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Podcast: Classical Music Discoveries
Episode: 13116 Mozart: Bastien und Bastienne (Bastien and Bastienne), K. 50
Description: Bastien und Bastienne (Bastien and Bastienne), K. 50 (revised in 1964 to K. 46b) is a one-act singspiel, a comic opera, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Bastien und Bastienne was one of Mozart's earliest operas, written in 1768 when he was only twelve years old. It was allegedly commissioned by Viennese physician and 'magnetist' Dr. Franz Mesmer (who himself would later be parodied in Così fan tutte) as a satire of the 'pastoral' genre then prevalent, and specifically as a parody of the opera Le devin du village by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The German libretto is by Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, Johann Heinrich Friedrich Müller an...