Brisbane academic Samantha Owens has stumbled on a rare, 300-year-old opera in a German library.
The University of Queensland historical musicologist and lecturer said she was researching in the state library of Württemberg in Stuttgart when she made the find of her career.
Dr Owens had asked to see any uncatalogued music so a library worker handed her a pile of old music that was last opened in 1979.
Inside was Adonis, a 460-page, 18th Century opera in German.
She said the 300-year-old opera was a massive find for German music history and the opera community.
“It’s amazing actually that this has survived fully intact,” Dr Owens said.
In Greek mythology, Adonis was the God of Desire and manly good looks and the opera tells of his love for Venus and his death while hunting wild boar.
The opera was written for a five-part oboe band with strings and harpsichord and presented in two hardbound volumes, covered in marbled paper.
The composer and date were missing from all 14 orchestral parts but the names and scribblings of the musicians linked it to the Stuttgart court.
Dr Owens is verifying the opera was written in 1699 or 1700 by a roaming and temperamental German composer called Johann Sigismund Cousser.
Cousser was a central figure in Germany’s operatic history even though little music from his 10 operas survived.
“He worked at Stuttgart for a few years but he was incredibly temperamental and argued with everyone so he moved around a lot which is partly why he helped spread opera in Germany,” Dr Owens said.
Dr Owens, an oboist specialising in baroque music, saidAdonis was a unique discovery because of the opera’s age, completeness, that it was in German not Italian and unusually scored for an oboe band.
“No other opera from around this time in Germany is known to survive in a full set of parts, so it brings us much closer to solving some of the mysteries surrounding how opera was originally performed.”
The music is owned by the library but it has allowed Dr Owens to publish the opera in a modern form so it can be reprinted, played and studied.
Opera first appeared in Italy about 1600 but did not become popular in Germany until the last decades of the 17th century.
Media: Dr Owens (+61 07 3365 4274, s.owens.@uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (3365 2619)
