With regard to scenic movement, the chorus in French Baroque opera was, for the most part, almost completely static. Yet from Lully on, French musical theatre had available the ‘chœur dansé’: a chorus number which incorporated both singing and dancing. The era of Lully and Rameau knew various forms of chœur dansé, in all of which scenic movement was realized through dance. Gluck’s Parisian reform operas of the 1770’s transformed this sort of number, since Gluck had the singers as well as the dancers move. The decisive change, however, came in the function of the musical setting, which underwent a paradigm shift. Whereas formerly only homophonic passages accompanied dancing, with polyphony serving as a surrogate for physical movement, now polyphony was actually associated with that movement.

The recitative is found in the original conducting score of Martin y Soler’s opera Il burbero di buon cuore, held by the Austrian National Library. While no autograph of the accompagnato survives that would unequivocably identify it as Mozart’s composition, the evidence strongly points to that conclusion. Motivically tight and well-crafted, the accompagnato continues the process of reworking borrowed material observable in K.583 as well as its companion aria ‘Chi sa, chi sa qual sia’ K.582. In the conducting score, the accompagnato is written on the same inserted gathering as K.583 and in the same hand. Even more compellingly, the aria begins on the reverse side of the page on which the accompagnato ends. The aria is labelled by the copyist as ‘del sigr. Mozart’; the recitative, not surprisingly, is not separately identified.

The orchestrally accompanied recitative which precedes the aria ‘Vado ma dove’ does contain gestures and harmonies found in Mozart’s accompagnati, yet it differs from his standard practices in a number of respects. Its lack of motivic development, persistent use of unison, and reiteration of chords and arpeggios in the same inversion all diverge from Mozart’s customary procedures. Moreover, the passage does not include a chord progression found in practically all of the composer’s accompagnati. If the recitative is by Mozart, it appears, as Link argues, that he composed it in haste. The music and the manuscript evidence also suggest that one of Mozart’s pupils or an apprentice at the Burgtheater may have composed the passage. Whoever wrote the recitative, however, brought the scene more in line with late eighteenth-century operatic practice.

Like several of her early operas, Judith Weir’s The Consolations of Scholarship (1985) lives on the concert stage: the work lasts only twenty-two minutes, there is just one singer, and there are no costumes or scenery. A similar economy and restraint characterizes Weir’s musical language from this period. The essay argues that The Consolations of Scholarship is as much ‘about’ the workings of the genre as it is ‘about’ the story it purports to tell. Indeed, Weir constructs music drama by emphasizing its artificiality, and her reworking of established conventions results in an unusually reflexive form of opera.