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.

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

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