<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    WIT AND ORIGINALITY

One thing that was already evident to those familiar with the score -- it shines through the recording, too, and was beautifully demonstrated by Steuart Bedford's Garsington Opera Orchestra -- was the astonishing musical eloquence and achievement of Mozart's young apprentice: Schikaneder was in his forties, Mozart in his mid-thirties; but Johann Henneberg was aged a mere 21 on 11 September 1790, the day of the première of Der Stein der Weisen. He both ran the rehearsals and took over the conductor's baton, soon after the première, for the rest of the run.

And no wonder. For the youthful Henneberg not only composed the lion's share of the music, but was the budding genius behind much of the best music (that by Mozart included). This included several arias, long passages of linking arioso and deftly accompanied recitative, and most of both the magnificent concerted finales. These weren't in any sense ham-fisted; rather, they were among the best to be composed at that time (a period which included both Mozart and Salieri) and were actually composed two years before the birth of Rossini and some twenty years before Rossini's operas began to take Vienna by storm.

Henneberg went on to have an intriguing career up to his death, at the age of 53, in 1822. By his mid-thirties, from 1804, he was first organist and then (from 1811) Kapellmeister to the Esterhazy family at Eisenstadt, the scene of many of Haydn's greatest triumphs. Over the few years immediately following Mozart's death Henneberg's operas for Schikaneder's troupe included Johanna of Weimar and The Honest Farmhand (both 1792), The Ice Queen, The Woodsmen (the long-running Die Waldmänner, one of his and Schikaneder's most successful) and, with others, The Beneficent (or Magnificent) Dervish (all 1793), The Scissors-grinder (1795), two more in 1799 and also the (unperformed) grand opera The Giantess. Like Mozart's English composition pupil Stephen Storace, the brother of Mozart's first Susanna, here was a young musician of the generation below Mozart who could not only ape his mentor, but even come close to matching him.

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