Franz Mesmer summers he lived on a splendid estate and became a patron of the arts. In 1768, when court intrigue prevented the performance of "La finta semplice" (K. 51), for which the twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had composed 500 pages of music, Mesmer is said to have arranged a performance in his garden of Mozart's "Bastien und Bastienne" (K. 50), a one-act opera, though Mozart's biographer Nissen found no proof that this performance actually took place. Mozart later immortalized his former patron by including a comedic reference to Mesmer in his opera "Così fan tutte". In 1774, Mesmer produced an "artificial
The Parlour reviewer in "Opera" magazine dismissed the music as "feeble in content, too long, and mis-timed in its relation to the dramatic action". The BBC, broadcasting a recording made at the Odeon Theatre, Llandudno, in November of the same year, described the première as "highly successful", and said that the opera, despite being Williams' first, displays a "confident professionalism and the theatrical awareness". The Parlour The Parlour is the only opera by the Welsh composer Grace Williams; a comic opera in one act, it is based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant. Although written in 1961, it was not