Cimarosa’s Il maestro di cappella is a comic monodrama for a single singer (bass-baritone). He portrays a Kapellmeister rehearsing with his orchestra, struggling throughout the rehearsal with musicians who manage, to varying degrees, to play according to his expectations. The Maestro oscillates between criticism and outright harshness towards the musicians and, on the other hand, an almost servile attitude with which he unsuccessfully tries to motivate them. In the end, the musicians stop the rehearsal just when things are going well, without playing the piece through to the end. Cimarosa’s work was probably written between 1786 and 1793, at a time when he was Kapellmeister at the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. The Empress had drastically cut expenditure on her musicians, which caused Cimarosa considerable difficulties. The work can therefore also be seen, to a certain extent, as a bitterly comic glimpse into the life of a musician.

Salieri’s opera Prima la musica e poi le parole, with a libretto by Gian Battista Casti, was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II and premiered on 7 February 1786 in the Orangery of Schönbrunn Palace. On that occasion, it was directly pitted against Mozart’s Singspiel Der Schauspieldirektor. Salieri’s work was performed at the opposite end of the same hall immediately after Mozart’s piece. Although this was not an official competition between the two composers, contemporary audience reactions and reports suggest that Salieri emerged victorious. The conservative aristocratic audience was not particularly impressed by the German Singspiel and preferred the Italian singing to which it was accustomed.

In the opera, Casti’s libretto parodies several specific works that were well known at the time and intriguingly combines elements of both serious and comic opera. It even includes a scene in French, in which the style of French opera is brilliantly imitated. The plot revolves around a dramatic situation from the world of theatre: a composer and a poet have just four days to create a new opera for their patron. Their struggle against time and adverse circumstances reflects both the contemporary and timeless challenges of operatic practice, as well as broader themes of human life.