For all his mastery of selecting and setting music to lyric poetry, Franz Schubert was disastrously inept in selecting plays and librettos for his music. None of the operas he composed ever succeeded. The closest he ever came to composing dramatic music was the incidental music to the play Rosamunde. Ironically, this piece has remained a standard in the orchestral repertory but the play itself is long forgotten and apparently lost.
Rosamunde was written by Helmina von Chézy, a compulsive writer and obviously a smooth talker, known as the “terrible Frau von Chézy.” It ran all of two performances. Shortly before, she had befuddled everyone with her incomprehensible libretto to Weber’s Euryanthe, but she continued to write in the same vein and managed to persuade producers to mount her plays. Schubert began composing the incidental music, comprising over 50 minutes, on November 30, finishing it on December 18, 1823, just two days before the premiere. The deadline left him no time to write an overture, so he recycled an earlier composition, the overture to an 1820 melodrama, Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp). As a result, the music of the overture bears no relationship to the rest of the incidental music and gives us no clue whatsoever to Rosamunde's lost plot. The overture opens with a lengthy dramatic introduction, followed by a typical lively and lyrical Schubertian sonata-form movement. The energetic closing theme is also in keeping with the standard nineteenth-century opera overture.
Sometime after the failed production, the incidental music disappeared, only to be discovered in 1867 when Sir George Grove and Sir Arthur Sullivan went to Vienna in search of lost Schubert manuscripts.
Program notes by: Joe & Elizabeth Kahn