Up to now, scholars have hardly managed to supply any satisfactory answers to the many questions attached to Mozart's singspiel Zaide. The opera, which Mozart's widow Constanze found among her husband’s papers only in 1799, eight years after his death, is regarded as a fragment - less in musical than in dramatic terms, however, for the work as it has come down to us lacks the spoken dialogues, which are indispensable for an 18th-century singspiel. The absence of the dialogues written by the librettist Johann Andreas Schachtner makes reconstruction difficult, as indeed does the fact that the history of both the opera Zaide and its rnaterial is closely interwoven with that of the better-known Entführung aus dem Serail. Mozart’s first 'Turkish' singspiel was composed (1779-80) only shortly before Entführung (1781), and this and also the fact that both works have the sarne subject - namly the so-called Turkish opera - makes it almost irnpossible to look at Zaide impartially.
In contrast to the richly-documented history of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the researcher interested in Zaide finds himself confronted with a gaping void. Mozart and his librettist Schachtner were both in Salzburg in 1779/80, and there are no surviving documents from the period when the opera was presumably composed (between spring and autumn 1780) The singspiel does not crop up in Mozart`s correspondence until late 1780/early 1781, when he was working on Idomeneo, and comes clearly into view in April 1781 in the run-up to Die Entführung aus dem Serail. On 11th December 1780, Mozart's father Leopold wrote to his son, who was in Munich at the time: "I can’t get anything done about the Schachtner drama. The theatres are closed, and the Emperor, who is only preoccupied with the theatre has no interest in the project. It is actually better that way, as the music isn't completely finished anyway, and who knows what opportunity may present itself to come to Vienna on this account?" In other words, Mozart’s father is telling him that the theatres remain closed because of the state of national mourning declared after the death of Maria Theresia. Thus there is no chance of getting the opera performed at present, and particularly not in Vienna. So the Mozarts attempted to launch Wolfgang’s 'Turkish' singspiel at the newly-founded Nationaltheater, even though the theatre had not issued any concrete commission for such a piece. At the same time, Mozart continued to pursue the Vienna idea, as we learn from a letter dated 18th April 1781; "As for the Schachtner operetta, nothing is to come of it - for the reason I have already mentioned so often. The young Stephani is going to give me a new piece, which he assures me will he a good one, and if I’ve already departed hence, he will send it to me. I couldn’t disagree with Stephani, I simply said that the piece is very good indeed - except for the lengthy dialogues, which could easily be altered - but that it is not suitable for Vienna, where people prefer comedies." This passage is informative in the extreme, first and foremost because Mozart admits here that the piece has two serious shortcomings, namely the long-winded spoken dialogues and the earnest subiect-matter. This meant that the opera was not in keeping with the taste of Viennese audiences, and this was already half a death sentence. The reason that Mozart says he has "already mentioned so often" was evidently the problematic dramatization with its imbalance between music and spoken dialogue.
In1936 Alfred Einstein presented his fellow musicologists with a libretto that is identical, in many places, with that of Zaide. The riddle of Mozart's singspiel seemed to have been solved. The libretto concerned had been published in Bolzano in 1779 under the title Das Serail, oder Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft in der Sclaverey zwischen Vater, Tochter und Sohn. This "musical singspiel" was set to music by the Passau Kapellmeister Joseph Friebert, while the identity of the librettist remains unknown to this day. The most striking parallel between the two seraglio operas is without a doubt the fact that most of the characters have similar or even the same names: Zaide, Comatz (in the Mozart: Gomatz), the Sultan (Sultan Soliman), a renegade (Allazim) and Osman (Osmin). In the Bolzano libretto, the events revolve principally around the Suitan's relationship to the renegade, who once
saved the Sullan’s life. The plot develops accordingly: Zaide and Comatz recognise the renegade, who is actually Prince Ruggiero, us their father, and the Sultan is so moved that he grants everyone their freedom. It is pretty obvious that Mozart was not exactly enthusiastic about such a simple ‘family re-union' from the fact that he changed Bretzner’s original libretto of Entführung aus dem Serail, where he altered precisely this point.
Even if Schachtner’s Zaide dialogues have been lost, Mozart’s opera still contains spoken text, namely in the melodramas. The presence of melodramas in Mozart’s singspiel reveals the markedly experimental character of the work: here, Mozart was adapting a genre that was hardly compatible with the south German form of the singspiel. But thc melodramas are mainly instructive in dramatic terms: they tell us more about the dramatic personae (Gomatz and Soliman) than the arias do. In Gomatz's melodrama (no. 2) we find ourselves faced with a character full of sentimentality and pathos, whose emotional outbursts are clearly aimed at the foreign culture with which he is confronted. Much moreso than Belmonte in Entführung, Gomatz is a xenophobe. The underlying cultural conflict in Mozart’s opera is evident in the second melodrama at the beginning of Act II. Unlike the Bolzano Serail, Mozart portrays here a Sultan Soliman who has been cheated and is now overwhelmed with thirst for revenge, a character who is likewise not at a loss for a few juicy racist terms.
The Sultan’s melodrama also reveals that Mozart and Schachtner intensified his character strongly - but only in one direction. Mozart’s Soliman is a far cry from the enlightened and liberal-minded Turkish ruler presented to Viennese audiences not long after in the person of Bassa Selim in Entführung aus dem Serail. The Sultan in Zaide corresponds more to the picture of the vindictive oriental despot. In this way, Mozart and Schachtner stepped up the conflict to an extent where it is hard to believe that this same Sultan suddenly does a volteface at the end of the story and grants the Europeans their freedom. The libretto of Zaide is indebted to the traditional image of the Turks purveyed by many an 'Oriental' drama of the day. And in view of the fact that the Austrian dramatist (and librettist of Entführung) Stephanie junior fell the opera to be too earnest, we cannot cornpletely rule out the possibility that Zaide was originally rneant to have a tragic ending.
With their modifications of the ‘Turkish libretto’, Schachtner and Mozart lent the piece clear drarnatic contours. Mozart may even have rnade his first appearance here as a dramatist - in his previous Italian operas, there was scarcely any opportunity for him to influence the dramatic side of the proceedings. However, the radical way the composer and his librettist went about it also had its price - the opera could not be performed in Vienna in this Form. But though this may have restricted the work’s commercial chances at the time, the emphatic move towards a German opera seria is precisely what makes this daring operatic experiment from the year 1780 fascinating to the modern listener.