The Jewel Box

Griffiths, realising that arias composed by Mozart for insertion in other composers' operas are seldom performed nowadays, worked up what he called "a jeu d'esprit" which also contained music from the composer's unfinished operas Lo sposo deluso and L'oca del Cairo and some of the arias which he had written for concert performances. This came to the attention of Nicholas Payne, General Director of Opera North, who scheduled its première for 1991, the year of the bicentenary of Mozart's death.^[3]

After the Nottingham premiere and subsequent performances in Opera North's territory of northern England, the opera was performed in the United States by Skylight Opera Theatre (1993), Wolf Trap Opera (1994), Chicago Opera Theater (1996), and New Jersey State Opera (1996). In England, it was revived by Bampton Classical Opera in 2006 for the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, with the orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner.^[4]

The Editor of Opera magazine Rodney Milnes was enthusiastic about The Jewel Box; "If anything more ingenious and original happens by way of a special event in Mozart year than Opera North's and Paul Griffiths's The Jewel Box, then I'll eat my hat". He went on - "his greatest triumph has been to string his pearls together into an entirely logical musical order, 'a Mozartian key sequence,' as he wrote, 'through thirds and fifths, and simultaneously distributing the numbers helpfully among the singers". He found that the opera was "a convincing musical entity in its own right, [which] rescues from the library shelf a substantial body of top-drawer Mozart written mostly for the theatre, and indeed returns it to the theatre where it belongs. It's crammed full of great music almost to the point of indigestion".^[5]