Overture (Rosamunde, D. 797)

Helmina von Chézy's play Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern was staged at the Theater an der Wien on 20 December 1823 and withdrawn after the second performance; Schubert had written the music for it in a few days. The score outlived the drama, whose text is now lost. What is played as the Rosamunde overture was not written for it at all: the theatre used the overture to Alfonso und Estrella that evening, and the piece that later took the name came from Die Zauberharfe of 1820. The entr'actes, ballet music and choruses are genuinely Schubert's for the play. The confusion of titles dates from 1855, when the Zauberharfe overture was published together with the Rosamunde entr’acte music and labelled as the overture to the drama. What survives as D 797 runs to ten numbers and is seldom given complete; the first entr’acte has been thought to be the finale Schubert intended for the Unfinished Symphony, and the theme of the third returns both in one of the late Impromptus and in the A minor String Quartet.