Ruhe Sanft (Sleep Gently): An Exploration of the music from Zaide

Ruhe Sanft. This piece drew me to the opera Zaide. The most beautiful opera aria. Ruhe Sanft makes Schubert 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 tightened. 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 have spoke of the history of this opera in an earlier column.) I’ve read various theories, all likely to have some truth to them. Yet, all my attention was drawn to the opera solely because of Ruhe Sanft. But, what makes it so beautiful?

A while back, I was speaking to a foreign exchange student from Germany. 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 sounds stuff. (I did spent two years in Germany, but they spoiled me there, and I didn’t need to learn any German to get by.) She said it was rue heh not rue. Then, she added a rolled ‘r’ sound to the accent to make it pronounced 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… “less than beautiful” language.

Maybe, sometimes, the roughest, harshest environments produced the purest beauty.

First, let’s start with the opening. The sweetest opening to the sweetest aria. Such sorrow filled longing right from the start. An oboe cries out… Dreams of what it can not have. Mozart tells the world, Zaide knows what she wants, but knows she can never have it. Following the woodwinds, viola strings are plucked ever so tenderly, as if they are falling tears. The notes ask, ‘Would I be better off never having experienced a desire that can never sustain me.’ The notes wrestle with the old adage, ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, then…’ but they are not convinced the statement is true.

Then, the soprano voice wishes, 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 her beloved. 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?’

Perhaps, a good set of best-case-scenario dreamings is healthy. I mean can one really ever take action towards such lofty goals unless he or she really understands what one wants? Other times, it's simply fun escapism. And as with with Zaide, at times, some people are caught in a miserable lot, and there is very little they can do to escape. Deep dreams are a form of release.

Yet, clearly such dreaming can be detrimental. Many get caught up in dreaming, but never doing. Or, some are so narrowly focused certain dreams, they may tie all life’s hope and purpose to such, and in turn find despair when such goals either don’t happen, or don’t satisfy. Ruhe Sanft (as well as the entire opera of Zaide) illustrates magnificently the struggle of trying to understand joy as one wrestles with his or her grandest desires.