VI
Orient and "Far" East
in context of eighteenth-century compositional practice
Walter Kreyszig, Department of Music, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
Zentrum für Kanada-Studien, Universität Wien
Joseph Friebert’s teutsche Operette Das Serail (ca. 1778) in the context of eighteenth-century Organology: On the Klangfarbe as a means of text related dramaturgy in the linking of compositional practice and instrumentation, with special reference to the wind instruments
In January 2006, the Don Juan Archiv in Vienna acquired a most unusual find at an auction in the Dorotheum in Salzburg: the manuscript material of Joseph Friebert’s Teutsche Operette Das Serail, the musical setting, long believed lost, of the libretto printed in Bozen in 1779 by Karl Joseph Weiß; the material – transmitted by hitherto unknown eighteenth-century copyists – includes various elements; a score containing the parts of three of the four vocal soloists (Zaide, Comaz, Renegat) with harpsichord; the separate incomplete vocal parts (Zaide, Comaz, Renegat) with merely a partial text underlay; orchestral parts, including two oboes (with alternating flutes indicated within the two oboe parts) and two horn parts, presumably also of incomplete nature, at least with regard to the sole surviving violin I part. These wind parts in Friebert’s Das Serail are assigned specific roles, as becomes readily apparent from the close examination of the surviving oboe and horn parts. In the da-capo arias, on occasion, Friebert aligns the A and B sections with a change in instrumentation, by replacing the oboe with two flauti traversi (see, for example, Act I, Scene 2 “Rase immer hartes Schicksal”), whereby the latter instruments surprisingly enough are not identified on the title page Oboe primo / Oboe sceondo, but whose presence are merely identified at the appropriate moment in the two oboe parts notated as a separate score. Throughout Das Serail, Friebert resorts to the wind parts (oboes with alternating flutes, horns), notwithstanding a few soloistic passages identified in the respective parts, as an accompaniment of the melody, thereby imparting additional color (Klangfarbe), with the presence of oboes and horns suggesting Friebert’s conscious emulation of the contemporary orchestral practices found in both Vienna and Mannheim. Beyond that, Friebert’s obvious interest in the Klangfarbe as a means of effective text portrayal is underscored by the frequent change of keys and the related tunings specified in the natural horn parts, such as tunings in C, D, E, F, G, A, and Eb, the latter with regard to the Duetto ("Aria für zwey") No. 7 “Sie weint!” (Act 2), though erroneously marked as a tuning in D-sharp by the anonymous copyist.