"Such great pain is worse than death"
Mozart's
opera seria Idomeneo
"I will wander alone into madness / seeking death elsewhere / until I find it," laments Idamantes in the famous quartet from the third act of Idomeneo, "Andrò ramingo e solo". In the late summer of 1783 when Mozart was visiting Salzburg, he sang this ensemble movement together with his wife and friends. He himself took the role of the Cretan prince Idamantes but he was so intensely moved when singing the quartet that he burst into tears and had to leave the room. It was some time before he managed to calm down again. This is how Constanze Mozart related the episode almost half a century later, when she was paid a visit in Salzburg in 1829 by the English publisher Vincent Novello and his wife Mary. The Novello's travel diaries contain quite a few astonishing things: apparently Mozart once confessed to his wife that his happiness was too great to be permanent.
Mozart wrote Idomeneo as a commission for the court in Munich. He had left his home town on 5 November 1780 for Munich, and he was ordered to go from there directly to Vienna in March 1781, where, as is well known, he came into conflict with his employer and master, Prince-archbishop Colloredo. He began a new life in Vienna as a freelance artist and almost three years passed before he returned to Salzburg on what was to be his last visit. In Munich, in the winter of 1780/81, the studying of the score, rehearsals and the premiere of an opera, which he had not yet composed - Idomeneo K. 366 - awaited Mozart. Although Mozart had already written down some of the opera's individual numbers in Salzburg, the main burden awaited him in the weeks he spent in the Bavarian capital. "I really have to rush", he reported to his father, "everything is composed already, but not written down yet." The opera seria Idomeneo was a work commissioned by the court in Munich for the Palatinate electoral prince Karl Theodor, the art - loving music enthusiast, who from 1778 became the prince of Bavaria.
 |
|
W. A. Mozart's Idomeneo will be staged in the Kleines Festspielhaus by Ursel and Karl-Ernst Herrmann, who is also designing the sets and costumes. (Photo: Schaffler ) |
Mozart knew him from the time he had spent in Mannheim. It is possible that it was the electoral prince himself who selected the piece, or to be more precise, chose the libretto of the Tragédie lyrique 'Idoménée', composed by the Frenchman André Campra in 1712 for the Paris Opera. Baron Grimm, German diplomat and publicist living in Paris, had already been well aware that this subject, containing the conflicts typical of the genre between love and duty, intense, opposing affects, emotional turmoil and turbulence of the elements, was perfectly suitable for opera, and it is conceivable that it was through him that Mozart became aware of Idoménée long before and independently of the Munich commission. However, for the premiere in the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, the old French libretto was not only translated into Italian but also reworked, a task that had to be mastered by the Salzburg court chaplain Giambattista Varesco (1735-1805), and which, in view of the specifications made by the court and the changes wanted by the composer, drove him to the verge of self-denial.
Sacrifice of one's own child: parallels to Gluck and Handel
"Idomeneo, king of Crete, was one of those celebrated heroes who dealt the deathblow to the famous Troy," writes Varesco in the foreword to his Italian libretto. "On his triumphant return to his kingdom, not far from the harbour of Sidon, he was caught in a raging storm. He was so terrified that he made an oath, vowing that if Neptune would save his men from being shipwrecked, he would sacrifice to him the first person he encountered on land. His son Idamantes, who had been given the false news about the death of his father, rushed to the shore - perhaps in the hope of discovering some kind of favourable sign. Unfortunately he was the first person to encounter his father". Through this tragic basic conflict, the story of Idomeneo has similarities with the Agamemnon-Iphigenie subject which Gluck made into an opera, and even more so with the story of Jephtha, on which Handel's oratorio of the same name is based. Sacrificing the life of one's own child to protect the people and the well-being of the state - this is the common subject.
 |
|
W. A. Mozart's Idomeneo will be staged in the Kleines Festspielhaus by Ursel and Karl-Ernst Herrmann, who is also designing the sets and costumes. (Photo: Schaffler ) |
Unhappy about the singers, fortunate with the orchestra
From the many letters exchanged between father in Salzburg and son in Munich, we know that Mozart was far from happy with the male singers of the leading roles. The legendary tenor Anton Raaf, who created the title role, but at the time of the world premiere, 29 January 1781, was nevertheless 66 years old, and the castrato Vincenzo Dal Prato, who sang Idamantes did not find much favour in Mozart's strict assessment.
He criticised the fact that "they sing the recitatives totally without spirit and fire, completely monotonously and they are the worst actors who ever set foot on stage." On the other hand there was no cause for complaint about the orchestra, the former court orchestra of Mannheim which had come from the Palatinate with the electoral prince to Bavaria.
"No orchestra in the world has ever played like the Mannheimers", wrote the poet Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart enthusiastically. "Their forte is like thunder, their crescendo a cascade, their diminuendo a river of crystal flowing away into the distance, their piano a breath of spring." The English music scholar Charles Burney referred to the Mannheimers as "an army of generals". Mozart shared this enthusiasm absolutely. He raised the orchestra to the secret heroes of his opera and unfolded the entire magnificent sound, intensity of expression and virtuosity of the court orchestra to a musical and dramatic panorama.
Ultimately Mozart was highly pleased with Idomeneo
In the end, despite all adversities encountered while studying the work, all the compromises, abridgements, instructions to be more sparing, and rewriting, Mozart was extremely pleased with Idomeneo: "One is happy to be freed finally from such a great and tedious task and liberated with honour and glory." Mozart made repeated efforts to stage this opera in Vienna but he only managed to achieve a private, concert performance in the palace of Prince Karl Auersperg. For this occasion the role of Idamantes was entrusted to a tenor after Mozart had earlier even thought of transforming Idomeneo into a bass role!
Loneliness speaks from the music
A few years after the death of her husband, Constanze Mozart had the still little known opera published as a piano score. She wrote, "The lovers and connoisseurs of Mozart's music will find in it all the beautiful features and characteristics of his art which makes each work by him stand out above all others, perhaps to an even greater degree in this work, because the subject is heroic and Mozart's spirit shone most brightly in what was grand and sublime". Even after two hundred years we experience the dark splendour, the sublime nature, the tragic grandeur of Idomeneo with undimished vividness. However, perhaps we are affected even more deeply than Mozart's contemporaries by the existential feeling of loneliness that speaks from this music, from the desolation and lack of freedom of the people living under the Greek heaven of the gods. "Such great pain / is worse than death", is what we hear in the third act, in the quartet that both unites and separates Ilia, Electra, Idamantes and Idomeneo. However, the court in Munich required that the story should come to a happy end, lieto fine. Like in one of the later "Salvation Operas" Ilia rushes into the temple, throws herself in front of Idomeneo and thereby defends the life of her beloved Idamantes. Finally the oracle declares him the new king of Crete, and Ilia, the Trojan princess from the enemy camp, is to be the new queen. Too great a happiness to be permanent?
| top |