About the work
Bastien und Bastienne is a one-act German Singspiel that twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed in 1768. The libretto by Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, Johann Heinrich Müller and Johann Andreas Schachtner adapts a Viennese version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's pastoral play "Le devin du village", gently parodying it.
Plot
The shepherdess Bastienne fears that her beloved Bastien has turned away from her. The village fortune-teller Colas advises both of them to feign indifference, a ruse that briefly stirs jealousy and confusion before reuniting the couple.
Cultural significance
Even at twelve, Mozart already shows a flair for musical comic timing. Whether the work was really first performed in physician Franz Anton Mesmer's Viennese garden, as a well-known anecdote claims, is not scientifically documented; the earliest verifiable performance took place only on 2 October 1890 in Berlin.