Mozart: La Finta Giardiniera at Eighteen

Eighteen years old. Think about that for a moment — think about what you were doing at eighteen — and then consider that Wolfgang Mozart, in December of 1774, sat down and wrote La finta giardiniera for the Munich Carnival the following January. The piece runs nearly three hours. It contains finales of startling harmonic adventurousness. It has no da capo arias, a deliberate structural choice that most of his Italian contemporaries hadn’t the nerve or the imagination to make. Eighteen.

This is not, let’s be clear, Le nozze di Figaro. It’s not even Così fan tutte. The libretto — whose authorship remains genuinely disputed — is a tangle of disguises, misidentifications, and fainting fits that would tax the patience of a saint, and on stage can defeat even a gifted director. On disc, mercifully, plot absurdity matters less, and what comes through instead is something more valuable: the sound of a great musical mind discovering what it can do.

René Jacobs has made a career of such discoveries, and his instincts here are sharp. He chose not the familiar Italian original but the German Singspiel adaptation — the Námet version, as it came to be known — that surfaced in Prague in 1796, five years after Mozart’s death. The Prague score is a strange and fascinating document. Large sections were cut, the orchestration was substantially revised, and the revisions themselves point toward the sound world of late Mozart — the wind writing in particular has a richness and weight that belongs more naturally to the 1780s than the 1770s. Whether Mozart himself reworked the score in his final months, or whether some other gifted hand did the reworking, nobody knows for certain. Jacobs explores the question at length in his booklet essay, which is one of the more substantive pieces of musical scholarship to appear in a commercial release in recent years. Read it.

The Freiburger Barockorchester plays with the kind of lean, transparent energy Jacobs consistently draws from period ensembles — gut strings with real bite, winds that sing rather than merely accompany. In the Act I finale especially, you hear why this music was ahead of its time: the harmonic pivots come quickly, the instrumentation shifts color almost bar by bar, and the emotional temperature swings from comic to genuinely unnerving without any loss of formal control. At eighteen, Mozart already understood that comedy and pain are not opposites.

Sophie Karthäuser’s Sandrina is the center around which everything else orbits, and she holds that position with grace and something close to authority. Her voice has a luminous, slightly reedy quality in the middle register that suits the character’s ambivalence — Sandrina is both victim and agent, and Karthäuser keeps both possibilities alive simultaneously. Jeremy Ovenden’s Belfiore is ardent and slightly unstable, which is exactly right; the character is genuinely unhinged for much of the opera, and Ovenden finds the comedy without sacrificing the unease. Marie-Claude Chappuis brings a firm, warm mezzo to Ramiro — one of those trouser roles Mozart wrote with characteristic sympathy for characters stranded on the margins of the plot.

Sunhae Im’s Serpetta is a delight. The role is essentially a comic soubrette, and Im plays it with a bright, pointed tone and a rhythmic precision that gives even the lighter numbers a satisfying snap. Michael Nagy is a dependable Nardo, though the role doesn’t give him much to distinguish himself with. Nicolas Rivenq’s Podestà is broadly effective without being especially memorable — the character is more caricature than person, and Rivenq leans into that, sometimes too heavily.

What Jacobs gets exactly right is the sense that this opera matters — not merely as a curiosity, a youthful exercise, a stepping stone to the da Ponte masterpieces, but as a work with genuine expressive life of its own. The slow arias in particular, written in sonata form rather than the period’s default ABA, have a concentrated emotional logic that anticipates the great accompanied recitatives of the mature operas. Mozart was already learning that form is not a container but an argument.

La finta giardiniera had only three performances in Italian during Mozart’s lifetime, the premiere delayed by a sick prima donna and an orchestra that apparently couldn’t get itself organized. The German version fared somewhat better, but the work spent most of the next two centuries in relative obscurity. Recordings have been gradually remedying that, though this one — with its unusual choice of the Prague version — stands apart from the competition. Nicholas Harnoncourt’s earlier account of the original Italian version has real virtues, but this is a different experience altogether, richer in texture, more ambiguous in its theatrical identity, and in some ways more revealing about what Mozart was becoming.

Decisive verdict: essential.