Mozart's reputation as a prodigy is so familiar that it's easy to forget how remarkable it is that an 11 year old could write an opera on the scale of the hour-long Apollo et Hyacinthus, not only in terms of the creativity and breadth of imagination required, but the discipline demanded to simply physically write out such a large score. Again, his precociousness is so taken for granted that it seems hardly surprising that it would actually be a good opera, when in fact the quality of its music should be regarded as ...
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Mozart's reputation as a prodigy is so familiar that it's easy to forget how remarkable it is that an 11 year old could write an opera on the scale of the hour-long Apollo et Hyacinthus, not only in terms of the creativity and breadth of imagination required, but the discipline demanded to simply physically write out such a large score. Again, his precociousness is so taken for granted that it seems hardly surprising that it would actually be a good opera, when in fact the quality of its music should be regarded as stupendously astonishing if not almost miraculous. The opera, with a libretto in Latin, was commissioned by a Salzburg grammar school to be performed as an intermedium -- a light diversion -- performed between the acts of a Latin drama. (Another mind-boggling fact: at the premiere, the leads were sung by 12-year olds, and all the parts except for a tenor role were written for treble voices and performed by teenagers, even though Mozart's vocal writing is no less demanding than that of...
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