Ascanio in Alba, K. 111

• Mozart composed this operatic work for the wedding of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and Maria Beatrice Ricciarda of Modena, in Milan, Oct. 17, 1771.¹ The Habsburg Archduke was governing Milan at the time.²
• Mozart was 15 when he wrote this.³
• This piece is in an operatic genre called festa teatrale, which features recitative and aria in the manner of opera seria, but also includes chorus and dance movements.⁴ The genre was alternately known by the name serenata.⁵
• An opera seria by Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) was also performed during the wedding festivities, but Mozart’s Ascanio was much better received.⁶

Ascanio in Alba “struck down Hasse’s opera”

Leopold Mozart, in a letter dated October 19, 1771⁷

“The opera [Hasse’s piece] has not met with success, and was not performed except for a single ballet. The serenata [Mozart’s Ascanio], however, has met with great applause, both for the text and for the music.”

From a contemporary newspaper report (Florentine publication Notizie del mondo, Oct. 26, 1771)

1. Cliff Eisen, and Stanley Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 19, 2019,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278233.
2.  Julian Rushton, “Mozart and Opera Seria,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 147.
3. Math
4. Rushton, “Mozart and Opera Seria,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart, 147. 
5.  Eisen and Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.