‘Mozart, You Drive Me Crazy!’ This is the title that the South African soprano Golda Schultz has decided to give to her new album, devoted to the female heroines of Don Giovanni , Così fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro , roles that have marked her career from Berlin to The Metropolitan Opera: ‘Why does Mozart drive me crazy? First of all, because his music, which sounds so easy when you listen to it, is extremely difficult to perform… And when I immerse myself in the world of Da Ponte and Mozart, I realise that there’s a deep complexity to their female characters: they endure the toughest trials, but they also display great strength. In fact, these operas explore humanity from the feminine perspective: every single one of these women is constantly evolving. They show how human beings transcend trauma and how grief and pain can be overcome.’

Since 1791, the Berlin (State) libraries and the Schwerin State Library have had the String Quartets Op. 1 by Johann Matthias Sperger (1750–1812) in their collections – including an original printed edition. Unfortunately, they went unnoticed until the first modern per- formance in 1990 by the ensemble “Musica Instrumentalis Schwerin” in collaboration with musicologist Stefan Fischer. Since then they have been presented in concert and released on CD by the string quartet of the Kammerakademie Potsdam: Peter Rainer (1st violin), Laura Rajanen (2nd violin), Christoph Starke (viola) and Jan-Peter Kuschel (violoncello). In a stroke of foresight, the proactive publisher Reinhard Wulfhorst of Schwerin has produced beautifully printed parts for the occasion.

In the summer of 1788 Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91) wrote what from any standpoint is an extraordinary set of three symphonies – as Jarno says in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, people “do extraordinary things without respecting orderliness”. It was presumably not Mozart’s intention that this group of symphonies should remain his final word on the subject, and a weighty one at that. Despite every setback, it tells of a time of new departures, not of valediction. Only three years later, during which time he had written many other masterpieces, death snatched the pen from his hand. He was
only thirty-five…