K. 344 Zaide, Ruhe Sanft

Right now, I’m on a Zaide kick. I’ve been working on a project centering on the Opera for about a year now. I’m getting close to revealing it. So, since I’m studying it like a prized buckskin paint yearling (horse terms: a beautiful colored horse that if has a great disposition could sell for a high price), I’d thought comment on each of the songs.  I even bought a CD for this one, makes it easier to listen to it all the time. 

 I’ve already commented on the cantor so the next song is Ruhe Sanft. First, I must say this song drew me to the Zaide opera. The most beautiful opera aria. Ruhe Sanft makes Shubert’s Ave Maria sound like a commercial jingle. When I first heard it, its beauty insisted that I find its origin. And, then when I read that it came from an opera that had never been finished—from a work scrapped and thrown into a slush pile—my gut coliced (a twisting stomach condition that can kill a horse). How could something so precious have just been thrown out?  From there, I had to know why. Why did Mozart stop working on it? I’ve read various theories, all likely to have some truth to them. But, I’m just talking about the song right now, not the opera. 

 We’ve taking in a foreign exchange student from Indonesia. And, the other day we were at a fellow host family’s home. Their student was from Germany. So, I thought I’d be clever and say Ruhe Sanft. She couldn’t understand what I was saying. I forgot that they actually use all their letters. None of that silent sound stuff.  (I did spent two years in Germany, but they spoiled me there, for I didn’t need to learn any German to get by.) She said it was rue heh not rue. Then, ad the accent and, well, I didn’t get it quite right. You’d think that for as many times as I’ve listened to the song, I’d have gotten it right. That baffles me all the more, how could the most beautiful song come from what many consider a… a… rough language.

Maybe, sometimes, the roughest, harshest environments produced the purest beauty. (Not trying to sound like a hippy.) 

First, let’s start with the opening. The sweetest opening to the sweetest aria. Such sorrow filled longing right from the start. Mozart tells the world, Zaide knows what she wants, but knows she can never have it. Plucking strings are tears. The notes ask, ‘Would I be better off never having known, or has seeing given me the a joy that can sustain me.’  The notes wrestle with the old adage, ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, then…’ yada, not convinced they agree. 

Then, the soprano voice seems to wish, the wishing turns to pleading. Selfless pleads, begging not for her wellbeing, but for the one she loves. By her voice alone, I wonder if I could have guessed she was giving away her only possession, in order that it may revive the receiver.  If the words to this song were a dear and the music was an arrow, Mozart would have pierced the heart. Did he have Aloysia Weber in mind when he wrote the song? It was about the right time. The girl he wanted. The one his father chased him away from. The one who rejected him when he returned. 

After the first theme, the music shifts from pleading/wishing to a daydream state. It imagines what could be. I have that kind of daydreaming all the time. I picture, what would happen if… Sometimes I chide myself, and say things akin to, ‘stop dreaming, start doing.’ But, this second theme says, ‘let yourself dream. Why not if it brings you joy?’ A bit of the cantor creeps in and whispers, ‘you can’t make it any different.’