Franz Anton Mesmer gave the twelve-year-old Mozart his first operatic premiere. The 1768 performance of Bastien und Bastienne in Mesmer's Vienna garden was a small private event, but it was the first time a Mozart opera was staged. The word "mesmerise" comes from what happened next in Mesmer's career.
The Story
Franz Anton Mesmer was a physician who arrived in Vienna in the 1760s and built a reputation as one of the most compelling and controversial practitioners in the city. He developed a theory he called "animal magnetism," the idea that a universal invisible fluid permeated all living bodies and could be manipulated to cure illness. His treatment sessions, involving iron rods, tubs of magnetised water, and atmospheric staging, drew patients from across the Habsburg aristocracy.
In 1768, Mesmer hosted a private performance of Mozart's one-act Singspiel Bastien und Bastienne (K. 50) in the garden of his Vienna house. Mozart was twelve. It was the first operatic work of his to be staged anywhere. Whether the premiere was commissioned or arranged through the Mozart family's social connections is not entirely clear, but Mesmer's garden was the venue.
His Viennese career ended in scandal after controversy over a blind patient he claimed to be treating; he was investigated and effectively expelled from the city's medical establishment. In France he rebuilt his practice and his celebrity, until the 1784 royal commission, which included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, concluded that animal magnetism had no scientific basis. Mesmer retired and died obscure. His name, however, entered the language permanently.
