W. A. Mozart's Opera Fragments: Then and Now

The historic Swedish town of Uppsala was buzzing with traditional festivities marking the start of the academic year, further spurred on by an unseasonal heatwave.Against this backdrop, the University hosted a cross-disciplinary event, bringing together academics and performers dedicated to exploring Mozart's unfinished operatic works L'oca del Cairo and Lo sposo deluso and the contexts of their creation.The main organizer of this practice-based workshop and discussion forum was Karina Zybina (Uppsala universitet).Her research project COIN (Complete Incompleteness: The Posthumous Histories of Mozart's Opera Fragments) has been hosted at the Department of Musicology since July 2023.In the introductory session at Carolina Rediviva, Uppsala University's library, Zybina provided an overview of the conference programme and a history of the fragmented operas that had brought attendees together, discussing how they had been revived on earlier occasions, and how each reconstruction in various ways merged past and present.The conference description had already set the stage enticingly by revisiting how, in 1782, Mozart was commissioned to compose an opera for an Italian troupe in Vienna.Although he began two projects with enthusiasm, he soon lost interest, remarking to his father in 1784 that his music 'liegt und schlft gut' (is sleeping well) (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, letter of 10 February 1784, in Digitale Mozart-Edition Briefe und Dokumente, https://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/briefe/(26 September 2024)).Next was a tour of the library, showcasing select parts of the impressive collection of historical materials that were relevant to the workshop theme and complemented the exploration of Mozart's opera fragments.Many of these resources have been digitized and are available on Alvin (www.alvin-portal.org),an online platform providing global access to collections from libraries, archives and museums in Sweden and Norway.Alongside the conference, a music-theatre workshop directed by tenor Ziad Nehme featured four students from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm -Eveliina Ainsalo, Svante Gustafsson, Liv Nyberg and Maja Peiningaccompanied by pianist Emily Liu.Together they created a new pasticcio from Mozart's unfinished operatic works.This practice-based approach also characterized much of the conference, which included numerous workshop exercises and projects grounded in similar types of research.A few presentations focused specifically on Mozart's fragments and the context of their composition.Bertil van Boer (Western Washington University) provided the historical backdrop, exploring the gap between Mozart's early successes and later Viennese triumphs, and examining why several operatic projects from this period remained incomplete.Van Boer suggested that these works may not have aligned with popular taste or may have been victims of circumstance, yet they still played a role in Mozart's musical development.Nathan Martin (University of Michigan) focused on the relationship between Italian prosody and musical phrasing in Mozart's operas, analysing examples from Lo sposo and L'oca.He stressed