatro Real, Opéra de Lille, Helsinki National Opera, Berlin Deutsche Oper und Komische Oper, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe and Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Grand Theater – National Opera, Opera Nova, Joburg Opera in Johannesburg, Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York and festivals in Perth and Adelaide, Australia.