You may be shocked to see Mozart's name attached to an 1801 date on this Glossa release, but the actual nature of the recording is not so shocking: Les Mystères d'Isis is an adaptation of Die Zauberflöte, K. 620 (The Magic Flute), made for the Paris Opera by the Bohemian composer Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith and the French librettist Etienne Morel de Chédeville. This is no mere translation. Not only Chédeville, but also Lachnith, remade Mozart's opera to suit French tastes and even French singers, lowering the Queen of the Night, ...
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You may be shocked to see Mozart's name attached to an 1801 date on this Glossa release, but the actual nature of the recording is not so shocking: Les Mystères d'Isis is an adaptation of Die Zauberflöte, K. 620 (The Magic Flute), made for the Paris Opera by the Bohemian composer Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith and the French librettist Etienne Morel de Chédeville. This is no mere translation. Not only Chédeville, but also Lachnith, remade Mozart's opera to suit French tastes and even French singers, lowering the Queen of the Night, for example, to a mezzo-soprano. The two acts of the original opera become four, with interpolated arias from other Mozart operas (including Don Giovanni) and even the slow movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 103 in E flat major, H. 1/103 thrown in as a curtain raiser. Certainly such insertion arias were common at the time, but the degree of alteration here is extreme. All the characters' names change except for Pamina's and Sarastro's, and Papageno becomes a much more significant...
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