About La Clemenza di Tito
The concert performance of La Clemenza di Tito brings us to the last opera in our Mozart opera seria series. It is a controversial work overshadowed by Die Zauberflöte, which Mozart wrote concurrently, and in particular by his earlier da Ponte operas: Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, and Così fan tutte. It used to be disparaged: “written in haste”, “a potboiler”, in a “genre as dead as a dodo”. However, the time has come to ignore such prejudice and open our ears to some of Mozart’s loveliest operatic music by putting the work in its true context.
A brief history of the opera: it was commissioned for the coronation of Leopold as King of Bohemia in Prague in 1791. Mozart had already tried to win a commission the year before for Leopold’s accession to the regency after his brother, Joseph II, but returned home empty-handed. His chance finally came in Prague, which had developed a taste for Mozart’s works, particularly following the first performance of Don Giovanni. Several days of festivities ended on 6 September 1791 with the coronation itself and the premiere of La Clemenza di Tito in the evening.
It was a glorious commission; receiving commissions from the court was a seal of approval that no composer ignored if he wanted to survive, and there is no reason to suppose that Mozart failed to approach the job with complete confidence and his usual zeal. He did not have much time, of course; he only received the commission in mid July, and the libretto needed revising. By mid August the libretto was in place and Mozart went to work. On 25 August he set off for Prague, the opera still only half finished. He arrived on 28 August, ten days before the premiere. We know that he wrote on the journey at inns and hostelries, and in Prague, too, his quill must have been red hot as he dashed out the pages. Yet the score bears no signs of stress or haste: his hand is calm and clear. He entered the opera into his own list of works on 5 September.
The greatest objection to the work today is surely its subject: “yet another opera about ever-gracious sovereigns and their enemies who give up all thoughts of rebellion; yet another case of prostration before the tyranny of the absolute monarchy, pathetically draped in a weak romance”; in other words, an opera seria! However, in Mozart’s day opera seria was the prevailing style. Audiences knew the conventions behind the plot structure. The libretto was originally by Metastasio, and it had been set to music many times before, each time with great success. The commissioners did appreciate that the story would need shining up; after all, more than 50 years had passed since the first version, and so the young poet Caterino Mazzolà was hired to cut and prune. Not until Mazzolà had accepted was Mozart offered the commission, after Salieri, by his own account, had turned it down. Why this story in particular? Well, it was a tried-and-tested success (and there was little time for experiments), and the emperor, and especially the empress, were very fond of the opera seria genre. What’s more, the plot was perhaps not that inappropriate: the story of the merciful emperor made a nice tribute to Emperor Leopold: he had abolished torture in Tuscany as an acceptable method of interrogation. It also matched the dawning Age of Enlightenment, when the emperor’s affinity with his people was powerfully underlined. In France things looked rather different in those days and we can only begin to imagine how revolutionary it must have seemed to all levels of society. Finally, the freemasons were powerful in Prague, strongly represented among the organizers of the festivities; the theme of clemency on the part of the victor went nicely with the ideals of freemasonry. It fitted in well with Mozart’s own life, too; he was profoundly absorbed by the Masonic ideals and in the middle of writing Die Zauberflöte when he was given the Tito commission.
We have no reason to believe that Mozart regarded the commission as an inconvenience to be completed for financial reasons; but neither is there any doubt that it was a hard-working man who now had to devote even more of his considerable dramaturgical talent to a new commission on top of Die Zauberflöte and the Requiem, which he was already working on.
Mozart was surely involved in editing the libretto: the fact that the large number of typical opera seria arias gave way to ensembles is evidence of his hand in the dramaturgy; the use of the chorus, and the splendid finales, likewise. Of Metastasio’s twenty five arias only seven remained; the rest were altered to ensembles or simply cut, leaving the bare essentials. The three da Ponte operas were epoch-making in the history of the genre, yes, but we should not overlook the fact that La Clemenza di Tito also augured a transformation of the opera seria, but one that was never to take place; the spirit of the times had left it behind. Yet if we are aware of the strict dramaturgical demands of opera seria it is liberating to hear this completely new treatment of the musical material: lots of ensembles, arias that are either brief comments or long emotional explications, and use of the chorus such as that already encountered in Idomeneo.
However, what primarily distinguishes Idomeneo from La Clemenza di Tito is surely the simplicity with which Mozart expresses himself. In this respect the opera is much like its contemporary Zauberflöte, far more so than any of the preceding operas of any genre. The orchestra is often muted to a few accompanying figures, yet the music is unutterably eloquent on behalf of the characters. In Vitellia’s first aria she does not have much sympathy for Sextus (“Do not torment me with your suspicions”), but the music tells a very different story with its long, convoluted lines and seductive coloratura; no wonder he is willing to sell his soul for this woman! The characters are more extreme than we are used to: Vitellia is the first Mozartian monstress, and she is the leading character to boot (the Queen of the Night comes later and isn’t a patch on Vitellia). Vitellia can seduce a man into doing the worst conceivable things without actually promising him anything at all. Sextus is a typical juvenile lead, but never previously portrayed with such painful despair; he is driven by love, knowing full well it can never be requited, and when the story ends he is condemned forever to live with the knowledge of his unforgivable betrayal.
The typical second couple, Servilia and Annio, traditionally used for throwing the romance of the primary couple into relief, move in a completely different sphere from that which tarnishes Vitellia and Sextus. Their music is always imbued with dignity and beauty, just as ideal love should be: an example to be emulated, and one that would have been the main story previously but which is reduced to a subplot, although it stands out strongly to the audience despite Servilia and Annio’s modest colouring: Servilia does not get an aria until ten minutes before the end, and Annio has two brief arias which he spends trying to talk sense into others; their gentle, self-sacrificing love is merely given 2½ minutes in total.
Mozart wrote in his list of works: “La Clemenza di Tito, opera seria ridotta à true opera dal Sig.re Mazzolà”: an opera seria transformed into true opera by Mr. Mazzolà. This surely indicates how much he knew how far he could have moved opera seria into a new age. La Clemenza di Tito is true opera through and through.
