Episode 260: 19260 The Weber Sisters

The story of how Mozart fell in love with the young singer Aloysia Weber, was dumped and then married her younger sister Constanze is well known. The fact that a third sister, Josepha, figured in Mozart's career (and that the youngest sister, Sophia, remembered Mozart from her childhood) is less commonly appreciated. French soprano Sabine Devieilhe steps into the roles of Aloysia, Constanze, and Josepha here, making clear that all three must have been among the strongest sopranos of their time. She doesn't really try to differentiate among the voices of the three (which are at any rate unknowable), but all of them got powerhouse arias. None is bigger than "Der Hölle Räche" from Die Zauberflöte, K. 620 (track 11), which is worth sampling on its own: it combines power and dramatic clarity in a way that few other recordings of this startling aria have done, and the chromatic crunch of the opening chord is typical of the sharp support Devieilhe gets from the historical-instrument group Pygmalion under Raphaël Pichon. The most unusual aspect of the album is that there are pieces not directly associated with the Weber sisters at all: instead, they set the scene for the stages in Mozart's career at which he encountered the sisters. This is quite effective in the case of the solfeggio exercise (which has its own Köchel listing, K. 393) Mozart wrote for Constanze in preparation for the big arias of the Mass in C minor, K. 427. At the end of the program, Devieilhe nails the "Incarnatus" from that Mass.

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