Chaya Czernowin: Zaïde / Adama Premiere at Salzburg Festvial

In 2006, the Salzburg Festival is presenting Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's complete 22 operas in his music theatre events. Among them, a very special project is the singspiel Zaïde which Mozart has never finished. Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin has been commissioned to study this work and to create a full evening performance. On 17 August the result, named Zaïde / Adama will be premiered at the Landestheater Salzburg.

In 1779 Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaïde posed the question about the possibilities of a dialogue between the Occident and the Orient. This Singspiel was meant to be a kind of tragic version of the happy-ending opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Never completed, Zaïde exists as a fragment only. The overture, the dialogues and the finale are all missing, and the outcome of the story remains unclear.

For 2006, the Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin has been asked to make her own response to Mozart’s question. In Adama (Hebrew: adama = earth, adam = man, dam = blood) she has composed an independent musical sound space and looks at the subject from a contemporary perspective. Whereas Zaïde describes the conflict between cultures, using
the story of a European couple who are in love and held in slavery in a foreign Oriental country, the situation as described by Chaya Czernowin is more edgy and the question of freedom and imprisonment touches on a different dimension: The lovers themselves speak two languages and encounter each other as foreigners, as a man from Palestine and a woman from Israel.

"Dealing, working with Mozart was completely strange to me: the strangest thing I have ever done."

Adama therefore is not the completion of a Mozart fragment, and the overall project of Zaïde / Adama is no closed totality. What really matters to Czernowin in Adama is to enter into correspondence and contradiction with an unfinished historical work. The various musical spheres are interwoven, and the interplay of sounds opens up the possibility of listening into each different musical cosmos with purified ears and perhaps of discovering unforeseen similarities.